Say Anything Blog

Why is the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story still all over the headlines while the globe's foremost organization for world peace is shrouded in scandal and corruption?

The United Nations has abandoned the North Korean refugees it promised to help with its Convention on Refugees. These people are still suffering under the tyrannical dictatorship of the Jong regime. They're starving and being forced into slavery. In some instances they've even been the guinea pigs on which chemical and biological weapons have been tested.

The UN looked the other way while horrible human rights atrocities were being committed in Zimbabwe a few years ago. This type of behavior from the UN has continued to this day when the Sudan was allowed to keep its seat on the human rights council despite on-going ethnic cleansing in that country.

The UN's Oil-For-Food program was supposed to be a way to allow Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil in order to finance the purchase of food and other humanitarian supplies. Want to know what really happened? $5 billion dollars found its way into Saddam's private bank account while 270 prominent foreign officials got the right to purchase oil from Iraq at cut-rate prices. And guess who won the 6 billion-British-pound contract for monitoring the oil-for-food program? Sutton Investments, a client of consultant Kojo Annan who just happens to be UN Secretary Kofi Annan's son.

In Kosovo UN workers and soldiers (with some help from their NATO counterparts) are currently single handedly causing the illicit prostitution trade there to flourish. And that's not the only sex scandal the UN is involved in right now according to The Independent:

Teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to the stop their suffering.

The Independent has found that mothers as young as 13 - the victims of multiple rape by militiamen - can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers.

Testimony from girls and aid workers in the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp in Bunia, in the north-east corner of Congo, claims that every night teenage girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining UN compound to sell their bodies to Moroccan and Uruguayan soldiers.

The trade, which according to one victim results in a banana or a cake to feed to her infant son, is taking place despite a pledge by the UN to adopt a "zero tolerance" attitude to cases of sexual misconduct by those representing the organisation.

You're reading that right. In order to secure food from UN "humanitarian" workers teenaged rape victims must proffer sexual favors as payment.

What American soldiers did in Abu Ghraib was bad. Really bad. But when one compares the intensive media coverage dedicated to Abu Ghraib to the coverage dedicated to the UN's many indiscretions (which are far, far worse than anything done by American soldiers in Iraq) you have to wonder. Why is it so easy for the international press to turn a searching eye to American scandals and a blind eye to UN scandals?