UNITED NATIONS


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	UNITED NATIONS . . . see "POLITICS" for related links see "THE HUMAN RACE" for related links - Last week the UN still had no staff at Banda Aceh airport, which is the focal point for the tsunami relief effort in Indonesia. What could more graphically illustrate the miserable inadequacy of this once great body than its failure to act decisively following the Boxing Day disaster? It lagged behind the Americans and the Australians in bringing aid to the devastated areas and was slow to co-ordinate the activities of international NGOs. Only four years ago in the Millennium Declaration the UN was described as "the indispensable common house of the entire human family". Yet today it is mired in controversy. Corruption in the oil- for-food program, administrative incompetence, rampant cronyism and sexual harassment of staff are among the welter of accusations it faces. Freedom-lovers might accept a plea in mitigation for all the other sins of the organisation if it at least acted to protect the oppressed. Yet, sadly, it has not. The grim record speaks for itself. In the 1990s the UN was a craven bystander in Angola, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. More recently, its troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been slated as poorly equipped, badly trained and lacking in commitment. UN soldiers are accused of abusing vulnerable refugees. A thousand people are still dying every day. The UN has a choice: reform or die. --John Bercow, quoted at The Australian [24 January 2005]. - - All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founders or will it be irrelevant? --George W. Bush (1946— ) The 43rd President of the United States and a former Governor of Texas. Speech to the U.N. General Assembly [12 September 2002]; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 939. Cohan & Major note: Bush was making the point that Iraq had failed to respond adequately to every UN resolution passed in the I990s. The United Nations now had the chance to enforce its will on Saddam Hussein; if it did not do so, he declared that the United States and its associates would take unilateral military action against Iraq. & see: The Security Council... 1. Decides that Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions ... 9. Demands ... that Iraq cooperate immediately, unconditionally, and actively with UNMOVIC and the IAEA [the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency] ... 13. Recalls ... that the Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violation of its obligations. --United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 [8 November 2002] - - The UN was here when the massacres started, twenty-five hundred troops. UN Headquarters in New York knew it was being planned, they had files and faxes and informants and they sat in their offices, consulted each other, and ate long lunches. Most UN forces ran to the airport, they couldn't get out fast enough. This is not a case in which the UN failed to send troops to stop genocide. An armed, predeployed UN force evacuated as soon as it started. All those signatures on the Genocide Convention, dozens of rapturously celebrated human rights treaties, a mountain of documents at UNHQ on the subject of genocide, law professors all over the world making a living talking about this, and we _evacuated_. Tanks and supply planes and helicopters and soldiers sat useless and stationary for six months in Somalia, two hours away by C-130, and then drunk peasants armed with machetes and lists of names killed 800,000 civilians in Rwanda. And we evacuated. _Eh la, comment?_ --Kenneth Cain, _Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth_ [2004] - The League exists as a foreign agency. We hope it will be helpful. But the United States sees no reason to limit its own freedom and independence of action by joining it. --Calvin Coolidge (1872—1933) American Republican statesman and President [1923—1929]. [December, 1923] - That is pretty much it for the United Nations — all over, finished, bye-bye. Whatever happens now, whether there is a second resolution that does or does not get a Security Council majority, the game is up. The UN has been revealed to be not a talking shop, as its dismissive critics have always claimed, but a diplomatic souk in which bribery, vanity and manipulation are the currencies. Can anyone claim to have been edified by the pantomime of the past few days, with the foreign ministers of the great nations flying around Africa with metaphorical suitcases full of money to "persuade" tinpot dictators to support their position in the Security Council? The French and the British, whose political cultures gave the world modern democracy, are now vying for the favour of Guinea, whose corrupt, totalitarian government is conducting an auction of promised favours. And for what? To get the legal imprimatur of the Security Council of the UN. The government of Guinea — with an appalling human rights record and not even an approximation of democratic accountability — might have the power to deliver the ultimate sanction of UN approval for America and Britain to invade Iraq. How can this be anything but absurd? This is the organization on which peace protesters rest their credibility: the great fount of moral legitimacy, the institution which holds that factitious entity called "international law" under its authority. --Janet Daley, _The Daily Telegraph_, "The UN lets tinpot dictators rule the world" - The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good. --John Foster Dulles (1888—1959) American diplomat