The United Nations issued a report yesterday that confirms its inability to protect the refugees it shelters, leading to sexual abuse, slavery, and worse, according to the AP. As many of us in the blogosphere have written, the UN lacks the political will and influence to do more than open camps willy-nilly and stand around hoping for the best:

The United Nations is failing to protect millions of people displaced by conflict in Sudan's Darfur region and violence in other hotspots around the world, a U.N. report said Friday.

The world body's approach to the problem of people who have fled their homes but not crossed any international borders "is still largely ad hoc and driven more by the personalities and convictions of individuals on the ground than by an institutional, systemwide agenda," the report said.

Of particular concern in this report is the situation in Darfur, where government-back Arab terrorist gangs enforce the Sudanese policy of genocide. The UN has not stopped the murders, the dislocation, and the rest of the so-called ethnic cleansing that the Islamists have committed. In fact, the refugee camps run by the UN in another African disaster area (the Congo) are just as bad, where UN staff and "peacekeepers" rape and extort their wards, using food and security as their method of trade.

That's what makes this section of the report so bitterly ironic:

The Sudanese government is allowing the United Nations access to camps in Darfur, but U.N. activity is still limited by a lack of staff and funding. That shortage means the world body has been unable to provide AIDS tests and psychological counseling for rape victims in Darfur's camps, which McNamara called unacceptable.

Still, recognition of the problem might be the first step to solving it, if the problem wasn't built into the structure of the UN itself. The majority of the member states are dictatorships and kleptocracies who refuse to allow the UN the authority to stop activities like this, mostly because they don't want the UN on their doorstop next. These countries also supply the staff and security forces that the UN puts in charge of their camps, which leads to the grotesquerie that we've seen in the Congo and elsewhere.

More and more, the UN reveals itself to be a noble idea but mostly a failed experiment. The democracies should construct a new multilaterial organization to deal with security issues. Otherwise, the oppressors will continue their cruelties through the auspices of the United Nations, demeaning the US and other democracies that lend it credibility and its victims false hope.

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» The U.N., The Fraud from Conservative Revolution
Lots of word recently regarding the U.N., most of it is not good. Michelle Malkin has word that a group is trying to get the U.N. headquarters out of the United States. Captain's Quarters has talk of U.N. refugee abuse, a lot of which was sexual.... [Read More]

Tracked on November 28, 2004 11:19 AM