What are the U.N.'s "10 Stories the World Should Hear More About"?
The U.N. sucks at a lot of stuff.
For example, it's terrible at using force to help innocent people. The U.N. hasn't stopped the current genocide in Darfur, nor did it stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
But before you go sticking additional pins in your Kofi Annan voodoo doll, remember that the U.N.'s charter makes it impossible to act with force unless all five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, U.K. and U.S.) can agree. Even when they do, the U.N. is constrained by its puny, $5 billion annual peacekeeping budget. The Pentagon spends more every five days.
That said, the U.N. also does quite a few things very, very well.
The U.N. feeds and vaccinates tens of millions of people annually. The U.N. Development Programme is the world's largest grantor of technical assistance to developing nations. The people who figured out that Iran hasn't been forthright about its nuclear program? They're part of the U.N. And remember how Saddam didn't gas U.S. forces that invaded in 2003? A none-too-small "thank you" should go out to the U.N.; it was their inspectors who found and destroyed Iraq's WMD stockpile between 1991 and 1998.
What else is the U.N. good at? Well, when it comes to stoking the paranoid fantasies of this country's right-wingers, only Hillary Clinton and Mexicans do a better job.
For example, check out JeremiahProject.com's "report" on how the U.N., along with a cabal of Jews, diplomats, Yale grads and, believe it or not, FEMA, are conspiring to take over the United States. Among the U.N.'s post-takeover goals: to assert "[c]ontrol over whether women are allowed to have babies." By that logic, U.N. = Uterus Nazi.
Perhaps the U.N.'s least-heralded contribution to humanity is its skill at gathering and distributing information about the economic, political, environmental and social condition of even the most remote countries. To understand what's going on outside of the U.S., you could do worse than to check out the U.N.'s news websites daily.
A week or so ago, while taking a break from YouTubin' and MySpacin', I happened across a short, engaging report on the U.N.'s website titled "10 Stories The World Should Know More About" (www.un.org/events/tenstories/). It's a list of important, ongoing news stories to which the news media pays little attention.
Here's the list, in convenient, gist-like form:
1) Liberia's struggle to rebuild after a savage, 14-year civil war left it near anarchy.
2) The worldwide exodus of 200 million migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, who fled their native countries in search of peace or a better living.
3) The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that killed 4 million people over the past five years, making it the deadliest world conflict since World War II.
4) The tens of thousands of Nepalese children being abducted and recruited by the country's Maoist rebel movement.
5) Southern Somalia sitting on the brink of a famine brought on by civil war and a persistent drought, with the potential to kill 12,000 people monthly.
6) The world's 9.2 million refugees remaining in exile for an average 17 years -- nearly twice as long as in 1993.
7) A shortage of aid, despite an international outpouring, that can sustain the long-term survival of victims of last year's South Asian earthquake.
8) The more than 1 million children jailed or imprisoned around the world, the majority of whom are discriminated minorities from poor families.
9) The scarcity of fresh water being just as likely to engender cooperation between two countries as it is to engender conflict, contrary to conventional wisdom.
10) Côte d'Ivoire, plagued by poverty and leaders stirring up ethnic hatred, approaching a Rwanda-like genocide.
Not surprisingly, the U.N.'s "10 Stories The World Should Hear More About" was hardly heard about. Hardly anyone has reported it.
Before I wrote this column, I typed the report's title into Google News and got eight hits. That's exactly 666 fewer hits than I got when I typed in "Brangelina."
