The United Nations at work again.

[dude1394]

Hmmm.... I guess no arabic folks are being victimized so it's no big deal huh.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Apr2.html

Crisis in Darfur

Saturday, April 3, 2004; Page A22

ACCORDING TO THE United Nations, one of the world's worst humanitarian crises now afflicts a Muslim people who face a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing driven by massacre, rape and looting. These horrors are unfolding not, as Arab governments and satellite channels might have it, in Iraq or the Palestinian territories, but in Sudan, a member of the Arab League. Maybe because there are no Westerners or Israelis to be blamed, the crisis in Darfur, in northwestern Sudan, has commanded hardly any international attention. Though it has been going on for 14 months, the U.N. Security Council acted on it for the first time yesterday, and then only by issuing a weak president's statement. More intervention is needed, and urgently.


The victims of the ongoing war crimes are non-Arab African people who have lived in the Darfur region for centuries. In February 2003, as the Sudanese government began to negotiate a peace agreement with rebel movements representing the non-Arab peoples of the south, an insurgent movement appeared in Darfur demanding more government resources and power-sharing. The Khartoum-based government responded by sending troops and by enlisting Arab tribes in the region as allies. Early this year, after the breakdown of a cease-fire, it launched a scorched-earth offensive in the region that, according to the United Nations and human rights groups, has taken on the character of an ethnic war.

According to a report issued this week by Human Rights Watch, "the government of Sudan and allied Arab militia, called janjaweed, are implementing a strategy of ethnic-based murder, rape and forcible displacement of civilians." More than 750,000 people have been forced from their homes, and 100,000 more have fled across the border to neighboring Chad, an area of desperate poverty and little water. The dead number in the tens of thousands, though no one knows for sure how many: Humanitarian aid groups have had almost no access to the Darfur region.

For years Sudan's government, a dictatorship headed by Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, waged a similarly ruthless campaign against the rebellious south. At last, under considerable international pressure -- much of it from the Bush administration -- it agreed to a cease-fire and negotiations that now inch toward a peace settlement. Some of the governments that pushed for that accord are concerned the deal may be disrupted if the international community also presses Mr. Bashir about Darfur. They should take a lesson from the 10th anniversary this month of the Rwandan genocide, which the United Nations failed to stop: Political and diplomatic calculations should never prevent the international community from intervening to stop mass murder.

[Mavdog]

I'm not sure what point you are making on this one dude...we should or should not do something about Sudan? Should the US invade and rescue these people? Just what do you suggest?

[dude1394]

The point I'm making goes to the lack of moral standing of the UN. I'm obviously not suggesting that the US "invade" and rescue these people, but it would certainly lend some credence, ANY credence to the UN's credibility if they gave a damn.

[Mavdog]

Originally posted by: dude1394
The point I'm making goes to the lack of moral standing of the UN. I'm obviously not suggesting that the US "invade" and rescue these people, but it would certainly lend some credence, ANY credence to the UN's credibility if they gave a damn.

hmm, seems like the perfect scenario to apply the Bush Doctrine. A country ruled by autocrats, abusing/killing their citizens, ties to terrorists, and who knows? they could obtain WMD in the future.

What's up with the inconsistentcy in the Bush foreign policy? i wonder what it could be.....

[dude1394]

I don't know but I'm glad you are finally coming to your senses about it.

[Mavdog]

So you believe that we should send in US forces to enforce the Bush Doctrine?

[dude1394]

Nope, not unless and until we think the government of Sudan begins to harbor islamic terrorists. If they do and do not do anything about it, then first diplomacy, then possibly embargo, then maybe armed conflict.

However I don't really think they have the wherewithal that saddaam did, nor are they as vital to our interests. So no. But I am glad that you are thinking..

[Mavdog]

Originally posted by: dude1394
Nope, not unless and until we think the government of Sudan begins to harbor islamic terrorists. If they do and do not do anything about it, then first diplomacy, then possibly embargo, then maybe armed conflict.

However I don't really think they have the wherewithal that saddaam did, nor are they as vital to our interests. So no. But I am glad that you are thinking..

on no...seems like they DO harbor terrorists...

Sudan

Does Sudan sponsor terrorism?
Yes. The country has been on the State Department’s list of states that sponsor terrorism since 1993, and the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions on Sudan from 1996 to 2001 because of its involvement with terrorism. The Islamist Arab government that controls most of the country—which remains in the throes of a long-running civil war—has provided sanctuary to terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, and has let terrorist groups plan and carry out operations from Sudan.

