The UN’s silence and complicity stand as a grim hymn to the world’s super-powers ignoble deeds

A shattered world cries out not for silence and complicity as offered by the UN, but for a bold, new covenant of justice forged in truth and shared humanity.

It would be no exaggeration to characterize the United Nations as an apple-polisher to the world's superpowers!

As the planet convulses under the weight of unprecedented crises—raging wars, an infernal climate, widening gulfs between the powerful and the powerless—the institutions we built to steer humanity through the fog of chaos are themselves sinking into irrelevance. The United Nations, once conceived as the conscience of the world, today cuts a sorry figure on the world stage—impotent, compromised, and complicit.

Nowhere is this decay more evident than in the hypocrisy the UN has displayed in the face of systemic repression in countries like Bangladesh, where democracy is not merely withering—it has been uprooted entirely. The global silence on the brazen rise of an authoritarian puppet regime, reportedly installed and sustained by the CIA and other Western interests, and fronted by Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus, is not just deafening. It is disgraceful.

The Cracks in the Global Compact

Our problems are no longer neatly confined by borders. Climate change is not “regional.” Hunger and inequality are not “national issues.” The weapons that fuel war in Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, or Myanmar are shipped across oceans. The corruption that empowers dictators in the Global South often begins in bank accounts in Geneva, London, and New York. These are global problems, requiring global solutions.

That was the founding promise of the United Nations: a place to forge common purpose through collective dialogue. Not to erase our differences, but to navigate them with decency and determination. Not just to debate, but to deliver.

But today, the UN has abandoned that moral high ground. Under Secretary-General António Guterres, the institution has become an echo chamber of the Global North—a public relations puppet for Western superpowers and their feudatory regimes. Rather than championing the oppressed, the UN now seems more interested in appeasing the powerful, even when their hands are drenched in blood or dripping with the oil of exploitation.

Bangladesh: A Case Study in UN Failure

Consider Bangladesh, a country of over 170 million people, whose democratic aspirations have been violently extinguished. What masquerades as a government today is, in truth, an illegal, repressive regime installed and propped up by external actors—chief among them, the CIA and their local operatives.

This regime, with Dr. Yunus as its polished but perfidious face, has not only betrayed the people’s mandate but actively dismantled civil institutions. Dissent is criminalized. Journalists are imprisoned. Opposition leaders vanish in the dead of night, their families left with silence and terror. Elections are orchestrated farces. And yet, not only has the UN failed to condemn this descent into tyranny—it has embraced it.

Dr. Yunus, once hailed under manipulation as a champion of microcredit, has long since abandoned any moral high ground. His complicity in the regime’s consolidation of power is no accident. It is a calculated betrayal. The fact that the UN continues to fete him at high-level forums and allow his regime to speak on behalf of the Bangladesh’s people is a travesty of international justice. It sends a grim message: that legitimacy is no longer earned through democracy, but bestowed through Western approval.

A Planet in Peril, A People Ignored

The complicity doesn’t stop at Bangladesh. Across the world, the UN has failed to adequately respond to escalating crises. In Gaza, where entire generations are being obliterated, the UN issues half-hearted statements while Israeli bombardments continue with impunity. In Sudan, Yemen, and Congo, the orgy of violence rages on, mostly ignored. In the Sahel, Western interests prop up pliant autocrats while paying lip service to human rights.

The consequences of this failure are planetary. The climate crisis, which threatens our collective survival, is inseparable from the questions of justice, war, and inequality. Who pollutes and who suffers are no longer abstract questions; they are quantifiable injustices? And yet, the UN’s climate agenda continues to be dominated by polluting powers and oil magnates, with summit after summit ending in vague commitments and broken promises.

Can the UN Be Reclaimed?

There are those who argue that we must reform, not reject, the United Nations. That its flawed architecture still holds the potential for a more just and cooperative world order. But reform requires courage. And so far, what we’ve witnessed from Guterres and his secretariat is not courage, but cowardice. Not impartiality, but indulgence. Not bold leadership, but bureaucratic lethargy.

Yes, the UN is meant to be a forum where dialogue prevails over division. But when that dialogue becomes a euphemism for inaction—when neutrality becomes moral nihilism—then we must ask ourselves: is this system worth preserving?

Perhaps the time has come to build new multilateral institutions, rooted not in the colonial hangovers of the 20th century, but in the moral imperatives of the 21st. Institutions that are democratic not only in name, but in function. That uplift the voices of the Global South not as tokens, but as equal partners. That do not polish the boots of empire, but challenge its violence.

The West Must Reckon With Its Own Reflection

Let us also be honest about the role of Western powers in this global moral decay. The US, UK, EU, and their allies often wrap their foreign policies in the garb of democracy and human rights, but their actions betray them. They arm autocrats when convenient. They fund proxy wars. They orchestrate regime changes and manipulate institutions—both international and domestic—to serve their economic and geopolitical interests.

They lionize dissidents in enemy states while criminalizing whistleblowers at home. They speak of press freedom even as Julian Assange rots in prison. They accuse others of election meddling while bankrolling entire political campaigns in fragile democracies. This hypocrisy is not lost on the world. And it is eroding whatever credibility the so-called “rules-based order” may have once claimed.

A New Ethic of Global Solidarity

So where do we go from here?

First, by telling the truth. By refusing to be silent in the face of injustice—whether in Dhaka or Damascus, Gaza or Geneva. Second, by building coalitions across borders that prioritize people over profit, justice over expedience. The era of Western paternalism must end. The Global South must speak with its own voice, write its own narrative, and forge its own alliances.

Third, by recognizing that humanity is not served by institutions that merely exist. Legitimacy must be earned. The United Nations was created to serve humanity, not to kneel before power. If it can no longer serve that function, then yes, perhaps it must be discarded—or at the very least, radically rebuilt.

Conclusion: A Fork in the Road

We stand at a historic fork in the road. One path leads us further into fragmentation, where puppet regimes and global complicity sow the seeds of unending conflict. The other points to a new horizon—a world bound not by imperial interests, but by mutual survival and shared dignity.

Let us choose that second path. Not with naïve hope, but with urgent, organized resistance. Let us demand that our global institutions reflect the values they claim to uphold. Let us reclaim our future—from the hands of tyrants, from the grasp of corporations, from the silence of those who should have spoken.

The UN may have become a buffoon. But the ideals it once claimed—peace, dignity, and equality—remain worthy of pursuit.

A fractured world demands a brave new global compact—not complicity and silence.

In a world broken and bleeding, what we need is a daring new covenant of global conscience—not the UN’s hollow silence and complicit grace.

Let us begin anew.

Written by:.Anwar A. Khan

Anwar A. Khan, was a freedom fighter to establish Bangladesh in 1971, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, who writes on politics, current affairs and international issues.

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