Human Rights Champions

While the Rwandan genocide was ongoing with the provisional Hutu-led government exhorting Hutus to butcher Tutsis, resulting in 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus dying in horrible mass atrocities conducted by the Interahamwe, the Rwandan forces, the Presidential Guard, and ordinary citizens who were incited to a frenzy of hate by the country's official radio station, the country's Hutu ambassador to the United Nations was elected to the revolving UN Security Council, privy to all the discussions about the UN's efforts to put an end to the slaughter.

And he, good citizen of Rwanda that he was, relayed all that data back to the Hutu-led government that was busy overseeing the genocide. Puzzling the UN forces' leader in Rwanda at that time, General Romeo Dallaire, about how it was that the provisional Hutu government had information of a supposedly UN-secure nature that he was later privy to, in his UN-led position. Talk about putting the fox in the hen house; the relaying of that information no doubt assisted the work of the genocidaires to an even greater degree.

But all of this is in perfect accord with what the United Nations does, and not necessarily what that august body should be doing in representing the interests of peace and security in the world. One can look at the UN Council On Human Rights for a similar absurdity where past members have included Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Zimbabwe on the committee. All stringently human-rights-abusing countries, sitting in judgement on their peers and above all, on countries whose human-rights records are beyond reproach.

So should it then be surprising to discover that President Ahmadinejad of Iran has been flattering and engaging as many countries as he can manage, to commit to voting for Iran to join the revolving membership of the Human Rights Committee...? It has become a social club for countries whose record on human rights is so abysmal that it hardly bears repeating, so well known is that fact. It makes a complete mockery of the nomenclature and the mandate of the UN committee.

The sole unifying feature in whatever the UN Council On Human Rights determines is the regularity of their pronouncements condemning the State of Israel. There is an unspoken agreement that countries or nations are not to be embarrassed, so they are seldom mentioned outright when an inconvenient condition is brought to the fore and the country quietly chided in private. The sole exception being Israel, where incendiarily slanderous charges are brought out in the open and loudly.

The committee excels at congratulating one another for their peerless behaviour in upholding the standards of human rights, irrespective of the real, existing conditions within their countries. If their own population feels their leadership is less than benevolent, that leadership has only to point out to the brazenly complaining citizens that their leadership sits on the UN's Council On Human Rights. Compelling.

That Iran, a country that persecutes its religious minorities, imprisons and tortures political dissenters, murders young gay men, frames and then executes political prisoners, rapes young women who have been incarcerated, exacts punishment upon women who display flesh in public, threatens the existence of another country in its neighbourhood, funds and arms proxy militias that wreak terror, defies Security Council resolutions against its nuclear programs, yet seeks committee membership, tells us much about the United Nations' dedication to peace and justice.

So perverted is the United Nations in representing the interests of the world at large, and taken hostage in its mandate and intentions by an overwhelming bloc of third-world countries representing failed autocratic, dictatorial, tyrannical governments that the UN Commission on the Status of Women, a body dedicated to gender equality - announced one of its new members to be the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Sticking the West with our own values. Somewhat perverted.