Global Policy Forum

A Stain on the UN

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National Post (Toronto)
September 11, 2000


The United Nations celebrated the year 2000 in the manner that has become its trademark. It held a grandiose "Millennium Assembly," costing between US$100-million and US$250-million depending on what you include in the calculation, and ended with a characteristically incoherent and overblown final "declaration."

Mohammad Khatami, president of terrorism-sponsoring Iran, was there to pledge, with everyone else "to take concerted action against international terrorism," and Jiang Zemin went along with the promise to "strive for ... civil, economic, social and cultural rights for all," even as his troops and apparatchiks complete the cultural disembowelment of Tibet.

The leaders of Russia, Brazil, India and China all initialed "the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol ... to embark on the required reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases," when all those countries explicitly refuse to participate in this environmental house cleaning. Fidel Castro, Cuba's dictator-for-life, was keen as mustard for "democratic and participatory governance based on the will of the people," just as assorted African kleptocrats were there unflinchingly to promise to "spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty."

The declaration is, in other words, a hoax. But it is also worse than that. No matter how many potentates had assembled in New York, they could not have done the one thing that would turn the verbose declaration into reality, which is a fundamental reform of human nature. Greed, cruelty and the lust for power exist as surely today as they did a week ago; all the summit has done is camouflage them. And it has also camouflaged those greedy, cruel and power-hungry leaders who participated, by giving them the clothes of humanitarian, liberal democrats. The pragmatic requirements of international diplomacy are never pure and rarely simple; sometimes it is necessary for the leaders of free nations to rub shoulders with despots. But this was not one of those occasions.

As John Bolton argues on the page opposite, the Millennium Summit will achieve nothing desirable, and will instead make reckless and improper "peacekeeping" efforts more common. To participate in a consensus document that is at best meaningless and and worst dangerous, while lending lustre to some of the ugliest regimes in the world is a stain on the reputation of the UN and leaders of liberal democracies.

Hope did not "glow" at the UN, as Michael Enright suggested on CBC radio yesterday, it was juggled by a multinational conclave of confidence tricksters. The victims of this week's feel-good diplomatic pact will be the benighted millions around the world who may put their trust in the promises of the UN's piece of paper, hoping against reality that it will improve their lot.


More Information on the Millennium Summit and Its Follow-Up

 

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