The United Nation's Golden Cage
Charles Petrie is a seasoned diplomat and humanitarian with a distinguished career spanning over two decades at the United Nations and beyond. His work has consistently placed him at the center of some of the world’s most severe crises, including the Rwandan genocide, where he served as Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator for the UN and witnessed atrocities that profoundly shaped his commitment to understanding the nature of violence and its prevention. He was also involved in conflict zones such as Sudan, Somalia during the Black Hawk Down incident, and the Middle East, where he spent two years in Gaza. His career reflects a focus on addressing the structural and political roots of conflict, rather than simply its symptoms.
Petrie’s tenure in Myanmar from 2003 to 2007 as the UN Resident Coordinator ended when he was expelled for supporting the monks during the Saffron Revolution. Despite this, his engagement with Myanmar continued, and he returned after leaving the UN in 2010 to facilitate dialogue between armed groups and the military. His deep familiarity with Myanmar's socio-political landscape has made him a critical voice on the country’s ongoing struggles. Beyond Myanmar, Petrie has been a relentless advocate for accountability and institutional reform within the UN, leading significant reviews such as the one addressing the UN's failures in Sri Lanka.
Driven by a commitment to ethics and justice, Petrie resigned from the UN in 2010, citing the organization's inability to hold one of its own accountable for alleged involvement in genocide. His later work includes visiting rebel-held areas in Myanmar to document new governance dynamics and the resilience of local communities amidst ongoing conflict. Petrie remains a prominent voice in advocating for a reformed, morally guided international system that learns from its failures to protect vulnerable populations. Listen to his full conversation on the podcast here.
“Most people in the UN know that they would not be able to get the same level of remuneration and advantages outside of the UN!”
Host: How can it be that you have an organization [meaning the United Nations] where everyone all the way up to the Secretary General, himself, all of the important people in the organization from what you're saying, not only did they not punish you for what you have done, but actually said that they were proud that you did what you did! They were proud to be associated with it. They thought that it was the morally right thing to do, and they thought that it was in line with the ethos of the organization; and yet you were not able to secure permission ahead of time, because it feels like everyone that you're talking about wants your type of action, your objective, this direct call-out to dictatorial regimes, to repressive systems, to be a thing that happens. They want these dictators, they want these military regimes to be called out by the United Nations publicly. But they don't seem to be comfortable when they're saying, for example, ‘If we have to do it for Myanmar, we would have to do it for these other countries.’ The obvious rejoinder to that is, then, ‘If you recognize that their situations are so dire that they should be called out publicly, why is the United Nations not doing that?!'
Charles Petrie: When you're in the UN, there are two schools of thought as to what the UN represents and what the UN should do.
So you have one school of thought, which is that the UN and the Secretary General are actually nothing more than the administrator of a world body. So the role of the Secretary General and the role of the UN is to serve states, because the states are coming together, and the UN is nothing more than the Secretariat to a state-centric structure.
And then you have another school of thought in the UN, which is that the UN actually is there to promote the charter; that the role of the UN is very much the promoter, the protector, the projection of the UN charters. So they're very strong principles.
I think, as an institution, the dominant philosophy is the first, and that goes all the way up, the whole realpolitik. It leads to many jaded UN officials, but when the second is done, and it doesn't necessarily cause overwhelming damage to the institution, or there isn't overwhelming pushback from from the member states, and specifically the permanent five; then all of a sudden, of course, it's welcomed, because it feeds this sense that the UN is more than just a secretariat!
What I found with these two philosophies, is that the higher up you go in the system, the more you develop this sort of realpolitik approach to states and to the international world order; while at the lower and middle level, that's where you have the greatest commitment to the second, which is this sense of the UN is actually the guarantor of the UN Charter and the promoter of the UN Charter, in sort of a structured way.
And then I think the second problem that confronts the UN today, is in a very perverse way, it's benefited from the advantages that are given to UN stuff, the salaries, the education for children until university. Also the fact that most people in the UN know that they would not be able to get the same level of remuneration and advantages outside of the UN!
So then if you take the first view that the UN is nothing more than a secretariat that is actually serving the member states, and you actually don't want to upset the member states; then you take young people who, the higher they go, the better the remuneration and the advantages, the more they realize that they're not going to get the same thing outside, the more they fall into basically the trap of the golden cage! And I think we're seeing that even more now, where, you know the UN as a multilateral organizations have lost a lot of influence in in the world order, the UN is is has a huge financial crisis. So these are all realities that are that are not incentivizing individuals to take risk within the UN because the cost of taking, the personal cost of taking risk, is real.