Meeting in Japan, the leaders of the G-7 industrial powers (plus Russia, with which President Clinton made it the G-8) are stymied over how to punish Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who is this month’s election-stealing nation-ruining violence-cultivating tyrant-in-the-news. Our leaders are bogged down in the usual default mode of urging UN sanctions, while the tyrant-of-the-month’s pals — in this case, the seven African rulers on hand to shake down the developed world for yet more aid – say no.
While they’re all having that fascinating off-the-shelf discussion, here’s one way the leaders of the democratic world could at least begin punishing Mugabe, with zero harm to anyone but Mugabe and his cronies. Launch a public campaign to kick Zimbabwe off the 36-member governing boards of two of the UN’s biggest aid agencies: UNICEF and the World Food Program. What Mugabe’s regime is doing with these seats in the first place is an intriguing question. Kicking him off would be a two-fer. It would take away some of the perks he still enjoys on the UN stage, and it would be at least one small step toward cleaning up the UN. If the Bush administration won’t raise the issue, Obama, McCain, whaddaya say?
At the G-8 meeting now underway in Japan, the talk is all about targets. Double aid to Africa. Funnel resources as directed under the UN’s 8 millennium development goals, to be met by the year 2015. Halve carbon emissions by the year 2050.
No wonder so many people are struggling. This isn’t how poor people get rich. This is how for much of the 20th century the Soviet Union and its satellites stayed poor. Back then, the labels were different. Moscow wasn’t slick enough to have millennium development goals. The politburo had Goskomstat issuing five year plans, setting productions targets, calculating inputs and rationing outputs — which resulted in an impoverished and oppressed population waiting in long lines for such luxuries as toilet paper. In the West, it was then the fashion in professional do-good circles to attack under the label of “capitalism” the vibrant all-American productivity now widely reviled under the proxy label of “carbon emissions.”
Real wealth comes from setting up fair rules of the game, and leaving people free to choose. If the G-8 countries want to work on that, we’re on our way to a better world for all. But on the current course, maybe we should just rename the G-8 the Grand Rationing Committee, and batten down for a shabbier world, in which amid all the doubling and halving and UN millennium goals, the only clear beneficiaries are the planners themselves.
No joke. In a terrific column on the seductive delusions of appeasement, Barry Rubin of Israel’s Gloria Center highlights the headline above, from an article published Dec. 21, 1924, in the New York Times. As Rubin notes, it sounds like satire. In fact, it sounds so much like satire that I double-checked in the Times archives. (Subscription only, but here it is). The Times described the paroled Hitler as “a much sadder and wiser man” expected to “retire to private life and return to Austria, the country of his birth.”
Rubin (author of a new book on “The Truth About Syria“) points out that the many concessions of today’s prevailing Western diplomacy reflect much the same mindset, that “the leaders of Hamas, Hizballah, Syria, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhoods, al-Qaida, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Sudan, etc., will no doubt be tamed, abandon public life, and go back to their homes.”
Nor has the Times changed its tune. Rubin quotes from a June 30th NYT editorial: “Few countries can afford the luxury of limiting their diplomacy to friendly countries and peace-loving parties.” (Note, just in case you missed it, Condi’s many carrots for Kim Jong Il reportedly include $2.5 million for the recent Potemkin show of blowing up the cooling tower at the aging Yongbyon reactor).
Were hypocrisy an Olympic sport, UNICEF would qualify for the top ranks of the UN’s star-studded team. Recently, UNICEF cut all ties to an Israeli businessman, Lev Leviev, because of what Reuters described as his “suspected involvement” in building settlements on the West Bank. Now the Gulf News reports that following UNICEF’s blacklisting of Leviev, the Arab League is considering going beyond its usual bigotry in boycotting all direct business with Israel, and may blacklist all Leviev’s companies, as well as his agent in the United Arab Emirates.
Why did UNICEF get into this game? According to Reuters, UNICEF spokesman Chris de Bono explained that blackisting Leviev is supposed to be all about limiting UNICEF’s partners and donors to folks who are “as non-controversial as possible.”
Oh really? That’s fascinating, coming from UNICEF, where the 36-member executive board — which is its governing body — currently includes the regimes of Iran, Burma and Zimbabwe.
These despotisms (let’s say it again — UNICEF board members Iran, Burma and Zimbabwe) are all in flagrant violation of a whole array of the UN’s own resolutions, on matters as grave as nuclear proliferation and obscene violations of basic human rights. Their collective activities in very recent times have included slaughtering peaceful dissidents, torturing and jailing political opponents, plundering their own countries, blocking and manipulating UN emergency relief efforts, rigging elections, training and supporting terrorists and engaging in the illicit pursuit of nuclear bombs — accompanied by gloating threats to obliterate a nearby state.
Apparently — since all three are still listed as members of the board — UNICEF does not regard the governments of Iran, Burma and Zimbabwe as controversial. Either that, or UNICEF has two different standards: One that entails the blacklisting of Israeli would-be supporters that UNICEF has decided are not “as non-controversial as possible”; and another that provides seats on UNICEF’s governing board for some of the world’s nastiest tyrannies. That leaves us with two questions. Why on earth would Lev Leviev, or anyone else in the democratic world, want to support UNICEF at all? And who on the UNICEF governing board is busy deciding what is controversial, and what is not?
Almost five years after Kofi Annan lauded the UN Oil-for-Food program while declaring it over and done with, the vast ensuing scandal continues to ooze and bubble through the U.S. courts. With the criminal proscutions of recent years winding down, the Government of Iraq has just filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court againt dozens of private players, from a number of countries, for alleged corruption under Oil-for-Food.
For private players now doing business with other UN relief programs that benefit corrupt tyrants — say, Kim Jong Il, in North Korea — this lawsuit might just raise some colorful questions about the wisdom of assuming that because the UN enables it, it must be all right. On the contrary, unless the Secretary-General deigns to waive immunity, the UN and its staff don’t have to worry about being hauled into court. With its privileges and immunities, the UN deflects legal remedies like water off a greased pig’s back.
So, the incentives are for the UN to run rotten programs (because it can), while private players (or at least those who operate in countries with genuine rule of law) get stuck holding the bag. So, while we wait for more details of this Iraqi lawsuit to emerge, I start to wonder: What might happen if Kim Jong Il were to fall, and some of those currently hungry and oppressed North Koreans were to start combing through the leftover Pyongyang records? What would they conclude about how much UN aid actually went to the North Korean people, and how much helped sustain and pamper the regime of Kim Jong Il – and who among the private contractors recruited for these projects did handsomely out of the deal? And what might those North Koreans try to do about it?
