The UN Apologist

If not the UN, what? (no need convincing any of you!!)

2006-08-16T07:45:00.000-07:00

If not the UN, what?

Critics of the organisation should explain their alternative to it, for it remains the only mechanism we have to uphold peace and human rights in the world today.

Conor Foley

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August 9, 2006 03:08 PM | Printable version

Shortly after the Kosovo war in 1999, Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, famously posed a question about the relationship between state sovereignty and international human rights. "For those who think the former inviolable", he asked, "how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica - to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?"

In the last few pieces that I have written on humanitarian interventions a variety of commentators have posed the same question to me. I think that interventions that seek to sideline the UN are likely to be counter-productive. But what if the security council refuses to intervene in a case of clear genocide? "Are we supposed to watch the Hutus sharpening their machetes while we wait for a UN resolution?" asked one respondent.

The simplest answer is that the failures in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot actually be blamed on the UN charter, as the security council did agree to Chapter VII interventions in both countries. That the interventions were late, feeble and ineffective is beyond doubt, but this does not automatically mean that a more robust mandate would have made them successful. These interventions followed the disaster of Somalia, which was the first time that the UN had used its Chapter VII powers in respect to a purely internal crisis. "Operation shoot-to-feed", as it became known, undoubtedly contributed to the reluctance of western nations to put their troops at risk in future humanitarian missions.

The UN is obviously not beyond criticism, but it is reasonable to ask what alternatives would be better? Did NATO do a better job protecting minorities in Kosovo? Was the ECOWAS mission to Liberia more successful?

To a large extent the weaknesses of the UN system simply reflect the inequalities and injustices of the world that we live in. The UN has "failed" to intervene in Cechnya and Tibet because Russia and China are world powers as well as permanent members of the security council. It has "failed" to bring an end to the conflict in Lebanon because the British and US governments tacitly support Israel's intervention.

The UN mission to Lebanon has recently come under attack from both sides. A commentator here described its unarmed observers as "next to useless" and stopped just short of justifying the Israeli attack on their post. One of my relatives, Captain James Kelly, was a UN blue beret in a previous mission to northern Israel and the Golan Heights back in the 1960s and has written about what it is like to be pinned down by hostile fire. He subsequently became a defendant in the 1970 arms trial when ministers in the Irish Government were accused of sending guns to republicans in Northern Ireland. I have posed the question before about whether this is a better way to "protect the victims" when the state proves unable to fulfil this responsibility?

It should also be recognised that the UN has got a lot better at peacekeeping over the last decade, as the falling number of conflicts and refugees shows. Last year, language embodying the concept of the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) was endorsed by the world's heads of state at the UN's 60th anniversary summit. In April of this year, the security council accepted its responsibility "to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the security council, in accordance with the Charter, including chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis" to protect people against war crimes, ethnic cleansing and other violations.

The words "through the security council" make it clear that R2P does not legitimate actions taken outside this framework. For those who see conflicts in black and white terms this is probably a pity. Some may view the renewed outbreak of conflict in Darfur as another indictment of the UN's failure to prevent "genocide", although most informed observers seem to take a more nuanced position about the conflict. This does not mean that we do not care about the victims, just that we do not want to make things any worse for them.

For those of us who believe in collective security, however, the UN remains the only mechanism that we have to uphold peace and human rights in the world today. To those who disagree with this statement, what is your alternative?

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from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2006/08/if_not_the_un_what.html

The UN has a new Human Rights Council!!

2006-06-20T02:24:00.000-07:00

New U.N. rights body under pressure to prove itself

18 Jun 2006 11:33:55 GMT

Source: Reuters

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By Richard Waddington

GENEVA, June 18 (Reuters) - The United Nations' new human rights body, the Human Rights Council, begins its inaugural session on Monday under close scrutiny to see if it does more to protect fundamental freedoms than its discredited predecessor.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, a prime mover behind the replacing of the old Human Rights Commission, will attend the launch and a host of ministers will be in Geneva to address it in the opening days.

Much of the initial two-week session of the 47-state body will be devoted to planning future work, but its chairman ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico has set aside time for examining current rights crises around the world.

The latter will be a test of whether the new body is ready to break out of the confrontational and highly politicised atmosphere -- often pitting developed nations against developing -- that hampered the commission, diplomats and activists say.

