c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ The United Nations is a paper tiger.

The situation in East Timor shows just how pathetic the organization is _ weak, dumb and deadly to those it wants to help. With its massive skyscraper on New York’s East River, its ideology as a world parliament, its pompous ceremonials and high-priced staff, the United Nations can’t fight its way out of a paper bag, can’t, indeed, even protect its own employees.

For more than a half-century now, all good liberal opinion has pretended the United Nations is not a hollow shell. East Timor shows how hollow it really is _ and now devilishly stupid.

East Timor was a potential tinderbox. Almost three-quarters of the population wanted independence and the other quarter did not. The larger group is devoutly Catholic, the smaller enthusiastically Muslim. The latter group controlled the police, the army and the guns. A referendum on independence was certain to stir up a civil war.

So, blithely ignorant, the United Nations arrives on the scene without any military protection for itself or for the Catholics of East Timor. When the referendum produces the expected results, the Muslim militias go berserk and murder hundreds, maybe thousands of people and every priest and nun they can find.

The great men in their luxurious offices on the East River seem shocked and surprised. Did they know Indonesian history? Did they expect anything else besides genocide? If you’re about to throw a match into a gasoline tank, you should at least be smart enough to have a fire department ready.

The United Nations’ performance in Bosnia should have been enough evidence that it is useless when facing demented mass murderers. Why was it given a chance to repeat its mistake somewhere else? Did not the European countries sidestep the United Nations in Kosovo precisely because they knew how ineffectual it is? Why didn’t somebody scream”NO!”to the East Timor mission?

Why, in particular, were American leaders silent? Is Timor too far away? Does anyone know anything about it? Were there no Americans at the United Nations or the State Department who could say,”Leave well enough alone unless we have 50,000 troops we will use no matter what the Indonesian government might think”?

Is there not hypocrisy in bombing the Serbs and refusing even to impose sanctions on the Indonesians? Is Orthodox genocide against Muslims a crime against humanity and Muslim genocide against Catholics a minor event?

Sometimes it seems the elite in Washington think Catholics don’t count.

I do not suggest American troops should be sent to East Timor. Neither the public nor Congress would support it. Moreover, American strategic interest in Timor is minimal.

However, the United States, which has sanctions all over the world, could impose sanctions on Indonesia and support armed intervention by countries closer to the scene. The polite fiction that the United Nations cannot interfere in the affairs of a sovereign country does not seem to apply to what is still called Yugoslavia in polite circles, but it does apply to Indonesia, which has even less right to East Timor than Serbia had to Kosovo.

The Vatican doesn’t look very good either. When Muslims were being killed in Kosovo, the Vatican spoke with fine impartiality. Now that Catholics are being killed, it demands armed intervention. I happen to think the Vatican is right this time and wrong last time. Apparently it is utterly unaware of its own inconsistency and of the embarrassment such inconsistency causes to Catholics who pay attention to the Vatican’s foreign policy.

Perhaps, should the United States impose sanctions, the pope _ who normally condemns sanctions _ will visit President B.J. Habibie of Indonesia as he has other leaders whose nations are under sanctions.

Can anything be done about the United Nations?

Surely the men and women who tried to facilitate democracy in East Timor are brave idealists who were abandoned when the shooting started in Dili. The criminals are the stuffed-shirt pompous bureaucrats on the East River, including Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The United States should continue to refuse to pay its dues until the leadership of the United Nations is made up of people who are tough enough to make their decisions stick or smart enough not to overreach their very limited power _ the kind of people who will say:”We won’t even go into a place like Dili unless you give us 50,000 armed Australians and Malaysians to protect our people from the local fanatics.”

DEA END GREELEY