The United Nations: Indispensable or irrelevant?
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Siddharth Chatterjee owes his life to the United Nations.
His Hindu father was a refugee from what is today Bangladesh. Young Siddharth grew up with the chaos of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan as his history, but the security of U.N. assistance programs as his cradle.
At 3 years old, the boy was diagnosed with polio. Yet the quick intervention of a doctor and the U.N.’s polio eradication program – one of the young global institution’s first health initiatives – helped him recover.
At 6, a proud Siddharth marched off to school sporting a backpack marked UNICEF, for the U.N. agency dedicated to promoting children’s welfare.
And years later, as a young lieutenant in the Indian army who had come to question resorting to armed conflict to solve disputes, he would find a new sense of purpose in the U.N.’s peacekeeping and peace-building operations. His first assignment: Bosnia. Iraq, South Sudan – where he spearheaded an initiative to decommission child soldiers – Indonesia, and Somalia would follow.
“You see why I say that for me, the U.N. is personal,” says Mr. Chatterjee, now the U.N.’s resident country coordinator in Kenya. “A story like mine demonstrates how, whatever its faults may be, the U.N. is woven into the social fabric of so many countries.”
This fall the United Nations marks 75 years since its founding charter