"The new Human Rights Council must be more than the dysfunctional old commission by another name," said Peggy Hicks, global advocacy director at the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.

"The new members must ... find new and more effective ways to help the victims of human rights violations across the globe," she added in a statement.

But the council, intended to spearhead a series of U.N. reforms, had a difficult birth, with the United States declining to stand for membership because it said that changes to the old commission did not go deep enough.

KEEP OUT ABUSERS

Unlike the commission, whose 53 members were nominated by regional blocs, those wanting to take part in the council had to win a majority in the U.N. General Assembly.

Washington backed Annan's initial call for a two-thirds vote, which it said would help keep out abusers who had been able to join forces within the commission to bloc effective action against violations.

But rights activists say that with the storm of international criticism over Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. detention centres, as well as alleged secret prisons, it was far from certain that Washington would have won election.

One of the other key changes is that the rights records of all members will be periodically reviewed. It will be the job of the council to decide how this will be done.

While some states whose records have been questioned, such as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China won election, others failed or did not even stand.

Washington has not ruled out standing in the future and it has been active in preparatory work. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva will address the council on Wednesday.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference has already made it clear that the situation in territories under Israeli military occupation must be discussed.

It also wants a debate on respect for religion following the furore stirred up by the publication late last year in some Western countries of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad -- something which is abhorrent to Muslims.

European countries have warned they will not allow Israel to be the only one signalled out for censure. Its routine condemnation, in resolutions repeated year after year, symbolised for many the sterility of the old commission.

European diplomats say there will certainly be discussion of Sudan, Myanmar and North Korea, although what form it will take and whether there will be resolutions was not decided.

But China, which has faced attempts at censure over charges of suppression of religious and ethnic minorities, has warned that there must be no return to the finger-pointing of the past.

From: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L18754924.htm

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FW: ANNAN CALLS FOR 'A NEW COALITION' ON UN REFORM TO BRIDGE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE

2006-06-13T02:29:00.000-07:00

-----Original Message-----
From: news11-admin@lists.un.org [mailto:news11-admin@lists.un.org] On Behalf Of UNNews@un.org
Sent: lundi 12 juin 2006 22:01
To: news11@list.un.org
Subject: ANNAN CALLS FOR 'A NEW COALITION' ON UN REFORM TO BRIDGE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE

ANNAN CALLS FOR ‘A NEW COALITION’ ON UN REFORM TO BRIDGE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE

New York, Jun 12 2006 6:00PM

Warning that the United Nations is facing “a moment of truth,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan is urging all UN Member States to tone down their rhetoric over a proposed package of reform measures and join forces to reach a sensible compromise that will prevent a budget crisis and pave the way for more fundamental change later.

“It is time for those who really care about reform to come together and form a new coalition – one that bridges the artificial, destructive divide between north and south and brings together all those who are willing to work together because they share the vision of a UN that really works, for the benefit of all the world’s peoples,” the Secretary-General said in an <"http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sg/stories/articleFull.asp?TID=56&Type=Article">op-ed article published today in The Financial Times.

The situation, he noted, stemmed from a decision made by Member States last December when they adopted a budget for the current 2006-2007 biennium, but gave the UN “authority to spend only enough to carry us through the first six months.” The main contributors, led by the US, insisted that this spending cap should be lifted only when there is significant progress on UN reform.

“We are now perilously near the deadline and it is far from clear that enough reform to satisfy them has been achieved,” the Secretary-General wrote. “Neither side has found a way of engaging with the other to agree on further reforms.”

In the midst of this stalemate, he recalled a “minor storm” broke out last week when Mark Malloch Brown, the Secretary-General’s deputy, made a speech suggesting that the US should engage more fully and wholeheartedly with other members of the UN to bring about reform.

“That is absolutely right, but he and I believe the same message needs to be heard in many other countries besides the US,” he said, maintaining that that country is trying to use “the power of the purse” to force through the badly needed reforms and the tactic has provoked a negative reaction among developing countries, who see “overwhelming influence of a few rich countries.”

It was crucial to get passed this impasse in order to get on to the full scope of reforms that needed to be accomplished in the organization, including updating the Security Council, which would require greater political vision on the part of all governments.

