A rchive Date
[ 10-09-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.N ]
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[Much ado about nothing in New York
By PAUL STANWAY
Edmonton Sun
September 8, 2000
It was billed as the UN Millennium Summit and generated enough hot air to create its own greenhouse effect and extend the New York summer to the end of the month.
According to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the meeting of more than 150 heads of state and political heavies is the largest such gathering in human history and would be "a defining moment for the world's leaders and for the United Nations."
Yeah, and Tiger Woods won't make the cut for this weekend's Canadian Open in Oakville.
Over its history, the UN has specialized in hypocrisy and meaningless hyperbole but the organization really outdid itself with this grand millennium bash. Today the world leaders will endorse a 20-year plan to raise half a billion people from abject poverty, halve the number of people who don't have access to safe drinking water, ensure that all of the world's children complete at least primary education, and move at least 100 million people from slums into adequate housing.
Oh yes, and by 2015 the UN will also have found the time to beat the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Wonderful stuff, but the only safe bet is that if any of these goals are achieved it will have had little to do with the United Nations. No doubt the attraction for most of the delegates to the Millennium Summit was the bash itself, and the opportunity to step up on the world's largest soapbox and do a little bashing of the other kind we've come to expect at the UN.
Some examples:
As he always does, Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi blamed Africa's problems on the "legacy of colonialization" while making no mention of the unsavory legacy of his generation of African leaders, the billions in wasted or stolen aid and the continued repression by home-grown despots.
That well-known democrat, Chinese President Jiang Zemin, took the opportunity to warn against UN intervention in a country's internal affairs, even if it involved persecution of a minority. Tibet perhaps? It is a "minority" to Beijing but in reality an occupied country.
Fidel Castro stepped out of his time warp to damn the western democracies for "coming up with the same recipes that have made us poorer, more exploited and more dependent."
Those dreadful recipes are, of course, democracy and free-market economics. Dreaded policies which have led the peoples of the western democracies to the greatest expansion of freedom and prosperity in human history.
I don't know about you, but if we're talking about real, meaningful accomplishments, I'd stack that up against the biggest political shindig in history.
If we learned anything in the 20th century (and I'll admit that you could make a pretty strong argument that we didn't learn much) surely it was that peace, prosperity and what we've come to call human rights flourish in free-market democracies like nowhere else. Of course, the UN's problem is that many of the 150-odd leaders in New York aren't interested in democracy. The only prosperity they're concerned about is their own.
Through four decades the UN has been a home for those who have attacked and undermined the ideals and policies which have caused the western democracies to prosper. It has become a rambling, expensive bureaucracy in which waste and inefficiency have flourished. Even its friends would admit it has been used and abused by despots and freeloaders.
But not Jean Chretien. He was in New York this week (of course) for a succession of photo-ops, lunches and dinners. But he found time from his busy schedule to defend the UN as "the cornerstone of Canadian policy and foreign affairs" and blast the Alliance for suggesting Canada needs to seriously examine its UN involvement.
What's to examine? We write fat cheques and volunteer peacekeepers, and in return we are encouraged to be ashamed of our prosperity and liberty.
An expensive guilt trip!
Could there be anything more liberal, more Canadian than that?
Letters to the editor should be sent to sun.letters@ccinet.ab.ca
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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