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The UN Helps NK Dictatorship Stay Alive
Posted by Raven on June 11th, 2008
Can we trust the UN to do the right thing? Do we still consider the UN to be a relevant entity that supports freedom and human rights for all people?
NEWS ANALYSIS — After more than two years of accusations and probes into the operations of the United Nations Development Program in North Korea, a weighty report finally reveals how routinely, and systematically, the agency disregarded U.N. regulations on how it conducted itself in Kim Jong-Il’s brutal dictatorship, passing on millions of dollars to the regime in the process.
The 353-page report, by a three-member “External Independent Investigative Review Panel” appointed by UNDP to investigate itself, was published with much fanfare last week after nine months of political maneuvering and research.
The report depicts an organization that for years apparently considered itself immune from its own rules of procedure as well as the laws and regulations of countries that were trying to keep weapons of mass destruction out of Kim’s hands.
Reports like this cause me to wonder what exactly, the UN is supposed to really stand for. Uniting nations or providing nations with the tools, resources and money to create a world of un-United nations.
Yet despite those rules, and in the midst of a growing international storm of concern over Kim’s behavior, UNDP’s North Korea office, as well as other UNDP offices, continued to hand over millions in hard currency to the Kim regime and to transfer sensitive equipment with potential for terrorist use or for use in creating weapons of mass destruction.
“What this report shows is that UNDP has operated lawlessly for far too long,” said Mark Wallace, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who brought many of the original accusations against the U.N. anti-poverty agency to light in January 2007 after examining confidential UNDP internal audits of its North Korean operation.
“U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has indicated that integrity is a high U.N. priority,” Wallace said. “It is now up to UNDP to follow that direction.
The monster has become to big, to bumbling, too corrupt to serve any purpose now. The US should step down from this wasteful organization and start helping nations on it’s own.
