by Klaus Rohrich
January 6, 2005
at a press conference held last Monday, UN Secretary General Kofi annan claimed that the $2 billion pledged to assist south asian tsunami victims by Western democracies is not likely to materialize. "If we go by past history," the Secretary General intoned, …"it is quite likely that at the end of the day we will not receive all of it."
as evidence, annan pointed to the earthquake that devastated Bam, Iran last year, where pledges for aid were made in the amount of $1.1 billion, but according to annan, only $17.5 million actually materialized.
It appears that all the heads of the various bureaucracies run by the UN are reading from the same page of talking points. Robert Smith, of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian affairs (OCHa), indicated that they took pledges for disaster relief with a grain of salt. "Let's put it this way," Smith told The Guardian, a British newspaper, "large scale disasters tend to result in mammoth pledges…The figures look much higher than they really are. What will end up on the ground will be much less."
Jan Egeland, UN Undersecretary for Human Services, who famously claimed that americans were "stingy" because of their low taxes, complained that not nearly enough is being done in support of victims of other disasters. "We have 20 parallel catastrophes unfolding," he said, referring specifically to the genocide in Darfur and the ongoing violence plaguing the Democratic Republic of Congo as just two examples. "Couldn't we wake up to the forgotten emergencies as we have woken up to the tsunami?" he pleaded.
The difference between what's happening in Darfur or the Congo and a tsunami is somewhat akin to the difference between being mugged and losing your wallet. The former is a deliberate act perpetrated through aggression, while the latter is an inadvertant event. The UN figures very prominently in the continuing genocide now taking place in Darfur in that they have caved to the arab/african/Muslim bloc at the UN to allow Sudan to get its house in order under its own steam, rather than have the UN impose peace by force. My guess is that the violence in the Sudan will end when the last living Christian inhabitant is killed or displaced.
To now chide the West for not offering to help pay for relief efforts there is a supreme display of cohones, to put it mildly. It seems to me that the UN cares a lot more about controlling the relief money, whatever the amount is, than it is about how much is given. In fact with a solid track record of misadministration and misappropriation, giving relief money to the UN is the same as using it for kindling. Past disasters have demonstrated that much of the so-called relief money donated winds up in places other than for which they were intended.
Much of the money donated to the starving masses of Ethiopia was used to buy single malt scotch whiskey and fine cigars for Haile Mariam Mengistu and his cohorts. Much of the aid money sent to Somalia was used to buy weapons for the Mogadishu warlord, Mohammed Farah aidid. Most recently, the "Oil for food" program administered by the UN was found to have over $20 billion inexplicably missing.
Even with the current relief efforts, there is ample evidence that the fraudsters are out in full force. Reports from Sri Lanka, where Canada plans to send its Disaster assistance Response Team, already indicate that food, clothing and building materials are winding up in the hands of terrorist groups, rather than the victims.
"almost every truck gets stopped and held, sometimes for several days," an unnamed UN official is quoted in The Globe and Mail, one of Canada's national newspapers. "So far we have been able to persuade them (the Tamil Tigers Terrorist Group) to let us distribute most of it, usually after several hours of negotiations, but there are still many shipments being held at the checkpoints."
Listening to the UN bureaucrats talk about money leaves one with the distinct impression that money means very little to them, oher than to be another tool for wielding control. The victims of the tsunami will be much better off if the aid money goes directly to them without first being laundered by the UN. When Shakespeare wrote "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war," he might well have been writing with the UN in mind.
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