Has Sudan harbored al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups?
Yes. The country has given shelter to Islamist and Middle Eastern terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, which used Sudan as its main operational and training base from 1991 to 1996. International investigators suspect it has become a financial hub for the terror network since September 11; al-Qaeda operatives have reportedly spirited large amounts of gold into Sudan.

Sudan has also harbored members of the Baghdad-based Abu Nidal Organization, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Lebanese group Hezbollah, and others. These terrorists do not carry out attacks within Sudan but plan and support terrorism elsewhere. Hamas and Hezbollah have reportedly maintained training camps in Sudan. The National Islamic Front, the strict Islamist party that governs much of Sudan, does not consider any of these groups terrorist organizations

cfrterrorism.org

If the Bush Doctrine is a well thought out foreign policy shouldn't it be applied to Sudan?
or is it selectively applied?

It is in reality merely an attempt to justify attacking Iraq, it's flawed and should be removed from our country's playbook.

[dude1394]

ALL doctrines are selectively applied. We were battling the soviets for years, but not all of the time did we so directly supply the other enemy. Having a black and white policy for every situation is not too smart buddy. Iran will be handled differently. Libya was handled differently. The doctrine of holding harborers of terrorists responsible for their actions is a pretty handy arsenal to have in the playbook during a global war on terrorism. I think I'll keep it, and bush. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]

[Mavdog]

That's the difference between policy, which is fluid and "selectively applied", and a Doctrine, which is a base position.

Libya's reformation began in 1999 and has borne fruit. Time showed preemption wasn't needed.

Iran? Hard to predict what will happen. I'd expect a 2nd Bush term to push the issue ("axis of evil" and all), there's troops on 2 sides right now. Pretty good bet Iran won't have enough time.

Hard to defend preemption and the Bush Doctrine.

[dude1394]

Originally posted by: Mavdog

Libya's reformation began in 1999 and has borne fruit. Time showed preemption wasn't needed.

This guy doesn't agree with you..

1) Rogue-state Libya would not have voluntarily surrendered its WMD program and applied for membership in the community of nations. In an interview last year with the British Spectator, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi told him, "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq and was afraid."



action

[Mavdog]

[quote]
Originally posted by: dude1394

Originally posted by: Mavdog

Libya's reformation began in 1999 and has borne fruit. Time showed preemption wasn't needed

This guy doesn't agree with you..

1) Rogue-state Libya would not have voluntarily surrendered its WMD program and applied for membership in the community of nations. In an interview last year with the British Spectator, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi told him, "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq and was afraid."

Libya and Great Britain reestablished diplomatic relations in 1999, which began the process of Libya's reformation.

From a Brookings Institution paper:

"But some analysts are questioning whether President Bush really deserves the credit for Libya’s U-turn. One of these is Martin S. Indyk, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and former US ambassador to Israel. President Bush implies that Qaddafi gave up his WMD programs because Saddam Hussein was defeated. But according to Indyk, Bush “completed a diplomatic game plan initiated by President Clinton.”

Indyk writes: “Embarrassed by the failure to find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, President George W. Bush is trying to find another WMD-related justification for his pre-emptive war on Iraq.”

He points out Libya’s offer to dismantle its WMD programs was conveyed to the US in May 1999, and that it was the Clinton administration that opened secret talks with Libya in Geneva that year. At the first meeting, the US used the promise of official dialogue to persuade Libya to cooperate in the campaign against Osama Bin Laden and provide compensation for the Lockerbie families.

At that time, Libya’s economy was in a shambles.

Its economic policies, mismanagement of oil revenues, and UN and US sanctions prevented Libya from importing oilfield technology and thus made it impossible for Qaddafi to expand oil production. Libya had no choice but to try to get the US to the negotiating table.

From the start of the Clinton administration, Indyk contends, “Mr. Qaddafi had tried to open back channels, using various Arab interlocutors with little success. Disappointed, he turned to Britain, first settling a dispute over the shooting of a British policewoman in London and then offering to send the two Libyans accused in the Lockerbie PanAm 103 bombing for trial in a third country. For the US, accepting this offer had the advantage of bringing Libyan terrorists to justice. But it also generated pressure in the UN Security Council to lift sanctions.

The task of US diplomacy then was to maintain the sanctions until Mr. Qaddafi had fulfilled all other obligations under the UN resolutions: ending support for terrorism, admitting culpability and compensating victims’ families.”

Perhaps it is enough that Libya’s WMD program has been ended, and the world should not care who gets the credit. But it now seems clear that it did not take a war with Iraq to accomplish it. "

[madape]

Has anyone seen the new documentary "Lost Boys of the Sudan"? It is supposed to be very good.

