The founders of the United Nations (UN) will be turning in their graves. Their high minded aspirations for the organisation are in the gutter.

A UN so called ‘peace conference’ has now started in Switzerland to ‘pretend’ to deal with the horrific civil war in Syria. The dreadful slaughter of combatants, adult civilians, children and babies, has been going on for 3 years now and continues at a pace; with perhaps  ten million people’s lives destroyed, their homes lost, livelihoods extinct, food & water sparse, and with nowhere safe to go. Some seven million of the estimated 23 million population, including five million women & children, fled or displaced. It is the UN who has allowed the Syrian situation to escalate to this stage.

This gathering of the representatives of the Syrian regime and their opponents in Geneva will only provide a platform for vitriolic speeches, abuse allegations, threats, and bile – but it will achieve in a word, NOTHING. Why is that? Because the UN is increasingly impotent, a weak, toothless, ineffective, talking shop, full of piss takers, only there to promote and look after the self interests of their own sycophantic rulers and third rate countries. A long way off from the lofty ideals of a caring gathering of nations which would look after the weak and save the World isn’t it?

The UN has repeatedly stood by, while numerous evil tyrants and vile dictators have run amok. It has stood aside while millions of the World’s human race. men women & children, have been repeatedly disenfranchised, abused, displaced, starved, deprived of water, decimated by illness, ravaged by disease, imprisoned, raped, tortured, killed, massacred, gassed – often by the State or their own so called rulers.

It has watched while civil wars and armed conflicts have ravaged around whole continents. It has closed its eyes while untold amounts of weapons and materials, including guns, grenades, explosives, bombs, chemical weapons, tanks, aircraft, drones, missiles, boats, ships, and submarines, have been trafficked by manufacturers and third parties to warring factions to fuel conflicts – simply to make massive amounts of money or promote other selfish or racial interests. It has been transfixed while country after country has been given the means and so has acquired weapons of mass destruction – which you can be of no doubt will inevitably lead to the eventual obliteration of our wonderful lovely World.

Oh yes, the current Syrian conflict is a case in point  – but only the ‘latest’ one, and not by a long chalk a unique or special example.  The so called President – the ‘unelected’ Bashar al-Assad – heads a regime that rates as one of the most horrific in the history of mankind (and there have been quite a few!).

The regime now has destroyed the country, murdered some hundred & fifty thousand of its own people, committed outrageous war crimes, snipper’d, bombed, strafed, deployed chemical weapons against civilians (as well as the opposition combatants), starved people by blockade, imprisoned & tortured tens of thousands, conducted mass killings– all in an attempt to cling onto power, which without doubt will turn out to be ‘all in vain’. No one seems ever to ask Assad what right he has still to be in power; the point is that he has NO right,– he basically inherited the presidency and a regime in 2000 from his dead father, Hafez al-Assad, who had himself seized power by coup some 30 years previously.

There is a saying “what is worse than a strong Ruler? The answer is “a weak Ruler”. Assad is the latter. He is controlled by others, including strong members of his family (particularly his mother, and brother Maher an army Commander), the  Baath party, and the Generals in the Secret Service and Military. He heads, and is responsible for, an organisation that commits atrocities galore without compunction or conscience. The UN looks the other way, pretending nothing is wrong, and it will all get sorted without direct intervention. Some chance of that.

Like in all such cases of inaction by the UN, other caring nations are forced to step up to the mark – notably the USA, France, and Britain (but their own peoples have now become ‘war weary’). The USA threat of force was the only reason that Russia backed-off, and the UN are currently removing (or trying to) chemical weapons from Syria

Through no fault of his own, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is unfortunately a powerless icon. He has said that Assad has committed many crimes against humanity, but despite his international role he can actually DO nothing, and even gets treated with disrespect at the Syrian Geneva gathering.

You literally get away with murder when you are a major power, or have a ‘protector’ at the UN. For instance, you get the Americans (and Brits) who allow the Israelis to flout UN Security Council directives and indeed to continue to cruelly enslave a people and belligerently occupy other territories after some 50 years. You get the Chinese who argue and threaten their veto to thwart UN interventions, including peace keeping in Macedonia, stopping deployment of ceasefire observers in the Yom Kippur War & Guatemala conflict, and even on sanctions against Zimbabwe, and China themselves are able to occupy and persecute the inhabitants of Tibet (since 1950). The Russians can also be relied upon to oppose UN action and frustrate effective responses to urgent situations – as they did on Bosnia, in their own involvement in the Georgian conflict, and are doing so now for their 60 year old Syrian friends (in conjunction with China).

[Vetoes actually ‘used’ in the Security Council to prevent UN action (by mid 2012):

Russia    127    USA       83       UK    32     France      18     China         9]

Inaction is a byword at the UN; for example? The genocide carried out in Rwanda  – a 100 day mass slaughter of half a million Tutsis by Hutus in 1994; the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia – in 1995 Bosnian Serbs killed about ten thousand men & boys, apart from the rapes & sexual assaults, tortures, beatings, robberies, and imprisonments; the oppression and twenty thousand killings in South Africa under apartheid; the murderous suppression of student dissenters by the Chinese in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – many hundreds or even perhaps three thousand killed; and not to forget the previous ‘revolution’ of 2011 in Libya to oust Colonel Gaddafi – possibly fifteen thousand combatants dead or missing, and a further ten thousand civilians as well. Just to name some few horrible events.

 

 

[The United Nations was actually formed by the Allies in 1942 during World War II. US President Roosevelt & UK Premier Churchill being the prime proponents – in the aftermath of the war some fifty nations approved a formal Charter in 1945. The ‘unachieved’ goal of the UN was to ACT to prevent future conflicts between nations, stop further wars, and keep the peace. However, it simply then developed into hostile camps, and now is reduced to a ’frustrated’ but spent force, unable to cooperate as an organization to achieve world peace. There are now 193 Members of the United Nations General Assembly.

Before the days of the UN, an organisation called the ‘League of Nations’ was formed at a Paris conference after WWI, with a ‘principle’ mission to maintain world peace! It lasted nearly thirty years, but was beset by the same problems as the UN – nations’ vested interests. World War II followed].