The UN is broken, and it's time to fix it

Tomorrow is the UN's deadline for the government of Sudan to disarm and disband the Janjaweed, halt attacks on civilians, and fully open refugee camps to international humanitarian aid. The latest reports suggest that access to and safety within refugee camps have somewhat improved, but that the government of Sudan continues to both commit and permit genocidal attacks on Darfur's black civilian population. With all eyes on the UN tomorrow, observers generally agree that the UN Security Council is likely to do nothing more than offer another deadline and demand more improvement, realizing that this amounts to another reprieve for the engineers of genocide in Khartoum. How could this be, from an organization that claims the following as its reasons for being?:

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom

If the UN is systemically unable to prevent or to stop the crime of all crimes against humanity -- the systematic attempt to wipe an entire people off the face of the Earth -- then I'm reluctantly forced to conclude that the UN is broken, unable to fulfill its core purpose. That's not to say that nations who care about stopping future Rwandas and Sudans ought to ignore or abandon the UN, but they ought to begin a concerted effort to amend the UN charter and to implement structural reforms that would turn the vision of the UN into functional reality.