and Secretary of State [1953—1959]. - [On the United Nations General Assembly:] If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions. --Abba Eban [Aubrey Solomon] (1915—2002) Foreign minister of Israel [1966—1974]. - There is no other salvation for civilization and even for the human race than in the creation of a world government, with the security of nations founded upon law. As long as there are sovereign states with their separate armaments and armament secrets, new world wars cannot be avoided. --Albert Einstein (1879—1955) German-American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. _New York Times_ [September 15, 1945] If anything is evident it should be that, while nations might abide by formal rules on which they have agreed, they will never submit to the direction which international economic planning involves — that while they may agree on the rules of the game, they will never agree on the order of preference in which the rank of their own needs and the rate at which they are allowed to advance is fixed by majority vote. Even if, at first, the peoples should, under some illusion about the meaning of such proposals, agree to transfer such powers to an international authority, they would soon find out that what they have delegated is not merely a technical task, but the most comprehensive power over their very lives. --Friedrich A. von Hayek (1899—1992) Austrian-born British economist; co-winner of the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. _The Road to Selfdom_ [1944] This organization [the League of Nations] is created to prevent you from going to hell. It isn't created to take you to heaven. --Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. (1850—1924) Republican U.S. senator [1893—1924]. There is a small articulate minority in this country which advocates changing our national symbol which is the eagle to that of the ostrich and withdrawing from the United Nations. --Eleanor Roosevelt (1884—1962) American human rights activist, diplomat, and wife of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Speech before the Democratic National Convention [22 July 1952]. - A plan to build an outdoor dining terrace at the headquarters of the United Nations, in Turtle Bay, has been abandoned because of "atmospheric conditions" — which is a diplomatic term for sootfall. We happen to be a student of atmospheric conditions in Turtle Bay, having dwelt there happily for many years, and we can testify that sootfall does not preclude terrace life if you have any guts. Our own terrace — a small, decadent structure a few blocks from the U. N. — is a howling success as far as we are concerned, and we are in a good position to give the U. N. a few helpful hints on terrace living under heavy sootfall. First of all, you have to get an awning. The awning is not to ward off soot but merely to give the terrace dweller a cozy feeling. It soon catches fire from cigarettes tossed out of upper windows, but the fire is a clubby affair and you get to know your neighbors (a valuable experience for the United Nations, if you ask us). Next, you've got to have a glass-top table and some iron chairs with little thin detachable cushions that fade. Every time you come indoors from the terrace, even if only for a moment, you pick up your cushion and heave it ahead of you through the open door into the living room. If you leave a drink standing on the table to go inside and answer the phone, you simply drape your handkerchief over the glass, and when you come back you dump the soot out of the handkerchief and resume drinking. If the drinks are properly mixed, the soot can lie roundabout, deep and crisp and even, and nobody will mind. Soot is the topsoil of New York, giving plants a foothold, or soothold, on ramparts far above street level. We have a five- year-old ailanthus, a lovely tree, rooted in soot, and we are shocked and discouraged at the capitulation of the United Nations in the face of this mild threat — an organization created to bring peace to the world yet scared to death that some tiny foreign particle is going to fall into its drink. --E.B. [Elwyn Brooks] White (1899—1985) American essayist and literary stylist. "Coping With Sootfall, September 11, 1954" in Rebecca M. Dale (ed.) _E.B. White: Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976_ [1990]. - TOPICAL - The U.N. ? Who Cares . . . The Wall Street Journal By Victor Davis Hanson September 23, 2004 These are surreal times. Americans in Iraq are beheaded on videotape. Russian children are machine-gunned in their schools. The elderly in Israel continue to be blown apart on buses. No one — whether in Madrid, Istanbul, Riyadh, Bali, Tel Aviv or New York — is safe from the Islamic fascist, whose real enemy is modernism and Western-inspired freedom of the individual. Despite the seemingly disparate geography of these continued attacks, we are always familiar with the similar spooky signature: civilians dismembered by the suicide belt, car bomb, improvised explosive device and executioner's blade. Then follows the characteristically pathetic communiqué or loopy fatwa aired on al-Jazeera, evoking everything from the injustice of the Reconquista to some mythical grievance about Crusaders in the holy shrines. Gender equity in the radical Islamic world is now defined by the expendable female suicide bomber's slaughter of Westerners. In response to such international lawlessness, our global watchdog, the United Nations, had been largely silent. It abdicates its responsibility of ostracizing those states that harbor such mass murderers, much less organizes a multilateral posse to bring them