Leadership Accountability
Well it is true that only in a democracy are leaders held to a standard of accountability to the people on whose behalf they act, administering the country. Whereas in states ruled by other than democratic measures, say for example, dictatorships, there is no need for accountability. Dictators are not generally admired for their great moralistic vision, nor their bad consciences. Their purpose in life is to be accountable to their own perceived needs.Outside sources can always tch-tch, and point fingers, including the long pointy fingers of unsubstantial recrimination on the part of the United Nations, when a gaggle of countries get the opportunity to line up and censure, but it's rarely effective. If a dictator has wrested power from a predecessor of the same disposition he's accountable to no one, gives not one little damn for outside pressure, because he's sitting pretty and can rape his country's resources at leisure.
When the United States successfully encouraged the United Nations to impose an embargo on Iraq because of its incorrigible bullying and nuclear braggadocio, a way was found to offer aid ostensibly to the suffering Iraqis through the tainted 'oil for food' program, but the money Saddam Hussein happily raked in didn't go to food or medical supplies, but rather to self-aggrandizement in the form of one elegant palace after another.
Iran has been isolated and condemned by the United Nations and most particularly the United States, although there is more consternation than condemnation coming from the European Union. Trade sanctions have been imposed, moderately successfully - sufficiently so that the Ayatollahs and the Iranian press are now criticizing President Ahmadinejad's combatively hard line and nuclear determination. But bloody hell, Russia and China need the oil and don't mind making their own dirty little deals.
Libya's Gaddafi decided he didn't much care for his position as world pariah, so he relented. But North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il knows how to play the game of offence and more offensive. He knows how effective it can be to bargain extortionately, because he's done it before and has come away the winner. His people are starving, but the Glorious Ruler doesn't mind expending the state treasury on nuclear power. He's proven he can with the explosion of a low-grade nuclear device which sent the world out for a big dose of Aspirin.
Just incidentally, an already impoverished and starving North Korean population has suffered through severe floods and a disappointing harvest, leaving more than six million people in need of food aid; about 1.9 million of them pregnant women, nursing women and children under five years of age. Only a fraction of the needy population is being reached, mostly in urban areas. Malnutrition, illness, infant mortality and deaths are on the rise.
North Korea's food stocks from last year have run out. City dwellers can count on one hour of electricity a day. The UN has calculated that food supplies nation wide are up to one-fifth below the minimum which is required. It's in the countryside that true privation has settled in. Trouble is, the UN Development Program has suspended operations in North Korea. It would seem that UN aid money was being diverted from the needy to the regime.
It's mind-boggling that millions of peoples' lives are in transit between life and death through unspeakable privation, while their adored leader holds the world to ransom not over the well-being of the population, but over his vision of his exalted place of state in the world. His people may be starving, but he is determined to equal status in a nuclear world.
Now the United States has agreed once again to sit at the bargaining table with their counterparts in North Korea. Lives other than those of North Koreans may be at stake in a future which sees insanely corrupt and idiotic leaders like Kim Jong Il having possession of weapons of mass destruction. Thoughtful onlookers cannot but help thinking why there is no popular uprising from within these countries ruled by the certifiably insane.
Other, equally embattled and starved populations have stood up to insane tyranny and won their place in the world. Why not there?
Labels: World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, March 06, 2007
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