“But even while we wait for political vision to catch up with the scale of today’s challenges, we have vital work to do right now - programmes that have been mandated by members and provide essential services to people in acute danger or need,” he said.

“We must not let that work be stalled,” he urged.

2006-06-12 00:00:00.000

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Updates on UN reform...

2005-09-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

	13.09.2005

Report: UN Agrees on Reform Compromise

191 members have to agree on the proposed UN reform plans

Shortly before the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, negotiators have reportedly come up with a watered-down compromise deal on the organization's reform plans.

While there was no word on the proposal for expanding the UN Security Council, the apparent agreement, to be specified on Tuesday, ends deadlocked negotiations that some had believed would end in failure.

"What we can say now is that we will have a document that will reflect what is politically possible right now among 191 members," Gunter Pleuger, Germany's ambassador to the UN, told The New York Times. "It may not be the great reform idea that (UN Secretary General) Kofi Annan put into the world two years ago and might not meet with the excitement of all member states and of the press, but it will be an important step in the direction of a basic reform of the UN."

The draft document addresses topics that include the creation of a new human rights council, ways to increase economic development and reduce poverty and a UN management overhaul.

In many cases impasses were resolved by substituting specific goals with broad statements of principle, according to the newspaper.

Annan's centerpiece

The original reform plan was meant to be the centerpiece of Annan's ambitious plan to reform the world body on its 60th anniversary. Enlarging the powerful, 15-member Security Council was supposed to reflect the 21st century's new balance of forces, enshrining the enhanced status of economic powerhouses Germany and Japan -- the World War II losers -- and the emerging power of India and Brazil.

But the plan, which was to have been endorsed by world leaders at their summit this week, seems to have fallen victim to the competing egos and interests of rival nations.

The most promising expansion plan came in a draft introduced to the UN General Assembly in July by the so-called G4: Brazil, Germany, India and Japan. It called for boosting council membership to 25, with six new permanent, non-veto-wielding seats -- the G4 nations plus two from Africa -- and four non-permanent seats.

Power to veto a sticking point

But the African Union, led by Algeria and Egypt, rejected the G4 proposal and pushed instead for their own draft calling for two permanent Security Council seats for Africa -- with veto power -- as well as five non-permanent council seats, including two for Africa. This plan would correct what they perceive as a historical injustice that has left them as the only continent not represented on the Security Council.

That demand for veto power was generally viewed as unrealistic by the five current permanent members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. Early on, the United States warned it would reject any major expansion of the council, stating its preference for only two additional permanent seats, including one for Japan.

In an attempt to reconcile these differences, at a July meeting in London, the G4 proposed a plan by which Africa would drop its demand for veto power in exchange for a fifth non-permanent seat.

Yet as the United States and China signaled opposition to the G4 blueprint, the Africans decided at a summit in Addis Ababa in August to reject the compromise deal offered by the G4 and backed by Nigeria, the current AU chairman.

US to UN: Fix what you have before expansion

DW staff (aal/win)

From: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1708032,00.html

FW: ANNAN SAYS GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS CAN BE ACHIEVED THROUGH LOCAL ACTION

2005-09-08T11:07:00.000-07:00

-----Original Message-----
From: UN News Service [mailto:UNNews@un.org]
Sent: jeudi 8 septembre 2005 17:01
To: news11@list.un.org
Subject: ANNAN SAYS GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS CAN BE ACHIEVED THROUGH LOCAL ACTION

ANNAN SAYS GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS CAN BE ACHIEVED THROUGH LOCAL ACTION

New York, Sep 8 2005 1:00PM

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today stressed that cities and local authorities have a critical role to play in global progress in education, hunger, health, water, sanitation, gender equality and other areas of the development agenda to be discussed at next week's World Summit.

"Ultimately it is in the streets of your cities and towns that the value of what's decided here will be tested," he <"http://www.un.org/apps/sg/sgstats.asp?nid=1660">said to the mayors and other local representatives attending the United Cities and Local Governments Summit at UN headquarters in New York. "It is there, in the daily lives of your citizens, in their safety and security, in their prosperity and sense of opportunity, that our progress will be most visible, and our setbacks felt most keenly."

