The United Nations needs to do more to win over Arabs and distance itself from a political climate which is corroding its reputation for neutrality, a senior UN official said on Monday.
Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said it was too easy for those sitting in UN headquarters in New York to forget that many in the Arab world feel the body had failed them in recent years.
"There is a sense of double standards in the Security Council, the dominance of the US and Britain," Malloch Brown said in an interview in Beirut.
"It gets in the way of us being in the neutral space we need to do our job ... Every time we have to put new security measures outside our downtown offices or move to other areas we are losing touch with the very people that are our lifeblood.
"I think it's a very dangerous corrosion of our standing. We have to listen, we have to understand the needs of the region. But we also have to do a better public relations job to say what we are doing."
After a four-day visit to Lebanon, Malloch Brown said the United Nations needed more Arabs and Muslims working in the organisation and to focus on retaining the neutrality it prizes.
"All that we do (in Iraq) has a neutral intention, to give Iraqis better control of their own future. But in that little whirlwind or epicentre of politics it's very hard not to be buffeted and pushed into a corner," he said.