United Nations failed the world: Yet questions Sri Lanka - Part II

Blackmail smaller nations

Continued from yesterday

Latheef FAROOK

The screams and tears for help of innocent Muslim men who were slaughtered like animals in the presence of their family members never melted the hearts of Boutros Boutros Ghali and the US and European leaders.

Almost a week long Srebrenica massacre of approximately 10,000 Muslim men and boys and the torture, rape, and killing of many women and children, from July 12 through July 18, in and near the UN declared ‘safe area’ remains one of the most horrifying events in recent European history

Later admitting UN complicity UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan reiterated that Srebrenica massacre would haunt the world body forever. The 400 Dutch troops who were guarding Srebrenica’s Muslim victims looked the other way, while the UN rejected appeals for air strikes by NATO to halt their advance.

“The victims had put their trust in international protection. But we, the international community, let them down”, said a message from European Union Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana. “This was a colossal, collective and shameful failure”.

Anglo-American war on Iraq and UN

Once again, exploiting the September 11 events George Bush Junior turned to the UN resolutions to legitimize his well planned evil designs first on Afghanistan, and then to invade Iraq. Even in the case of these aggressions, the US managed to get the relevant UN resolutions passed simply by blackmailing smaller nations, while most Arab regimes struck under-the-table deals with the US and turned a blind eye leaving their Afghan and Iraqi brothers to face the missiles and bombs.

Mahathir Mohamed challenged the credibility of the UN, condemned the selective use of the veto power in the Security Council, and warned the world body against the resurgence of imperialism and ‘puppet regimes’.

Striking at the very heart of the UN problem, Mahathir called for the resignation of Secretary-General Kofi Annan for failing to assert himself to prevent the US invasion of Iraq. The UN’s organs had been “cut out, dissected and reshaped, so they may perform the way the puppet masters want”, said Mahathir, who pointed out that “the uni-polar world dominated by a democratic nation is leading the world to economic chaos, political anarchy, uncertainty and fear”.

Iraq was almost a developed country with modern infrastructure and the people enjoyed a very high standard of living. It was the United Nations which legalised Bush-Blair invasion which turned Iraq today into a virtually wasteland helping Western oil companies loot its oil wealth like vultures preying on the dead. The entire country is in ruins. Its health, education, water, electricity and others services were crippled. Around 1.4 million innocent Iraqis were killed, more than two million live in refugee camps in neighbouring countries and more than four million became refugees in their own country. Rape of innocent Iraqi women and torture of men, women and the aged alike remain common knowledge.

Bush bombed, incinerated and wiped out the city of Fallujah during the Holy Month of Ramadan and obliterates its people to bring them and their city of around 300,000 to its knees.

The savagery unleashed was unprecedented. American Forces dropped even cluster bombs and used phosphorous weapons that caused severe burns in the military’s most intense urban fighting since the days of Vietnam. Within ten days Fallujah has been laid waste, a hell on earth of shattered bodies and destroyed buildings while the city entered history as the place where US imperialism carried out a crime of immense proportions. The head of Turkey’s Parliamentary Human Rights Committee said this genocide surpassed those of Pharaoh, Hitler and Mussolini.

Summing up George Bush’s savagery, a Western reporter observed as follows: “some districts reeked from the sickening odour of rotting flesh, a stench too powerful to be swept away by a brisk breeze coming in from the sandy plain surrounding the city forty miles West of Baghdad. A week of ground combat by US and Iraqi surrogates, supported by tanks and attack helicopters, added to the destruction in a city where the homes and businesses for about 300,000 people are packed into an area, a little less than two miles wide and a little more than two miles long... cats and dogs scamper along streets littered with bricks, broken glass, toppled light poles, downed power lines, twisted traffic barriers and spent cartridges.

Walls are full of bullet holes. US troops have blown holes in walls and knocked down doors to search homes and shops. Dead Iraqis still lay out in the open’.

This crime was committed by George Bush and Tony Blair in a war legalised by the United Nations.

What has the UN done to stop the barbarity in Afghanistan which the US invaded in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and turned this impoverished nation into a killing field. This barbarity continues under vs President Barrack Obama who had extended this savagery to Pakistan where his drones and American sponsored mercenary private armies such as Blackwater fast turning this country yet another killing field.

On top of this the UN Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone on the Israeli military strikes in Gaza, from December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009, accused Israel of committing war crimes.

The mission found that, in the lead up to the Israeli military assault on Gaza, Israel imposed a blockade amounting to collective punishment and carried out a systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation of the Gaza Strip.

During the Israeli military operation, code-named 'Operation Cast Lead,' houses, factories, wells, schools, hospitals, police stations and other public buildings were destroyed. More than 1,400 people were killed during the military operation.

Here in our own country the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon flew all the way from New York to look into the plight of around 280,000 IDPs. Yet he never thought it fit to spend ten minutes to see the plight of more than 100,000 Northern Muslims driven out at gun point within two hours and living in and around Puttalam in appalling conditions for more than two decades. In fact on his way back home he couldn't find time even to see more than three and half million refugees in the Swat Valley in Pakistan.

The irony is that this very same United Nations plans to question Sri Lankan Government of the circumstances that led to the death of three senior LTTE cadres and their families. Those killed were not priests preaching, but leaders of the LTTE which turned the island into a killing field and ethnic cleansed the entire Muslim community from North.

Concluded