Today is the United Nations International Day of Peace. I wouldn’t have known this if it wasn’t on my desk calendar. I find it ironic that my Dilbert calendar, crammed with comedy, notes the UN declared day of peace.
From the International Day of Peace website:
“The International Day of Peace (“Peace Day”) provides an opportunity for individuals, organizations and nations to create practical acts of peace on a shared date. It was established by a United Nations resolution in 1981 to coincide with the opening of the General Assembly. The first Peace Day was celebrated in September 1982. In 2002 the General Assembly officially declared September 21 as the permanent date for the International Day of Peace. By creating the International Day of Peace, the UN devoted itself to worldwide peace and encouraged all of mankind to work in cooperation for this goal.”
Does the United Nations really know what peace is and how to achieve it? Their record suggests otherwise.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton has said the UN is hobbled “by bad management, by sex and corruption” and a lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions. An organization with such leadership will, on occasion, luck it’s way into success. But, the failures are massive and the decades-long list of those failures leave a path of death and destruction whenever this body of ‘peace’ gets involved.
A few examples…
Rwanda – The United Nations admitted failure in preventing genocide in the 1994 massacre, which left over 800,000 dead.
Darfur – The United Nations debated endlessly over the wording of a resolution to stop the genocide. Meanwhile, thousands died, being slaughtered by contracted Arab militiamen, with the direct or implied approval of the government of Sudan.
The Congo – The United Nations forces were supposed to keep the peace, but instead, they were accused of rape on a massive scale and of worsening the violence.
East Timor – Military forces under the political direction of General Suharto’s New Order regime entered East Timor in December 1975. In the weeks and months immediately after that invasion, the UN Security Council and later the General Assembly called for the withdrawal of Indonesian military forces. When the Indonesian military finally withdrew 24 years later, much of East Timor had been destroyed, 200,000 East Timorese had been killed and more than 100,000 had been displaced.
Serbia – Secretary General Kofi Annan laid out in a self-critical report the tragic story of how the United Nations allowed the Bosnian Muslim ”safe area” of Srebrenica to be overrun in July 1995 by Bosnian Serbs, who then systematically killed thousands of the town’s men and boys.
The United Nations has become an organization riddled with waste, fraud and abuse. Most people are unaware of the outrageous expenditures for some of the UN peacekeeping operations. Dale Van Atta of Reader’s Digest has summarized a few.
Andrew Thomson, Kenneth Cain and Heidi Postlewait, all former UN staffers, have a book titled “Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures”, in which they chronicle their early enthusiasm for “changing the world” and their eventual cynicism after witnessing the chaos brought by the UN.
The three have told of a wild contingent of Bulgarian peacekeepers in Cambodia in 1993. The UN was there to help organize elections. The Bulgarians, allegedly recruited from prisons and mental hospitals to fill the UN quota, were “A battalion of criminal lunatics arrive in a lawless land,” Cain observes in their book. “They’re drunk as sailors, rape vulnerable Cambodian women and crash their UN Land Cruisers with remarkable frequency.”
Perhaps the title of my post is just wrong. The UN declared Day of Peace is a joke.
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