to justice. And yet under this apparent state of siege, President Bush in his recent address to the U.N. offered not blood and iron — other than an obligatory "the proper response is not to retreat but to prevail" — but Wilsonian idealism, concrete help for the dispossessed, and candor about past sins. The president wished to convey a new multilateralist creed that would have made a John Kerry or Madeleine Albright proud, without the Churchillian "victory at any cost" rhetoric. Good luck. For years, gay-rights activists and relief workers in Africa have complained that the U.S. did not take the lead in combating the world-wide spread of AIDS. President Bush now offers to spearhead the rescue of the world's infected, with $15 billion in American help in hopes that the world's financial powers — perhaps Japan, China and the European Union — might match or trump that commitment. Nongovernmental organizations clamor about the unfairness of world trade that left the former Third World with massive debts run up by crooked dictators and complicit Western profiteers. President Bush now talks not of extending further loans to service their spiraling interest payments, but rather of outright grants to clean the slate and thus offer the impoverished a new start. International women's rights groups vie for the world's attention to stop the shameful international trafficking in women and children, whether as chattel or sexual slaves. The president now pledges to organize enforcement to stop both the smugglers and the predators on the innocent. For a half century, liberals rightly deplored the old realpolitik in the Middle East, as America and Europe supported autocratic right-wing governments on the cynical premises that they at least promised to keep pumping oil and kept out communists. Now President Bush not only renounces such past opportunism, but also confesses that "for too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability." He promises not complacency that ensures continual oppression, but radical changes that lead to freedom. The Taliban and Saddam Hussein were once the United Nations' twin embarrassments, rogue regimes that thumbed their noses at weak U.N. protestations, slaughtered their own, invaded their neighbors, and turned their outlands into terrorist sanctuaries. Now they are gone, despite either U.N. indifference or veritable opposition to their removal. The United States sought not dictators in their place, but consensual government where it had never existed. What was the response to Mr. Bush's new multifaceted vision? He was met with stony silence, followed by about seven seconds of embarrassed applause, capped off by smug sneers in the global media. Why so? First, the U.N. is not the idealistic postwar organization of our collective Unicef and Unesco nostalgia, the old perpetual force for good that we once associated with hunger relief and peacekeeping. Its membership is instead rife with tyrannies, theocracies and Stalinist regimes. Many of them, like Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, have served on the U.N.'s 53-member Commission on Human Rights. The Libyan lunocracy — infamous for its dirty war with Chad and cash bounties to mass murderers — chaired the 2003 session. For Mr. Bush to talk to such folk about the need to spread liberty means removing from power, or indeed jailing, many of the oppressors sitting in his audience. Second, urging democratic reforms in Palestine, as Mr. Bush also outlined, is antithetical to the very stuff of the U.N., an embarrassing reminder that nearly half of its resolutions in the past half-century have been aimed at punishing tiny democratic Israel at the behest of its larger, more populous — and dictatorial — Arab neighbors. The contemporary U.N., then, has become not only hypocritical, but also a bully that hectors Israel about the West Bank while it gives a pass to a nuclear, billion-person China after swallowing Tibet; wants nothing to do with the two present dangers to world peace, a nuclear North Korea and soon to follow theocratic Iran; and idles while thousands die in the Sudan. Third, the present secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is himself a symbol of all that is wrong with the U.N. A multibillion dollar oil-for-food fraud, replete with kickbacks (perhaps involving a company that his own son worked for), grew unchecked on his watch, as a sordid array of Baathist killers, international hustlers and even terrorists milked the national petroleum treasure of Iraq while its own people went hungry. In response, Mr. Annan stonewalls, counting on exemption from the New York press on grounds of his unimpeachable liberal credentials. Meanwhile, he prefers to denigrate the toppling of Saddam Hussein as "illegal," but neither advocates reinstitution of a "legal" Saddam nor offers any concrete help to Iraqis crafting consensual society. Like the U.N. membership itself, he enjoys the freedom, affluence and security of a New York, but never stops to ask why that is so or how it might be extended to others less fortunate. Our own problems with the U.N. should now be viewed in a context of ongoing radical change here in the United States, as all the previous liberal assumptions of the past decades undergo scrutiny in our post 9/11 world. There are no longer any sacred cows in the eyes of the American public. Ask Germany and South Korea as American troops depart, Saudi Arabia where bases are closed, and the once beaming Yasser Arafat, erstwhile denizen of the Lincoln Bedroom, as he now broods in his solitary rubble bunker. Deeds, not rhetoric, are all that matter, as the once