"While our Goals are global," he added, "they can most effectively be achieved through action at local level."

Calling the present era "the urban millennium," Mr. Annan noted that urban centres of the developing world are engines of economic growth but also reservoirs of poverty so large that one out of every six people on earth now lives in a slum or squatter settlement.

Indeed, he said, half the world's people now live in cities and towns and in the next 30 years virtually all of the world's population growth will occur in the urban areas of low- and middle-income countries. "How we manage that growth will go a long way toward influencing the world's future peace and prosperity," he said.

2005-09-08 00:00:00.000

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International court to probe Darfur war crimes

2005-06-06T17:10:00.000-07:00

International court to probe Darfur war crimes
Last Updated Mon, 06 Jun 2005 07:03:59 EDT
CBC News
The International Criminal Court announced Monday it will launch a formal investigation into suspected war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region.

The investigation is expected to be the largest handled by the court since it was established in June 2002.

The decision follows a vote by the United Nations Security Council in March to let the ICC try people accused of committing war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region, the first case the council has referred to the ICC. The U.S., which opposes the ICC because it fears it could be used to launch politically motivated prosecutions against Americans, had agreed not to use its veto power on the Security Council.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has given the ICC a list of 51 people, including top Sudanese government and army officials, militia leaders and army commanders, suspected of slaughter and rape in Darfur.

The ICC is not expected to get help from Sudan, which has insisted on prosecuting any suspects itself. The UN says Sudan has done little to disarm the Arab militia.

Critics say the Sudanese government has been supporting the Janjaweed, Arab militias accused of attacking Darfur's black residents and carrying out a brutal campaign to drive out the local population. The government denies the charge.

Tens of thousands of Darfur residents have died and more than 2 million have been displaced from their homes.

Human-rights groups and other observers – including former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell – have condemned the violence as genocide.

from: http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/06/06/icc-dafur050606.html

The Interpreter (filmed partly in the UN!) Opens...

2005-04-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

Kidman's latest film takes centre stage in Sydney

Nicole Kidman's latest film The Interpreter is making its world premiere in Sydney tonight.

The political thriller explores the inner workings of the United Nations and in a cinema first, permission was given to shoot inside the General Assembly.

Academy-award winner Nicole Kidman, who plays the role of a UN interpreter in the film, was the star attraction for the 1,200 guests attending the premiere.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Security Council, gave permission for the filming to help demystify the workings of the General Assembly.

Veteran director Sydney Pollack made the pitch to the UN personally.

"I didn't try to make a piece of propaganda for the United Nations, because that's not my job," he said.

"My job is to make a thriller."

The story centres on Kidman's character Sylvia Broome, an interpreter of an obscure African dialect who becomes caught up in an assassination plot.

FBI agent Tobin Keller (Sean Penn) is assigned to protect Broome after she overhears the assassination plot.

The film opens to the public next week.

from: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200504/s1338025.htm

The United Nations-"Mend it, don't end it"

2005-03-31T18:33:00.000-08:00

from:http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1448590,00.html

Leader
Thursday March 31, 2005
The Guardian

Those who had fervently hoped that the sins of the son would be visited on the father, have found their prayers ignored. One of the most thorough investigations into the United Nations oil-for-food programme in Iraq cleared Kofi Annan of corruption in awarding a contract to a Swiss company that employed his son, Kojo. The second interim report from the panel headed by Paul Volcker had damaging things to say about the behaviour of 31-year-old, English public school-educated Kojo, who had lied repeatedly to his father about the monthly payments he received from a Geneva-based company, Cotecna Inspection Services, up to six years after he was meant to have left it. Cotecna was found to have made false statements to the public, the United Nations, and to Mr Volcker's investigators.

