Would you believe, here comes yet another scandal surrounding the UN Development Program, or UNDP, home to the North Korea Cash-for-Kim scandal, and flagship agency of the UN. In that case, the UNDP ejected the whistleblower, Artjon Shkurtaj, who called attention to the problems that led to the shutdown in March, 2007 of the UNDP office in North Korea. The UNDP then rejected the recommendation of the UN Ethics office that he be given whistleblower protection. The Cash-for-Kim saga entailed a great many sub-scandals, including counterfeit U.S. cash stored in the safe of the UNDP office in Pyongyang, UNDP transfers of money on behalf of other UN agencies to accounts linked to North Korea’s weapons proliferation network, and North Korea laundering funds through UNDP-related accounts. But let us fast-forward to the matter at hand –
– Where the setting is the UNDP in Somalia. Now, there are reports of another whistleblower, Ismail Ahmed, a British national, kicked out by the UNDP. Ahmed claims he was trying to sound alarms about UNDP support for a Somali money transfer company with what Reuters, in a dispatch about his claims, calls “suspected links to Islamic militants.” And what militants would those be? Let us browse on to the details on this case provided by the Government Accountability Project, or GAP, which in a dossier on its web site says that Ahmed’s allegations include information about UNDP support from 2003-2005 for a Somali remittance company, Dalsan, which collapsed in 2006, with $30 million disappearing in the process. The problems with Dalsan went beyond alleged fraud. GAP also notes that Dalsan was “co-founded by a former spokesman of Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya (AIAI), an organization placed on a list of terrorist organizations by the U.S. in 2001 and by the UN Sanctions Committee.” That would be the UN list of “Entities and other groups and undertakings associated with Al-Qaida.” GAP further notes that Dalsan’s chairman when it collapsed in 2006 was Abdilkadir Hashi Farah “Ayro,” who is “the younger brother of Aden Hashi ‘Ayro’ ” – who was a top al-Qaeda commander in Somalia, reportedly killed two weeks ago by an American missile strike.
The GAP dossier further alleges that the UNDP helped Dalsan obtain the release of frozen funds, get visas and travel documents for senior company officials, and secure the appointment of a Dalsan company officer as chairman of the Somali Financial Services Association (Europe), handling the rule-making for the Somali remittance industry. According to the GAP, all that fed into the set-up in which “the UNDP Somalia Office provided Dalsan critical support that may have helped the company to flout international regulations and commit a major fraud in which hundreds of Somali migrants and remittance recipients lost an estimated $30 million.”
What do the folks at the UNDP headquarters in NY have to say about this? According to Reuters, the UNDP is promising to look into this “completely” and “get to the bottom of this as thoroughly as possible.” To that end, reports Reuters, a UNDP spokesman says an investigation team will ”fly in mid-June to Nairobi, where the UNDP’s Somalia programme is based.” Hmmm. Mid-June. For the UNDP this is so urgent that it will take a month before a team can even head for Nairobi. Maybe they have to get in line behind the UNDP’s much-delayed investigation into its own handling of Cash-for-Kim and the attendant whistleblower issues. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon promised in January, 2007 that the UN would get to the bottom of that one right away, and 16 months later, we’re still waiting. Come to think of it, when Cash-for-Kim broke, Ban-Ki-Moon initially promised a world-wide audit of all UN systems — an idea he then scrapped the following week. Too bad. Ismail Ahmed’s allegations about UNDP support for a company linked to Al Qaeda might have surfaced sooner.
As it is, the questions proliferating around the UNDP, and what Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is calling its “immutable corruption,” become ever more urgent and disturbing. As the UN’s flagship agency, the UNDP now has an annual budget of $5 billion and disburses another $4 billion per year worldwide on behalf of other UN agencies and donor programs. In countries such as North Korea, Somalia, and beyond, what exactly has the UNDP been developing?
”The truth is that there will be no salvation for Lebanon until there is regime change in Iran. One might dicker over whether an end to the regime in Damascus might suffice, especially given the strong ties that inspire Hezbollah to decorate its rallies in Lebanon with posters of Syrian President Bashar Assad. But the epicenter of the problem; the prime boot camp where Hezbollah foot-soldiers go for indoctrination and terrorist training; the oil-rich moneybags and top dog among this transnational pack of thugs, is the regime of Iran. Until it goes, Hezbollah will have the resources, the safe havens, and the incentive to press on with its role as Iran’s proxy force on Israel’s northern border, and sharp stick in the eye of a White House that hailed and tried to support Lebanon’s 2005 Cedar Revolution.”