unthinkable is now the possible. There is no intrinsic reason why the U.N. should be based in New York rather than in its more logical utopian home in Brussels or Geneva. There is no law chiseled in stone that says any fascist or dictatorial state deserves authorized membership by virtue of its hijacking of a government. There is no logic to why a France is on the Security Council, but a Japan or India is not. And there is no reason why a group of democratic nations, unapologetic about their values and resolute to protect freedom, cannot act collectively for the common good, entirely indifferent to Syria's censure or a Chinese veto. So Americans' once gushy support for the U.N. during its adolescence is gone. By the 1970s we accepted at best that it had devolved into a neutral organization in its approach to the West, and by the 1980s sighed that it was now unabashedly hostile to freedom. But in our odyssey from encouragement, to skepticism, and then to hostility, we have now reached the final stage — of indifference. Americans do not get riled easily, so the U.N. will go out with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, millions have already shrugged, tuned out, and turned the channel on it. Mr. Hanson, a military historian, is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. - - Peacekeepers in Darfur Hobbled by Need U.N.-African Union Force Short of Funds, Soldiers, Equipment By Stephanie McCrummen Washington Post Foreign Service July 4, 2008 EL FASHER, Sudan — Nearly a year after its creation, a joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur is struggling, with fewer than half the soldiers promised, broken-down equipment, government obstacles, and what commanders say are the unrealistically high expectations of a world that has failed to support them. The mission, the largest peacekeeping force in U.N. history, was to have been the robust replacement for an underfunded, poorly equipped A.U. force that had been on the ground since 2004. But of the 26,000 police and soldiers who were to deploy to protect civilians in this region of western Sudan, only 140 Bangladeshi police and a smattering of officers, engineers and U.N. bureaucrats have arrived. [...] - - Teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to stop their suffering. _The Independent_ has found that mothers as young as 13 — the victims of multiple rape by militiamen — can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers. --Cahal Milmo, "UN troops buy sex from teenage refugees in Congo camp", _The Independent_ [25 May 2004] - - What do the "Bush's boast rings hollow" crowd want for Iraq? Usually, they want the UN to take over. Is the UN perfect? No. Is the UN good? Well, I'm not sure I'd even say that. But if you object to what's going on in those Abu Ghraib pictures — the sexual humiliation of prisoners and their conscription as a vast army of extras in their guards'porno fantasies — then you might want to think twice about handing over Iraq to the UN. In Eritrea, the government recently accused the UN mission of, among other offences, pedophilia. In Cambodia, UN troops fueled an explosion of child prostitutes and AIDS. Amnesty International reports that the UN mission in Kosovo has presided over a massive expansion of the sex trade, with girls as young as 11 being lured from Moldova and Bulgaria to service international peacekeepers. In Bosnia, where the sex-slave trade barely existed before the UN showed up in 1995, there are now hundreds of brothels with underage girls living as captives. The 2002 Save the Children report on the UN's cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa provides grim details of peacekeepers'demanding sexual favors from children as young as four in exchange for biscuits and cake powder. "What is particularly shocking and appalling is that those people who ought to be there protecting the local population have actually become perpetrators," said Steve Crawshaw, the director of Human Rights Watch. By now you're maybe thinking, "Hmm. I must have been on holiday the week the papers ran all those stories about 'The Shaming of the UN.'" --Mark Steyn (1959— ) Canadian journalist. "UN fetish" Remember the tsunami? Big story, 300,000 dead; America and other rich countries too "stingy" in their response; government ministers from every capital on earth announcing on CNN every 10 minutes more and more millions and gazillions. It was in all the papers for a week or two, but not a lot of water under the bridge since then, and as a result this interesting statistic may not have caught your eye: Five hundred containers, representing one-quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on Dec. 26, are still sitting on the dock in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed. At the Indonesian port of Medan, 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock. [...] Yet, among the exhaustive examples of wasted Western generosity unearthed by the Financial Times, what struck me was not the free-lancers but the permanent floating crap game of international high- rollers who couldn't penetrate the labyrinth of Indonesian paperwork. Diageo sent eight 20-foot containers of drinking water via the Red Cross. "We sent it directly to the Red Cross in order to get around the red tape," explained its Sydney office. It arrived in Medan in January and it's still there. The Indonesian Red Cross lost the paperwork. UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency, sent 14 ambulances to Indonesia, and they took two months to clear customs. Terrible as it was in its awesome fury, the tsunami was in the end transnational business