THUGGISH despot who slaughters peaceful protesters in the streets, or global guardian of human rights? The United Nations can't seem to make up its mind where Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is concerned.
This week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was expressing ''grave concern'' over Assad's decision to set loose his tanks on unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators. But Ban then declined to intervene in the coming elections at the UN Human Rights Council, where Syria is a shoo-in for a new three-year term.
Scheduled for mid-May, these elections have about as much suspense as polling day in ... well ... Damascus. As one of the four candidate nations vying for the four open slots allocated to the Asia group, Syria's election to the council is all but assured.
Given its own dubious record, you'd think the council might hesitate before setting itself up as a moral arbiter. But that is precisely what happened three months ago as it stood in judgment over Australia's human rights record through something known as the Universal Periodic Review.
At the time, the Human Rights Council counted Saudi Arabia, Libya and the world's last Marxist dictatorship -- Cuba -- among its members. The presence of this rogues' gallery meant the verdict on Australia was written, in part, by some of the most repressive regimes on the planet.
Only in the depraved universe of the United Nations are the world's worst empowered to pass moral judgment on the world's best. The Universal Periodic Review is nothing more than a politicised kangaroo court that is the equivalent of putting an embezzler in charge of regulating the banks.
I'm in no mood to accept moral critiques from Saudi theocrats whose legal code makes the testimony of a woman worth half that of a man.
But the rhetorical hypocrisies of the UN's human rights machine are merely a casual annoyance when compared with the dark deeds that routinely take place under the United Nations banner.
Three years ago, British charity Save the Children sounded the alarm over rampant child sexual molestation committed by UN staff around the globe. In a 2008 report titled No One to Turn to, the charity noted: ''Troops associated with the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) were identified as a particular source of abuse.'' Even worse was the ''culture of impunity'' that routinely enabled these paedophiles to escape punishment.
A subsequent Save the Children policy brief, published in December 2009, confirmed that sexual predation by UN personnel remained epidemic: ''In 2008, in Cote D'Ivoire, Sudan and Haiti, we found that nearly 90 per cent of those interviewed recalled incidents of children being sexually exploited by aid workers and peacekeepers. In Liberia in 2006, we reported high levels of abuse of girls, some as young as eight.
''In 2004, it was reported that many girls and women in war-torn areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) traded sex for food and other essentials from UN peacekeepers. During the UN mission in Cambodia in 1992-93, the number of sex workers, including children, rose from 6000 to 25,000.''
A young Haitian girl quoted by the charity described the culpability of UN staff in particularly stark terms: ''The people who are raping us and the people in the office are the same people.''
I'm proud to report that Australian troops on peacekeeping duty have never been implicated in such repugnant behaviour. As a matter of fact, Australians in East Timor almost got into a firefight when they objected to the sexual abuse of small boys by Jordanian soldiers. Good on 'em!
Of course, the UN Secretariat has responded to this ongoing abomination with the usual declarations of commitment to zero tolerance strategies. But like nearly everything else related to the UN, the passage of time has revealed those measures to be all bark and no bite.
The NGO Refugees International noted that the UN's unwillingness to enforce an effective policy against sexual abuse meant that ''zero tolerance is meaningless''. And so sexual predators wearing the sky blue beret continue to prey on the vulnerable victims of war and natural disaster around the globe.
The taint of moral corruption pervades even the pinnacle of the UN's organisational pyramid -- the Security Council, where just three years ago Libya was awarded a temporary two-year seat. And now Julia Gillard seeks to resurrect Kevin Rudd's quest for Australia to join the Security Council as a non-permanent member. With apologies to great comedic actor Groucho Marx, I ask: why should we want to join any club that so recently had Muammar Gaddafi as a member?
By word and deed, the UN has forfeited any semblance of a claim to moral leadership. Former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton once quipped: ''The Secretariat Building in New York has 38 storeys. If you lost 10 storeys today, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.'' But my response to Bolton's witticism is to say: why stop with only 10?
No comments:
Post a Comment