[dude1394]

Dubya gave the UN the chance to be relevant. To make it's resolutions mean something. Now I understand why they didn't, they don't have any integrity. The UN has to go a LONG, LONG,LONG way to get the NYTimes to discredit it. Too bad the NYTimes doesn't take it's own advice to try and regains IT's integrity.

For the first time since last May, word came yesterday that American forces were engaged in serious combat in Iraq, this time against Iraqi insurgent forces who attacked American marines in a city southwest of Baghdad, and against an armed Sunni resistance in the town of Falluja. Reports of significant casualties on both sides in the pitched battle in the city of Ramadi were a grim and powerful reminder of how badly the United States needs a strong, credible and engaged United Nations.

Unfortunately, not only is the role of the U.N. still unsettled, the world organization is suffering from two self-inflicted wounds. One is a kickback scandal of multibillion-dollar proportions swirling around the U.N.-run oil-for-food program that kept ordinary Iraqis from starving during the long years of punishing economic sanctions. The other is the recent finding by an independent investigative panel that oversights in U.N. security management may have worsened the death toll in last August's terrorist bombing of the Baghdad headquarters.

Urgent steps, including high-level demotions and dismissals, are already under way to address the security failures. U.N. officials returning to Iraq face unavoidable risks, but everything that can be done to make them safer must be done. Ferreting out the murky details of the financial scandal, and meting out appropriate punishments, is no less urgent or important.

At the heart of the scandal are reports that Iraq collected billions of unmonitored dollars from oil surcharges and kickbacks for awarding consumer goods contracts under the oil-for-food program. U.N. officials clearly failed to supervise effectively the roughly $10 billion a year in transactions and may have been involved in illicit deals.

The oil-for-food program began in the mid-1990's, at Washington's behest, as a way to maintain political support for sanctions in the face of Iraqi civilian suffering. It seems to have fairly well served the limited goals of keeping sanctions intact enough to prevent Iraq from rebuilding unconventional weapons and of easing the burdens on ordinary Iraqis. But exporting the oil and buying the consumer goods required working with a corrupt Iraqi government, with Security Council members eager to maximize commercial gains and with some of Iraq's less than scrupulous neighbors.

U.N. officials have been reporting systematic corruption in the program for years, but the Security Council never insisted on a thorough cleanup. Washington acquiesced, since the faulty program was the only way to maintain support for the sanctions. Now there is finally some political will to investigate, and details of the corruption are emerging from documents seized by American occupation authorities in Iraq.

The U.N. investigation now under way can be credible only if it is independent of Security Council control. The investigators must put aside diplomatic niceties and concentrate on cleansing the U.N.'s reputation.

[dude1394]

Kerry calls on the US to bend over and get it from his buddies at the UN and his french brethren..

The Massachusetts senator, who is running even with the Republican Bush in opinion polls for the November 2 election, slammed the US administration's handling of Iraq where US forces have been confronted by mounting insurgent violence.
"They're doing it in such a frankly inept way," he told CNN.
Kerry called for the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to hand over responsibility for reconstruction and establishing a new government to "a legitimate international entity." He added that "people don't want to go to work for Paul Bremer" the US civilian administrator in Baghdad.
"I'm not the president and I didn't create this mess, so I don't want to acknowledge a mistake that I haven't made," Kerry said.
"But let me tell you something, the president needs to step up and acknowledge that there are difficulties and that the world needs to be involved, and they need to reverse their policy."
Kerry said Bush had blundered by excluding countries that opposed the Iraq war from the huge rebuilding contracts. "That's a terrible message to send to countries.
"They need to go to the world and say we're not going to have an American authority that is creating this new government, we're going to have an international authority that will help develop the new government."

[dude1394]

More UN "credibility". No wonder the arabs and the despots of the world love the UN, they are just alike.

April 20 — At least three senior United Nations officials are suspected of taking multi-million dollar bribes from the Saddam Hussein regime, U.S. and European intelligence sources tell ABCNEWS.

One year after his fall, U.S. officials say they have evidence, some in cash, that Saddam diverted to his personal bank accounts approximately $5 billion from the United Nations Oil-for-Food program.
In what has been described as the largest humanitarian aid effort ever undertaken, the U.N. Oil-for-Food program began in 1996 to help Iraqis who were suffering under sanctions imposed following the first Gulf War.
The program allowed Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil, under supposedly tight U.N. supervision, to finance the purchase of much-needed humanitarian goods.

Most prominent among those accused in the scandal is Benon Sevan, the Cyprus-born U.N. undersecretary general who ran the program for six years.