as usual. [...] On the face of it, this shouldn't be a difficult choice, even for as uncurious a squish as Voinovich. Whatever one feels about it, the United States manages to function. The U.N. apparatus doesn't. Indeed, the United States does the U.N.'s job better than the U.N. does. The part of the tsunami aid operation that worked was the first few days, when America, Australia and a handful of other nations improvised instant and effective emergency relief operations that did things like, you know, save lives, rescue people, restore water supply, etc. Then the poseurs of the transnational bureaucracy took over, held press conferences demanding that stingy Westerners needed to give more and more and more, and the usual incompetence and corruption followed. But none of that matters. As the grotesque charade Voinovich and his Democrat chums have inflicted on us demonstrates, all that the so-called "multilateralists" require is that we be polite and deferential to the transnational establishment regardless of how useless it is. What matters in global diplomacy is that you pledge support rather than give any. Thus, Bolton would have no problem getting nominated as U.N. ambassador if he were more like Paul Martin. Who? Well, he's prime minister of Canada. And in January, after the tsunami hit, he flew into Sri Lanka to pledge millions and millions and millions in aid. Not like that heartless George W. Bush back at the ranch in Texas. Why, Prime Minister Martin walked along the ravaged coast of Kalumnai and was, reported Canada's CTV network, "visibly shaken." President Bush might well have been shaken, but he wasn't visible, and in the international compassion league, that's what counts. So Martin boldly committed Canada to giving $425 million to tsunami relief. "Mr. Paul Martin Has Set A Great Example For The Rest Of The World Leaders!" raved the LankaWeb news service. You know how much of that $425 million has been spent so far? Fifty thousand dollars — Canadian. That's about 40 grand in U.S. dollars. The rest isn't tied up in Indonesian bureaucracy, it's back in Ottawa. But, unlike horrible "unilateralist" America, Canada enjoys a reputation as the perfect global citizen, renowned for its commitment to the U.N. and multilateralism. And on the beaches of Sri Lanka, that and a buck'll get you a strawberry daiquiri. Canada's contribution to tsunami relief is objectively useless and rhetorically fraudulent. This is the way the transnational jet-set works when the entire world is in complete agreement and acting in perfect harmony. Unlike more "controversial" issues like the mass slaughter in Sudan, no Security Council member is pro-tsunami. And yet even when the entire planet is on the same side, the 24/7 lavishly funded U.N. humanitarian infrastructure can't get its act together. When rent-a-quote senators claim to be pro-U.N. or multilateralist, the tsunami operation is what they have in mind — that when something bad happens the United States should commit to working through the approved transnational bureaucracies and throw even more "resources" at them, even though nothing will happen (Sri Lanka), millions will be stolen (Oil for Food), children will get raped (U.N. peacekeeping operations) and hundreds of thousands will die (Sudan). --Mark Steyn (1959— ) Canadian journalist. "Bolton's sin is telling truth about system" _Chicago Sun-Times_ [15 May 2005] - Some suggest that the UN's irrelevance is beyond dispute, and it only remains to be seen whether we will confirm our irrelevance by obliging the United States or ensure our irrelevance by failing to oblige the United States ... I am reminded of an old story about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam finds Eve is becoming a bit indifferent to him. So he asks her: 'Eve, is there some one else?' One could well ask the same question about the United Nations. Is there any other institution that brings all the countries of the world together to pursue collectively the security and welfare so essential to our common humanity? --Shashi Tharoor (1956— ) British-born Indian national, journalist, author, and U.N. under-secretary-general for communications and public information. In _Independent on Sunday_ [9 March 2003]. ----- comity [KOM-uh-tee], noun: A state of mutual harmony, friendship, and respect, especially between or among nations or people; civility. comity of nations, 1. The courteous recognition by one nation of the laws and institutions of another. 2. The group of nations observing international comity. Ex.: "In Athens last week, E.U. leaders offered a picture of comity as they formally signed accession treaties with 10 new members." --James Graff, "Can France Put a Cork In It?" Time Europe, April 28, 2003 end page \| ABORTION - ARABS \| ANTI-AMERICANISM \| ANTI-SEMITISM \| BALI - BUSH \| CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) \| ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS \| GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO \| GUN CONTROL & GUNS \| HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS \| HURRICANE KATRINA \| IRAN \| IRAQ 1 \| IRAQ 2 \| ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE \| LEFTISTS \| MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS \| MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES \| NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT \| RADICAL THOUGHT \| RAP MUSIC \| STEM CELL RESEARCH \| TERRORISM 1 \| TERRORISM 2 \| TERRORISM 3 \| TERRORISM 4 \| TERRORISM (PREVENTING) \| UNITED NATIONS \| \| Return Home \| The Credits \| The Cast \| Act 1 \| Act 2 \| Act 3 \| The End \| The Reviews \| Photos \|