Key UN Body - Conference on Disarmament

Leave it to the United Nations. The world body, invested in saving the world from itself, keeps creating various offshoot agencies and committees to further its work and to bring acclaim to the international organization trusted the world over to be fair, and just and protective of the world population.

Yet truth is, the United Nations famously prefers not to 'name and shame', much less overtly blame those regimes whose records defy human rights. Through the General Assembly of its associated members, a rotating roster of Security Council members augment the permanent Security Council.

Much as with other key committees, there are elections held on a regular basis to bring various countries into positions of prominence for stated periods of time. Serving on the rotating Security Council are Lebanon, Nigeria, Colombia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, among other countries.

The countries named are not bastions of human rights protection. Lebanon has become a failed state where atrocities occurred regularly between religious sects and where Christians have been marginalized. The terrorist group Hezbollah has fairly well taken over government, and its own militia is better armed, trained and more numerous than the national armed forces.

Nigeria, Colombia, Bosnia & Herzegovina all suffer from similar and exceedingly violent human rights lapses. Iran and Syria, both repressive regimes, one militantly theocratic, the other a military dictatorship, and both sponsors of terrorism, are each, despite their grievous oppression of their own communities, members in good standing of the United Nations and regularly appointed to commissions.

Libya has the distinction of being a notorious sponsor of terrorism around the world, and is now deeply engaged in terrorizing its own population part of which has turned against the regime, yet it continues to have the respect and support of many UN members, including South Africa, also on the rotating Security Council.

Iran has in the past been appointed to the Commission on Disarmament, and to one on women's rights.

If that doesn't represent a perversion of reality, where the world's worst human rights offenders are rewarded and recognized as outstandingly well organized and admired while presenting as utterly devoted to human rights violations, nothing else could be. Yet Iran, though facing censure for its nuclear ambitions and its clear intention to develop nuclear weapons, is invited to address the General Assembly.

Now North Korea, nuclear-armed and constantly threatening countries in its near geography, defying United Nations censures, and presenting as an economic basket case with an endemically starving population requiring the UN's World Food Program to feed its people while it uses available treasury to design and perfect technologically advanced rockets, has been appointed to lead the United Nations disarmament body.

The United Nations, through its Secretary General, gave a stamp of approval to Iran's recent international "anti-terrorism" conference. And a week on, appoints North Korea's ambassador to take on the presidency of the Conference on Disarmament. Although this too is a rotating position among member states, recognized in alphabetical order, there is no attention given to whom this benefits.

North Korea's So Se Pyong has announced at a United Nations address that he was "very engaged in moving the conference forward" and is prepared to use the temporary presidency of the conference for a "constructive proposal" that would have the effect of supporting the "work and the credibility" of the conference.

How could such a conference, headed by such a regime, conceivably boast of having any credibility? It does, because it can. It is a mockingly insane world where truth and fiction are interwoven, and fact loses out to the expediency of outwardly smoothing out relations between countries lest demands be made that will not be recognized.

This is a sad, sick farce of an abysmally dysfunctional state setting world standards. And it's right on par for anything that comes out of the United Nations.

"It's common sense that a disarmament body should not be headed by the world's arch-villain on illegal weapons and nuclear proliferation, notorious for exporting missiles and nuclear know-how to fellow rogue regimes around the globe."
Hillel Neuer, UN Watch

But that's just the thing of it; rogue regimes from around the Globe have, through the sheer force of numbers, managed to install themselves in such positions, supporting one another and demonstrating clearly the sinister absurdity that the United Nations has become.