The Incomparable United Nations

"The United Nations has been accused of altering a key humanitarian aid plan after consulting with the Assad regime."
"A leaked copy of the original draft of the Syria Humanitarian Response Plan shows UN officials deleted references to “besieged” areas such as Madaya where the Assad regime blocked food and aid from getting through."
"It also removed any mentions of a programme to remove landmines, unexploded bombs and missiles, and references to the Assad regime’s alleged human rights law violations."
"UN insiders and NGOs have accused the organisation of pandering to the regime and allowing itself to be censored."
"A group of Syrian NGOs wrote a letter to Stephen O’Brien, the UN undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, saying they were “alarmed” by the revelations and said that it set “an unacceptable precedent”."
Caroline Mortimer, The Independent, UK, January 2016

A toddler is held up to the camera in this still image taken from video said to have been shot in Madaya, Syria -- Reuters

Six years of civil war, with the Syrian regime unleashing horrendous weapons of utter destruction on its Sunni Syrian population, resulting in close to a half-million dead and over seven million homeless Syrians, and where are the UN sanctions? Saudi Arabia, using some of the $110-billion in arms accessed from the United States munitions industry is targeting hospitals and schools and civilians in Yemen in its battle against the Houthis aligned with Shiite Iran, and where are the censures?

Censures aside, these are countries which are, despite their dreadful human rights violations, are regularly elected by their supporting peers to sit on various UN committees including of course, its human rights committee where they sit in judgement on democratic nations whose dedication to upholding human rights is total, and which doesn't stop them from coming under scrutiny, while those who do commit such abuses are never mentioned.

The UN is never loathe to censure Israel for human rights violations, and does so repeatedly. News organizations like Associated Press and the BBC emphasize the loss of Arab Palestinian life when the Israel Defence Forces shoot dead an attacker who has slashed or shot to death Israelis, portraying the attacker as the victim not as the attacker who has victimized people walking down a street, all feeding into a selective process of demonization.

As the only global institute of authority and influence, the United Nations as a world body whose purpose is to fairly and equitably mediate between nations in the promotion of peace and security, it has been an abysmal failure. It failed to halt the stunning massacre in progress in Rwanda when its peace-keeping force helplessly witnessed the bloodshed and begged for weapons and additional manpower to put a stop to the killing.

And when Sudan saw fit to have its Arab troops aerial-bomb and march against black Darfurian farming communities, massacring, raping, looting and chasing helpless civilians into the forest and homelessness, the United Nations did nothing to stop the bloodshed. Its peacekeeping contingents have proven to be utterly useless in preventing the outbreak of conflict, and in settling violent disagreements between opposing rival factions leading to civil war.

The World Health Organization, part of the United Nations, is short of millions of doses of anti- yellow fever vaccine, to handle a massive outbreak in Luanda, Angola and Congo. The agenda to vaccinate over 14 million people ahead of the rainy season is failing due to insufficient supplies and an inability to keep track of the vaccine, with the situation leading to concerns over the disease, for which there is no cure, spreading to other countries.

When UN peacekeepers from Nepal were sent into Haiti in 2010 after the devastating earthquake that destroyed its towns and cities, killing over 160,000 Haitians and displacing one and a half million, the onerous task of clean-up and providing the necessities of life; shelter, food, potable water, medicine and health care received a massive response from the global community. But it was the UN peacekeepers who added to Haiti's agony by polluting a waterway that people were hugely dependent upon, with a strain of cholera that has since taken ten thousand lives.

Throughout all the revelations and accusations the United Nations did what it does best; deny, deny, deny. It took its own interior human rights rapporteur to produce a report, addressing it to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, condemning the UN response as "morally unconscionable, legally indefensible and politically self-defeating", a charge that is more than slightly difficult to skirt around, given the source.

UN peacekeepers in Central African Republic were discovered to have been guilty of sexual predation on women and children. Peacekeepers from Burundi, Gabon and France have been implicated by testimony from women and children who were horrendously abused. According to UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric, he found the allegations "shocking to the core" promising "exemplary disciplinary action" should they be proven true.

UN peacekeeping forces stand accused of 108 sex abuse cases in CAR, mostly against children [Andrew Medichini/AP]