article: So often repeated are the words of the Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjold, the organisation's most beloved secretary general, they have come to serve as a mission statement of sorts. Additionally, they function as a crude benchmark against which the work of the United Nations can be judged. When the organisation was formed in 1945, in the aftermath of World War Two and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "hell" would have been the outbreak of a third global conflict and nuclear Armageddon, neither of which has come to pass. But in those post-War years, as the full horror of the Holocaust was uncovered, "hell" also meant genocide, a word which had only just been coined: the systematic massacre of thousands of people because of their ethnicity, religion, race or nationality. Here, the UN has not always been able to halt the descent into the abyss. To its member states' eternal shame, on some occasions it has been a bystander to genocide. In any historical ledger, Rwanda and Srebrenica stand out as ghastly failures. During the Rwanda genocide, UN peacekeepers deployed in the country concentrated on evacuating expatriates and government officials, failing to intervene as 800,000 Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus were slaughtered. In Srebrenica in July 1995, more than 8,000 Muslims, mainly men and boys, were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces, which barged past Dutch soldiers wearing the distinctive blue helmet of the UN peacekeepers as if they weren't there. What made the massacre all the more horrifying was that the Muslims had sheltered in enclaves deemed "safe areas" under the protections of the UN. In some conflicts, such as Yugoslavia, the UN was slow to respond. In others, such as Vietnam and the Iraq war, it was sidelined. Its efforts to broker peace talks during Syria's civil war, now in its fifth year, have always ended in failure. Now, a third UN envoy, the Italian diplomat Staffan de Mistura, is trying, without success so far, to break the impasse. Peace has also proved elusive in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the UN's first major dilemmas following its formation in 1945 and a long-running bugbear. Sometimes the UN has been part of the problem rather than the solution. Blue-helmeted peacekeepers have been accused of a litany of sexual abuses, most recently in the Central African Republic. In Haiti, peacekeepers from Nepal were the source, the evidence suggests, of a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 8,000 people - though the UN refuses to accept any legal liability. While the UN sees itself as a force for democratisation, it is a ridiculously undemocratic organisation. Its locus of power is the Security Council, where the five permanent members - the US, Britain, France, China and Russia - still wield crippling vetoes. The Security Council, like amber encasing an extinct insect, preserves the influence of the victors from World War Two, freezing a moment in a time. Tellingly, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt coined the phrase the "United Nations," he was referring not to the countries of the world but rather the Allied powers. Germany
summary: "The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell."