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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (43879)	5/12/2004 11:08:34 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793917

If you set aside the murders . . . Atlantic Blog Do you remember Marion Barry's claim that Washington, DC is a safe city, so long as you set aside the murders? In the Guardian, Polly Toynbee does a Marion Barry. She describes the UN, apparently with a perfectly straight face, as "the last best chance" for Iraq. To do this, she has to ignore some things. Amnesty complains that the UN in Kosovo has failed to deal with women forced into prostitution. Their customers: the blue berets that Toynbee is all mushy about. Kofi Annan's aggressive efforts to cover up the growing scandal over the food for oil program. UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Italy, Denmark, and Slovakia have been expelled from Eritrea for sex with minors. While the Sudanese government is indulging itself in ethnic cleansing, the UN is too busy putting Sudan on its comically named Human Rights Commission to notice. And this kind of stuff: In Somalia, U.N. elements frustrated the peacekeeping process and led to its eventual failure. Few elements were proactive or helpful. For instance, many of the 22 countries participating mostly stayed in their compounds, leaving the daunting peacekeeping responsibilities to others. Further aggravating the problem, the Indian soldiers, being Hindu, were unable to command respect from Muslim Somalis, or even their Muslim Pakistani cohorts. In addition, the Pakistani contingent in Somalia looked at the Somalis with contempt and committed various human rights violations, including beating the Somalis with sticks. These actions led to Mohammed Farrah Aideed's group ambushing and killing 24 Pakistani soldiers. As a result, U.N. authorized UNSCOM to take all necessary measures against those responsible for the armed attacks. This later contributed to the deaths of American soldiers in the tragic incident recalled in the film "Blackhawk Down." U.N. modis operandi allows various countries to deploy undesirable and diseased soldiers as peacekeepers. Some of the 22 nations involved in Somalia came in "light" and left "heavy," stealing anything of value from the Somalis and other coalition members. Additionally, Zimbabwe sent a large contingent of soldiers who were HIV-positive, placing a burden on American and U.N. medical teams, and jeopardized the health Somali women through fraternization. The efforts made in Haiti were much of the same. The Bangladeshis serving there for the U.N. held the Haitians in low regard and often physically abused them, as witnessed by one of the authors of this article. "Whorehouse Row" in Port-Au-Prince was constantly packed with U.N. personnel who could have been engaged in nation-building or life-saving activity. Nice trick, that. Point to the problems the coalition forces are having, compare it to a UN of Toynbee's fantasy world, and of course the UN looks good. Marion Barry was more honest.