In an interview with ABCNEWS last year, Sevan denied any wrongdoing. . . .
But documents have surfaced in Baghdad, in the files of the former Iraqi Oil Ministry, allegedly linking Sevan to a pay-off scheme in which some 270 prominent foreign officials received the right to trade in Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices.
"It's almost like having coupons of bonds or shares. You can sell those coupons to other people who are normal oil traders," said Claude Hankes-Drielsma, a British adviser to the Iraq Governing Council.
Investigators say the smoking gun is a letter to former Iraqi oil minister Amer Mohammed Rasheed, obtained by ABCNEWS and not yet in the hands of the United Nations.

[FishForLunch]

Mavdog and the democracts are under the false illusion that if the UN or Nato takes over in Iraq, the attacks by Saddamites, Alqeda and Sadrs will stop. The attacks will stop only when Iraq has self rule with a promise by the American to be on standby to crush any uprising against the government. The UN is too dense to act swiftly against any crisis. They will betray the Iraqi people like they did with the Oil for Food program. Sure other countries troops and resource will help a great deal but it will not stop the violence. All the democracts suggest is pass the buck and act as if everything is OK. Yeah right if the UN had sanctioned this war, Iraq would be re-built in a year and the will be peace and prosperity in the middleeast.

[FishForLunch]

These are the people that John Kerry and the Democrats will trust the security of the USA to

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Senior UN officials stole from oil-for-food program
Wed Apr 21, 4:01 AM ET Add Top Stories - AFP to My Yahoo!

WASHINGTON (AFP) - At least three senior UN officials may have looted millions of dollars from the aid program that oversaw Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s oil sales in Iraq (news - web sites), ABC news reported, citing US and European intelligence sources.


Documents from Saddam's oil ministry linked the program's director, Benon Sevan, to a payoff scheme that allowed some 270 foreign officials to deal in Iraqi oil at dramatically reduced prices, ABC news said.

A letter to former Iraqi oil minister Amer Mohammed Rasheed -- which UN officials have not yet seen -- said that Sevan indicated which company should handle his own oil deal valued at up to 3.5 million dollars.


"It's almost like having coupons of bonds or shares. You can sell those coupons to other people who are normal oil traders," said Claude Hankes-Drielsma, a British adviser to the Iraq Governing Council.


Sevan has denied the accusations, which came a day before the UN Security Council is set to give its backing for an investigation into alleged fraud and corruption in the program led by former US Federal Reserve (news - web sites) chairman Paul Volcker.


Sevan has been on vacation in Australia since the scandal broke.


"Tomorrow we will officially announce the independent inquiry into the oil-for-food program. An important aspect of the panel's work is to thoroughly investigate allegations against any UN officials," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in response to the ABC report.


UN officials said they did not know the identities of the other two officials mentioned in the report. They were not named by ABC.


The United Nations (news - web sites) has been struggling to contain a mounting scandal over the now defunct oil-for-food program, which comes at a sensitive time as the world body prepares to take on a central role in Iraq's political future.


What started out in 1996 as a humanitarian effort to help ease the effects of international sanctions on ordinary Iraqis evolved into a complex bureaucracy that oversaw 100 billion dollars in trade contracts.


Saddam's regime was put under sanctions after invading Kuwait in 1990, and the program allowed Baghdad to sell oil to buy food and other essential humanitarian supplies.


But by the time oil-for-food was closed last year after Saddam's ouster, an alleged system of kickbacks, fraud and inflated cost figures had developed that critics say allowed officials and friends of the regime to profit. US officials told ABC the lost money could amount to five billion dollars.


In January, Iraq's Al-Mada newspaper published a list of hundreds of individuals alleged to have been involved, including Sevan. The allegations have since intensified under the probing of western journalists.


The list included the names of more than 270 people, political organizations and religious figures from more than 40 countries -- including Britain, Canada, France, Russia, the United States and several Arab countries -- whom it said received free crude oil.

[dude1394]

Iranian Nuke

Teheran: World must accept Iran into nuclear club
By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi: The world has to recognize Iran as an irreversible member of the nuclear club

Iran's top diplomat said Saturday the country won't accept any new internationally imposed obligations regarding its nuclear program and that the world must recognize Iran as a nuclear-capable nation.

"We won't accept any new obligations," Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told reporters, suggesting a toughening of Iran's position two days before the 35-nation board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, meets to discuss Iran's nuclear program.

"Iran has a high technical capability and has to be recognized by the international community as a member of the nuclear club," Kharrazi said at a press conference. "This is an irreversible path."

..... (more...