Immune to U.S. law, and now getting a $2 billion renovation of its headquarters where thousands of international staff work in NY, the UN acts as a gaping portal into America for who-knows-what. Among the culprits nabbed in recent years, in cases in which the evidence of wrong-doing was so rife that the UN Secretary-General took the rare and entirely discretionary action of waiving their immunity, there have been perpetrators of money laundering, bribery and visa scams on UN letterhead. On the broader front, there was the buzz of activity with which private agents of Saddam Hussein — hauling bags of cash – fringed the UN Oil-for-Food program, and of course such howlers as the UN Development Program quietly providing funds to fly officials of the North Korean government, business class, to its board meetings in NY — this being the same nuclear-proliferating North Korean government that was recently caught by U.S. Senate investigators laundering money in 2002 through UN-related accounts. Now, Fox 5 News takes an in-depth look at one of the UN security guards, video here. She says she’s done no wrong, and doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They report. What will the UN decide?
“We are North Korean defectors who staked our lives to escape from Kim’s cruel dictatorship. We will cooperate with those who are of one mind with us wherever they may be, whether in the north, in the south, or in a foreign land. We will, to our utmost, expand the anti-Kim Jong Il force within North Korea and form a united front with those in North Korea.”
That statement above is an excerpt from a declaration released by a group of North Korean defectors last week, during what has become an annual event in Washington: North Korea Freedom Week. Organized by Suzanne Scholte of the Defense Forum Foundation, in coordination with other NGOs, church groups, and scores of others, including North Korean defectors who fly in from South Korea to speak out about the totalitarian state of Kim Jong Il, this is a gathering at which the moving message, again and again, is that the real answer to North Korea is not to pamper and appease the murderous missile-selling nuclear-happy tyrant, but to look for any way to advance the cause of freedom in the world’s most repressive state — and especially to help the refugees who try to escape. This can’t be said too often, so I have said it again in my column in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
There is plenty more to be said — but for the moment, just a quick quiz. We know that hundreds of thousands have tried to escape North Korea, fleeing into China. We know that most are desperate, often ill, hungry, and in some cases starving. We know that if they get sent back to North Korea, they can end up in labor camps where people are starved and worked to death, and that some would-be defectors have been executed in public, as a deterrent to others. So, knowing all that, where has the world — or for that matter the well-heeled UN High Commissioner for Refugees — provided refugee camps to which North Koreans who risk their lives to cross the border can go for safe haven:
When Israel’s air strike last September destroyed Syria’s secret nuclear reactor, built with the help of North Korea to crank out plutonium on the Euphrates, Israel did more in one morning to advance the security of the free world than anything that has transpired in the past 17 years of feckless resolutions at the United Nations, or in the last three years at the Six-Party talks on North Korea. But who’s speaking up to say Thank You? Since the White House confirmed almost two weeks ago that what the Israelis hit was indeed a clandestine nuclear plant, built with no apparent purpose other than to make bombs, there has been a lot of earnest discussion and analysis — but if anyone outside the blogosphere has been saying a heartfelt thanks, it’s been so low-key I’ve missed it. On April 24th, the day the administration briefed the press, Bush welcomed Palestinian President Abbas to the White House, and told him “thank you” for coming. But in the White House press statement that day about the briefings on the reactor, Israel was referred to only by implication, as a sort of ghostly presence behind the passive voice; thus –”that reactor, which was damaged beyond repair on Sept. 6 of last year…”
Actually, it was Israelis who took the risk of flying into Syrian air defenses, and it was Israelis who took the risk of Syrian retaliation, and it was Israelis who ensured that Syria’s Yongbyon replica on the Euphrates would not become a factory supplying material to arm some of the world’s worst regimes with the world’s deadliest weapons. This was a blow on the side of the Free World, which is beset — like it or not — by a global war that is at core about who we are, and what we value. Seems like America should not be shy about telling allies like these, Thank You.
Have you ever noticed that whatever the crisis, the UN’s first response is to call for more money to go the UN? Never mind if the UN is already sitting on a hoard of unspent cash, meant to feed, clothe, shelter and help the victims of the crisis. Thus within days of the 2004 Asian tsunami did we see former UN humanitarian coordinator Jan Egeland slamming as “stingy” such bigtime UN sugar-daddies as the U.S., thus did former former Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his handpicked former head of the Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan, lament the funding shortfalls of an Iraq aid program in which even after all the billions in grafting, skimming and smuggling, the UN by 2003 still had more than $12 billion parked in the bank.