Article continues

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But a 12 month, $3m inquiry by some of the sharpest investigative brains available to the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, found no evidence that Mr Annan had intervened in the bidding process for the Cotecna contract and no conclusive evidence that he knew Cotecna was in the running for it. The secretary-general did not emerge unscathed. The in-house investigation he initiated, which lasted all of one day, was rightly deemed woefully inadequate. Two of Kofi Annan's closest advisers, his former chief of staff Iqbal Riza and Dileep Nair, former head of the UN watchdog group, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, were carpeted, one for ordering the shredding of files (albeit copies of original documents that were kept) and the other for appointing a person who did almost no work on overseeing the oil-for-food programme. But the centrepiece of the allegations, that the secretary-general had put $10m worth of business to a company where his son worked, was dismissed.
There exists, of course, a clear neo-conservative motive in seeking to discredit the head of an organisation that has been at the forefront of opposition to the war in Iraq. The White House spoke yesterday through gritted teeth. Mr Volcker himself is unimpeachable. He was the man called in to investigate the WorldCom and Enron corporate scandals. So if Mr Volcker says Mr Annan is clean, there could be no clearer endorsement of the general secretary's integrity. In its reaction, the White House balanced professed support for the work of the secretary general with a statement that the whole story about the oil-for-food saga had yet to be told. Much could still emerge when the final report comes out in the summer to discredit Mr Annan's stewardship of the programme, which came to symbolise all this Bush administration hated about the soft, dovish approach to Iraq's brutal dictator. A programme intended to minimise the impact of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis, by allowing them to sell oil for food, ended up allowing Saddam to corruptly run rings around the UN. The affair is at the heart of the neo-conservative contempt for weak-kneed liberalism and for the international community's inability to face down dictators. The UN's critics live to fight another day.

But while it is evident that the UN is in dire need of reform, it is equally clear that a strong, credible UN is needed as never before. As Jan Egeland, the UN's emergency relief co-ordinator wrote in the Financial Times yesterday, we must mend, not end, the UN. Not out of misplaced internationalism but out of hard-headed realism.There is no alternative to an organisation that can coordinate the responses of 60 different donor countries, the military assets of 26 countries, and the efforts of hundreds of aid agencies days after the tsunami disaster struck the Indian Ocean. While the second Bush administration gropes for international legitimacy, the battered, creaky leviathan of the UN already has it, and must be allowed to keep it.

Documents
Volcker commission report on UN oil-for-food

Useful links
UN website
Wikipedia: Kofi Annan

Annan wins support after damaging oil-for-food report

2005-03-31T18:28:00.000-08:00

By David Usborne in New York
31 March 2005

Britain and other European governments were preparing to voice unified support for Kofi Annan last night amid concerns that a report on ties between his son and a firm contracted by the United Nations to work in Iraq may have left him more seriously damaged than expected.

Mr Annan "enjoys the continuing strong support of the British Government," said Sir Emyr Jones Parry, the British ambassador. Tony Blair telephoned Mr Annan on Tuesday night to offer support, as the European Union moved to focus on the secretary general's proposals for fundamental reforms of the UN to be considered at a summit in September.

But some diplomats acknowledged privately that the need to shore up the secretary general had become urgent following the release of the report, prepared by the former US Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker. "He looks worse now than he did before it came out," a senior Western source commented. "A lot of this looks circumstantially very bad."

Making matters worse yesterday were leaks from yet another report, this time by an independent consulting firm, into personnel problems at the UN office for election assistance around the world. It allegedly found evidence of humiliation of staff, sexual harassment and misuse of agency funds.

The consultants said they had concluded that "constant sexual innuendo is part of the 'fabric' of the division". Fred Eckhard, the UN spokesman, said there had not been any decision on possible disciplinary action against the division's managers and its head, Carina Perelli of Uruguay.

Mr Volcker's report, published on Tuesday, forms part of his investigation into corruption in the oil-for-food programme. It focused on Kojo Annan's employment by the Swiss company, Cotecna, which was chosen in late 1998 to inspect humanitarian goods going to Iraq. The report concluded that there was no evidence that the secretary general had influenced the awarding of the contract. But the 94-page document chastised the secretary general for not taking stronger steps to query his son's activities. It included a revelation that his former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, had ordered significant documents to be shredded.

* The UN Security Council is expected to vote today on a resolution authorising the referral of suspects accused of war crimes in Darfur to the International Criminal Court.

from http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=624999

So Funny I needed to Post it!--Why Americans Hate the UN...

2005-03-31T11:28:00.000-08:00

May 14 — OK, so now it’s official: The world really does hate us. Implicit in last week’s votes to boot the United States from United Nations commissions on human rights and drug trafficking is the now-undeniable fact that we are the most-reviled country on Earth.

