Friday, June 16, 2017

Contemptibly Biased, Manipulative and Corrupt

"Kofi Annan yesterday promised to move swiftly to deal with corruption after an inquiry into the oil-for-food programme drew links to the relatives of the former UN chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
"Obviously, there were some hard knocks in the report and we are concerned about it," the UN secretary general told reporters. "We want to get to the bottom of it, to get to the truth, and to take appropriate measures to deal with the gaps."
"Mr Annan, who succeeded Mr Boutros-Ghali in 1997, could also fall under scrutiny for possible familial connections to the scandal. A forthcoming report from the independent inquiry will examine charges that his son, Kojo Annan, helped a Geneva-based company obtain a UN contract."
"So far, the head of the inquiry, Paul Volcker, has reserved his greatest criticism for the programme's administrator, Benon Sevan. But there were new concerns at the UN yesterday about the role of Mr Boutrous-Ghali, who was in charge of the organisation from 1991 to 1996, and oversaw the inception of the oil-for-food programme."
"Two of Mr Boutros-Ghali's relatives - a brother-in-law and a cousin - have been connected to the scandal in which Mr Sevan is accused of trading influence for barrels of oil."
The Guardian, February 5, 2005 
The United Nations headquarters building is pictured though a window with the UN logo in the foreground in the Manhattan borough of New York August 15, 2014.    REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
The United Nations headquarters building is pictured though a window with the UN logo in the foreground in the Manhattan borough of New York August 15, 2014. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

"The 21-page confidential report by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services' (OIOS), reviewed by Reuters, outlines the results of an audit ordered by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in response to charges against John Ashe, General Assembly president in 2013-2014, and six other people."
"The report gave the U.N. an overall grade of "partially satisfactory" in the March 22 report, which is available to U.N. member states on request. It noted "important deficiencies" in the way United Nations and its staff interacted with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and oversees U.N. employees."
"It is the biggest financial corruption crisis to rock the United Nations since the Oil-for-Food scandal hit the world body during the tenure of Ban's predecessor Kofi Annan. U.N. officials and diplomats say latest scandal highlights the need for greater transparency at the United Nations."
"OIOS recommended improvements in internal U.N. risk management and controls in light of the irregularities uncovered - a U.N. document improperly altered, travel expenses paid by NGOs against U.N. guidelines, U.N. employees keeping iPads given to them by an NGO headed by an indicted individual."
Reuters, April 3, 2016
Members of the United Nations Security Council vote at the United Nations headquarters.
Craig Ruttle /AP    Members of the United Nations Security Council vote at the United Nations headquarters.

There is the ghastly issue, of course, of UN peacekeepers in Africa preying on the vulnerable populations they were sent to aid and protect. Where UN personnel did the unthinkable for a universal humanitarian agency dedicated to promoting world peace and equality of opportunities for all. Personnel who felt entitled to comport themselves as their ugly mood took them, raping women and children and in the process demonstrating yet again that the organization is fully incompetent and unreliable. In Haiti after the disastrous earthquake and tsunami, UN peacekeepers were responsible for an outbreak of cholera resulting from their lack of hygiene.

From failing to react as required in Rwanda to prevent a barbaric ethnic bloodbath of epic proportions despite pleas from the very official sent there to monitor the situation and who warned his superiors at the UN that without additional troops and arms he, Romeo Dallaire, would be witness to a bloodbath when the ruling Hutus massacred the Tutsis and the peacekeepers were unable to react to protect those targeted victims, to the government of Sudan dispatching its military and Arab janjaweed to target and massacre black Sudanese farmers, raping women and children.

The United Nations' various arms are themselves products of corrupt members holding sway, such as the influential Organization of Islamic Cooperation which has succeeded in ensuring that one sole nation, the State of Israel, would be repeatedly cited for human rights violations as interpreted by the human rights violators who sit in judgement of the country, a lone democracy dedicated to equality located in a sea of hostile Arab monarchies, sheikdoms and theocracies, all dominated by tyrannical rulers.

The World Health Organization, another organ of the UN, announced a global flu pandemic in 2009, recommending universal vaccination. A year later the British Medical Journal published an evaluation, pointing out that medical scientists advising the WHO were in fact paid consultants of international pharmaceuticals happily mopping up hundreds of millions with the sale of global vaccines to meet the demand fostered by the World Health Organization's pandemic announcement and vaccination follow-up.

Yet another arm of the United Nations, the hugely respected UNESCO, has allowed itself to be coerced into declaring that Biblical history is a figment of Jewish imagination, that no historical, heritage, archaeological or religious relationship exists between Jews and the land of Israel, and nor has the ancient city of Jerusalem any trace of Jewish historical culture. All of the historical sites sacred to Jewish heritage are being declared by demand, to be Arab heritage sites, expunging history and relegating it to an expendable trashheap.

United Nations food convoys have been subverting their own humanitarian purpose, to feed Somalians threatened by starvation, living in areas of the geography where the legal government has no control, but Islamist insurgents who are terrorizing the land do. Food aid has been entrusted to Al Shabaab by the United Nations, to be used to feed starving civilians. The result being that none of the food trickles through where it is meant to go, and the UN, in effect, is supporting the jihadists by providing them with hundreds of millions of dollars of food aid.

The United Nations Environmental Program warned in 2005 that by 2010 climate change would be responsible for creating 50 million environmental refugees whose homes would be inundated by rising seas drowning their island nations. The maps used by UNEP officials showing these disastrous events were quietly removed from its website as though to prove that no such dire warnings that never came to fruition were ever issued; yet another UN arm that operates at great expense but whose usefulness is nil.

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