And now, it turns out that the World Food Program, while issuing dire warnings about a food crisis and the immediate need for at least $775 in extra funding, has been sitting on a cash hoard of more than $1.22 billion. Fox News has the story, complete with links to the UN audit containing this information, which was endorsed by WFP executive director Josette Sheeran just weeks before a conference at which she called for loads of fresh cash — part of the UN chorus on this issue in which Ban Ki-Moon as well has been calling for money, money, money and more money – claiming the WFP has only $18 million cash on hand.
And what does all the money, money, money really buy? Well, one thing it doesn’t buy is adequate oversight of how the UN spends all that money, money, money. For more in the never-ending series of UN scandals, see the latest from Inner-City Press on secret audits of the UN’s own investigative audit section. (Note: At the UN, even exposing the problem does not necessarily mean it will be addressed. These are the realms of jam tomorrow, never jam today). Seems like it would be a lot more helpful to the hungry people of the world if such donors as the U.S. were to simply cut out the money-stuffed UN as middleman, and give out bags of food and stacks of cash direct.
From the UN’s Durban II pow-wow in Geneva, and affiliated parts of the UN universe, the horrors just keep coming. Because you aren’t seeing anything about this on TV or in your morning newspaper (unless you subscribe to The New York Sun) I’m listing some more excellent sources of coverage on this Iran-entwined, Libya-chaired, U.S.-bashing, Israel-trashing, anti-democratic UN jamboree-in-the-making.
From Geneva-based UN Watch comes news today that the venue for the “Durban Review” conference itself may not be South Africa, but will likely be in Europe, possibly in Vienna, or Paris, or Geneva… plus updates on the elusive multi-million dollar budgetary plans for this shindig. It’s worth browsing through the UN Watch entries, not only on Durban II, but on the entire travesty that is the UN “Human Rights” Council.
And the Heritage Foundation has recently come out with more excellent background and analysis from Brett Schaefer on why the U.S. should explicitly boycott Durban II – or whatever this conference might best be renamed for a European host city, whether “Vile in Vienna,” “Poisonous in Paris,” or “Ghastly in Geneva.” Don’t miss the related video clip of Heritage’s Nile Gardiner explaining “Why We Should Be Suspicious of the UN,” and the paper by Steven Groves on the dangers of UN treaties that pretend to do things like fight racism, while doing nothing of the kind; instead serving as a vehicle to — you guessed it — attack America.
Following up on Monday’s post (just below) about the UN’s unseemly preparations in Geneva for next year’s Durban II conference — from the two-week planning meeting now underway in Geneva comes a video-clip that says it all. With Libya’s ambassador Najat Al-Hajjaji presiding, the planners are in theory hearing from NGOs. But at the UN, some NGO voices are more equal than others, and when Anne Bayefsky of the U.S.-based watchdog NGO www.eyeontheun.org tries to use her time to talk about genuine issues of anti-Semitism, Libya’s Al-Hajjaji — who has listened patiently to the likes of delegates from the regimes of Iran, China and Sudan — repeatedly interrupts, trying to shut her down.
It’s a four-minute video clip, in which the basic picture comes across pretty fast. To watch, scroll down to the section on “The Institue (sic) of Human Rights and the Holocaust” after clicking on this link.
At the same link, you can also scroll down to the video clips of statements — to which the Libyan Chair has no objections — from a delegate of Sudan (world genocide central) or China (where the government in the latest chapter of its long murderous rule has been killing protesters in Tibet). And if you scroll down in this link of Monday’s Durban II preparation session video clips, you will find the ambassador of Iran — who sits on the 20-member executive board now planning Durban II — bloviating on under the approving gaze of Libya, Pakistan (which has been speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference), and the rest of this gang now planning Durban II, which the UN has decided to fund in substantial part on the U.S. taxpayer dime (or more like a stack of almost 15 million dimes, since to bankroll Durban II, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon appears ready to hand over without protest at least $6.8 million from the UN core budget, which he is responsible for administering; and 22% of that budget is funded by the U.S.).
Why of course! At the United Nations, they’ve all been picked to lead the preparations for the UN’s “Durban Review” mega-conference against “racism,” scheduled for sometime in 2009. They all have seats on the 20-member preparatory committee which has just begun a two-week meeting in Geneva to plan for this Durban II pow-wow –which now looms as a reprise of the anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-American 2001 conference that was Durban I. This round, Libya is chairing the preparations. Cuba gets to send not one, but two officials to the planning party; one to plan and the other to act as rapporteur.