AMERICANS ARE RIGHTFULLY annoyed. I mean, it’s one thing to put slave-owning Sudan on a human-rights commission, but how dare they kick us off that drug panel! We’re the world’s largest consumer of narcotics, for Pete’s sake! Shouldn’t we have the largest say in how they’re distributed?
Of course, the U.N. does seem to want the U.S. represented on at least one commission, namely the High Commission to Soak Rich Countries. After all, wasn’t that General Secretary Kofi Annan asking our president the other day to cough up $200 million to fight AIDS in Africa?

Clearly, I am on the brink of a bitter, though entertaining, anti-U.N. tirade. But before launching into it, I am obligated by professional integrity to point out that perhaps the U.N. has a good reason to hate us. After all, we’ve been throwing around our considerable weight in bizarre ways lately.
At the human rights commission’s recent meetings in Geneva, for instance, we actually voted against a resolution banning torture, claiming (if you can believe this) that we do object to torture, but did not want to limit the “production of torture equipment.” (Who knew that the production of torture equipment is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy afloat right now?)
And when the commission passed a resolution objecting to the death penalty, we voted “no” along with our “friends” in Algeria, Burundi, China, Kenya, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland, Syria and Vietnam. (Now there’s a list of forward-thinking democracies!)
But my favorite vote from the last session was on a resolution declaring it “intolerable that 826 million people throughout the world [do] not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs.” We were the only country in the world to vote against the declaration (where are our Libyan allies when we need them?!).

So, OK, they hate us. But let’s now turn our attention to something far more important than them hating us—namely us hating them.
Here in New York—the epicenter of anti-U.N. sentiment (sorry, Sen. Helms, but you’ve got nothing on us)—we can’t stand the U.N. In fact, we’ve been waging a decade-long war to get the United Nations to pack up its bags and leave. (We’ve done this non-violently, of course, preferring the New York method of simply nudging them to death.)
You can’t say we aren’t justified. U.N. diplomats possess that magical “Get out of jail free” card called diplomatic immunity, which allows them to flout local and national laws without ever having to answer for it.
And here in New York, it’s never business, it’s personal. We couldn’t care less about being kicked off those U.N. commissions. We’re much more bothered by the local U.N. missions’ profligate use of our most precious resource: East Side parking spaces.
In 1994, it came to light that the Russian mission had racked up 6,228 parking tickets in just six months (that’s 34 tickets a day). From that point, it didn’t take much to fuel our rage (which I’m going to list with bullets because I’ve found that people take stories with bullets much more seriously):

Jan. 1997: Russian diplomat Boris Obnossov (from whose name is derived the American word “obnoxious”) took a few vodka-fueled punches at a cop who was writing him a ticket for parking at a fire hydrant. It was the Russians’s 386 ticket of the year (and it was still January!).

Jan. 1997: A group of Russian “diplo-brats” were arrested for public urination, graffiti, harassing seniors, breaking car windows and, cops said, wearing unattractive jogging suits. The teens were let go when their status as sons and daughters of diplomats (henceforward known in the tabloids as “diplo-brats”) was confirmed.

April 1997: A drunken South Korean diplomat crashed his car but was released after playing the immunity card.

1998: Two cheapskate South African diplomats stiffed a cabby of a $3.50 fare and one of them allegedly yelled at the turban-wearing cabby, “Go back to India.” Although bothered by the $3.50 rip-off, New Yorkers seemed most upset that diplomats can hurl racist expletives at cabbies with impunity while the rest of us have to mumble our invectives under our breath.

Dec. 1999: The missions of Guinea-Bissau and Liberia had their electricity turned off for non-payment of bills (which pissed off their landlord but, no doubt, earned them a seat on the U.N.’s Economic Development panel).

The ongoing situation made our contentious mayor, Rudy Giuliani, so angry that he said he didn’t even care if the city were to lose the estimated $3 billion that the U.N. pumps into the city economy (he gets that way sometimes).
“If they’d like to leave New York,” the mayor said, “then we can find another use for that area of town.”
A lot has calmed down since those days—the Russians only got 372 tickets in 1999 (down from the record-setting 32,350 in 1996)—but now comes this latest U.N. affront.
Granted, New Yorkers hold grudges like terrorists hold hostages, but this time, most New Yorkers are treating the U.N. like we treat everyone else: By looking down our noses and ignoring them.
“People in Washington care about the U.N., but New Yorkers see it for what it really is: an elaborate eating club for the world’s over-educated elite,” said New York University urban affairs professor—and every city reporter’s best friend—Mitchell Moss.
“Let’s face it, the U.N. is a great way for these guys to escape their lousy home countries and get a good meal. For them, New York is as close to heaven as they’ll ever get.”
So, consider this a threat: Kick us off any more commissions and that’s it, we’re closing Le Cirque.

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Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post and the author of “HAIR! Mankind’s Historic Quest to End Baldness” (Random House, April 2001). Visit him at http://www.gersh.tv/

© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.

from http://gershkuntzman.homestead.com/files/UN_Commission.htm

The United Nations -"Mend it, don't end it"

2005-03-31T03:28:00.000-08:00

from The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1448590,00.html

Leader
Thursday March 31, 2005
The Guardian

Those who had fervently hoped that the sins of the son would be visited on the father, have found their prayers ignored. One of the most thorough investigations into the United Nations oil-for-food programme in Iraq cleared Kofi Annan of corruption in awarding a contract to a Swiss company that employed his son, Kojo. The second interim report from the panel headed by Paul Volcker had damaging things to say about the behaviour of 31-year-old, English public school-educated Kojo, who had lied repeatedly to his father about the monthly payments he received from a Geneva-based company, Cotecna Inspection Services, up to six years after he was meant to have left it. Cotecna was found to have made false statements to the public, the United Nations, and to Mr Volcker's investigators.

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But a 12 month, $3m inquiry by some of the sharpest investigative brains available to the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, found no evidence that Mr Annan had intervened in the bidding process for the Cotecna contract and no conclusive evidence that he knew Cotecna was in the running for it. The secretary-general did not emerge unscathed. The in-house investigation he initiated, which lasted all of one day, was rightly deemed woefully inadequate. Two of Kofi Annan's closest advisers, his former chief of staff Iqbal Riza and Dileep Nair, former head of the UN watchdog group, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, were carpeted, one for ordering the shredding of files (albeit copies of original documents that were kept) and the other for appointing a person who did almost no work on overseeing the oil-for-food programme. But the centrepiece of the allegations, that the secretary-general had put $10m worth of business to a company where his son worked, was dismissed.

There exists, of course, a clear neo-conservative motive in seeking to discredit the head of an organisation that has been at the forefront of opposition to the war in Iraq. The White House spoke yesterday through gritted teeth. Mr Volcker himself is unimpeachable. He was the man called in to investigate the WorldCom and Enron corporate scandals. So if Mr Volcker says Mr Annan is clean, there could be no clearer endorsement of the general secretary's integrity. In its reaction, the White House balanced professed support for the work of the secretary general with a statement that the whole story about the oil-for-food saga had yet to be told. Much could still emerge when the final report comes out in the summer to discredit Mr Annan's stewardship of the programme, which came to symbolise all this Bush administration hated about the soft, dovish approach to Iraq's brutal dictator. A programme intended to minimise the impact of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis, by allowing them to sell oil for food, ended up allowing Saddam to corruptly run rings around the UN. The affair is at the heart of the neo-conservative contempt for weak-kneed liberalism and for the international community's inability to face down dictators. The UN's critics live to fight another day.

But while it is evident that the UN is in dire need of reform, it is equally clear that a strong, credible UN is needed as never before. As Jan Egeland, the UN's emergency relief co-ordinator wrote in the Financial Times yesterday, we must mend, not end, the UN. Not out of misplaced internationalism but out of hard-headed realism.There is no alternative to an organisation that can coordinate the responses of 60 different donor countries, the military assets of 26 countries, and the efforts of hundreds of aid agencies days after the tsunami disaster struck the Indian Ocean. While the second Bush administration gropes for international legitimacy, the battered, creaky leviathan of the UN already has it, and must be allowed to keep it.

Documents
Volcker commission report on UN oil-for-food

Useful links
UN website
Wikipedia: Kofi Annan

Coming very soon...

2005-03-30T07:15:00.000-08:00

everything the world needs to know -- well almost -- about why we need the UN