From a number of democracies, including Canada, the U.S. and Israel, there has been enough protest over this farce so that even UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour has interrupted her grieving over the 2007 execution of Saddam Hussein to note that there are concerns surrounding Durban II “which if not squarely confronted and resolved, may ultimately jeopardize a successful outcome of the process.”
Give us a break, Louise. The “process” here has patently nothing - zip, zero, nada — to do with fighting racism. It has everything to do with assorted thug states draping themselves in the mantle of the UN and abusing the vocabulary of genuine human rights, the better to attack democratic societies — starting with Israel and proceeding to the rest of the hit list maintained by the thugocracies of Libya, Iran, Cuba & Co. Thanks to UN sponsorship, their perverted “process” is thriving. Durban II is a gross insult to anyone genuinely fighting racism. In the propaganda wars of the UN, this conference is a coup for the club of thugs.
Would it be too much to ask that as plans roll ahead for the “Durban Review Conference” — as it is called –the U.S. State Department land a counter-punch on the side of truth, human dignity and genuine human rights? How about America introducing a resolution at the UN to give this conference and its preparatory committee an honest name — say, “Thugs R Us” –?
No doubt the UN would vote that down. But even that might just bring some much-needed clarity to this latest UN “process.”
Someday, North Korea’s government is going to go, and when that country busts open the headlines and TV news will be filled with questions about why the world did not do more to help people trying to escape from under the boot of Kim Jong Il. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have risked their lives — and many have died –trying to flee. Few help these refugees, few countries welcome them — fearing that to make it easy for them to flee might lead to an exodus of millions. The United Nations runs no sanctuaries for them. Perforce, the escape route for most North Koreans runs through China, but they find no safety there. The Chinese government refuses to grant them even safe passage to a third country. If they are caught, the policy is to send them back to North Korea. There, for the “crime” of trying to escape North Korea, some end up in labor camps where prisoners are starved and worked to death. Some are executed outright, in some cases as a public display meant to discourage others. North Korean refugees are the most disenfranchised people on earth.
Small numbers of these refugees do manage the dangerous journey through China, and almost all of them go on to South Korea — which as the chief haven has by its own official count received a pitiful total of just over 12,000 over the past half century. Today, in theory, they can also come to America. In 2004, President Bush signed an act mandating U.S. help for refugees from North Korea. This is not only a matter of compassion. It is also the best hope for a peaceful way of undermining the long, murderous, missile-peddling, bomb-building tyranny of the Kim dynasty — by reaching past the regime to offer the captive population a way out, and giving these refugees at least a chance to form a dissident diaspora that can speak up about the horrors of Kim’s government (something that has been discouraged for years by craven politicians in South Korea).
But passage to the U.S. remains elusive. Over the past four years, only a few dozen North Korean refugees have made it over the hurdles — geographic, life-threatening, and bureaucratic — to arrive in the U.S.
Which brings me to a small group of North Korean refugees right now being held in Thailand, waiting to leave for America. They are being held in a detention center for illegal immigrants from a number of countries, a place which according to sources I have spoken with usually has anywhere from 100-300 people crammed into one big room. In the heat of Bangkok, there is no air conditioning. They are required to pay a fine for having entered Thailand illegally — never mind what they are running from. Three of these refugees were allowed recently to go on to the U.S. for medical reasons. But the rest have all been in this detention center for more than a year, in some cases for more than two years — bound for the U.S., but waiting for the Thai and American authorities to grind through the process of letting them come to America.
They ask, “Why have we become prisoners here in a detention center where the United Nations is present?”
They write: “The Thai government puts the responsibility of the processing on the United States. The U.S. Embassy avoids any responsibility or fault by saying they have not received an approval from Thailand.”
They ask President Bush, who was moved to tears by the story of a North Korean defector, “When will we go to America?”
They say: “It is hard to understand why here in Thailand where it’s not North Korea nor China and where many Americans frequent, we still are watching our lives pass by, suffering in this refugee detention center.”
Yes, it is hard to understand. Whatever America’s national debates over immigration policy, what does it take for the White House — and the State Department — to understand? In dealing North Korea, both wise strategy and human decency would entail treating Kim Jong Il as the outcast, and helping the refugees from his regime. Instead, we seem to have arrived — and not for the first time — at the very opposite.
