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Two days after the US president announced his missile defence
programme on May 1st the US lost its bid to retain its seats in two important UN
institutions namely, The UN Human Rights Commission and the International
Narcotics Control Bureau. In the UNHRC France Austria and Sweden edged out the
US garnering more votes than the US out of a total of 53 member countries. In
the INCB the US was voted out and six other countries, including Iran and India,
were elected. In both the institutions the voting was secret compounding the US
exasperation as it became difficult to know who voted whom. The US State
Department was stunned by the results as more than 43 countries had pledged to
vote for the US candidate in the UNHRC but it could only get 29. All the three
elected candidates were from Europe with France (52), Austria (41) and Sweden
(32) outdoing the US.
The US officials are down discussing the vote results in
these UN bodies. Unofficially, they are blaming the European countries for
working clandestinely against the US. Twice bitten, the US is out to take
revenge on the UN. The US Senate has withheld hundreds of millions of dollars it
owed to the UN to punish it for daring to ‘disturb the Lion’. The UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan consoled the US leaders by saying that he
understood their "frustration, surprise and shock" at being not elected
to the UN bodies.
The US had been in these organisations ever since their
inception. In fact it had been the architect of these institutions and had been
utilising its clout to intimidate and impose sanctions on others. The case of
Iraq is for everyone to see where more than a million people have died due to
the unwarranted sanctions. Here is an account by Mr. Denis Halliday, the UN’s
Chief Relief Coordinator in Iraq, where he supervised the "oil-for-food"
program. Halliday resigned all his UN posts, including his position as Assistant
Secretary General, in protest of the brutal toll the sanctions are exacting on
the people of Iraq.
"There’s not a sense of mass death; it’s not a massacre, it’s
not a thing we’ve seen in other parts of the world. It’s just every day. And
every day people are dying all over the country, in isolation—not in groups, in
isolation. A baby here, a baby there, a child here, an elderly...so it’s hard to
get a tangible feel for it, but it pervades the whole country and the attitude
and the feeling of the Iraqi people.
I think it’s a program of genocide. I just don’t have a
better word."
The sanctions were imposed because the US wanted to isolate
Iraq and punish its people, as they had not heeded the US call to overthrow
Saddam Hussain’s regime. A million people die and no nation comes forward to
say: ‘put the US on trial for its inhuman crimes, its crimes against
humanity.’ It funded the Contra rebels of Nicaragua with the narcotic and
drug money but no nation raised a point to accuse the US rulers of trading in
drugs and using the money for illegal and unconstitutional activities against
other nations. It used the pretext of drug trade to arm and impart military
training to the reactionary governments of Peru, Columbia and Panama to crush
the revolutionary and anti-state struggles there, or, to change the governments
even by directly intervening militarily in many countries. All these years the
US has imposed its will on others. Now we see it being "kicked out" of
the institutions it had been using so wantonly. What the European
nations are upto? Thinking of replacing the US? Most probably. No doubt, the US
earned the ire of the people worldwide. No doubt, many governments in the world
resent the US over-lording and high-handedness. Pushing out the US is an
indicator as to this.
The Secretary General of the UN talks apologetically when he
expresses his wish that the US would again get his seat the next time the
election is held. The US defeat, he seems to regret, has come due to the
"number game" of votes because in an election you cannot tell "how the
people will vote" and "one has to respect the verdict of a democratic
election". He conveys the point that punishing the US was not on the agenda
and it was just a game of numbers. But the US knows it well. And when the most
ardent of advocates of democracy and democratic values in the world is pushed
out through elections its Senate refuses to clear its dues. The country
that teaches others to abide by democratic values is out to take revenge on a
"democratic decision".
A few days before the vote in the UN agencies the US pulled
itself out of the Kyoto Protocol to defy bindings on the emission of Green House
Gases (GHGs). The US is the biggest culprit in the world who pollutes the
environment with GHGs and contributes to the depletion of Ozone layer leading to
global warming but it refuses to take responsibility and make changes
accordingly.
The finance ministers of the Organisation of Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Europe have accused the Bush
administration of "undermining co-operation against global problems." The
newspapers have reported that there was a "collective outrage" against
the US for quitting the Kyoto protocol which sets the targets for reducing
greenhouse gas emissions.
Though the EU and the US are united when they come to deal
with the oppressed and backward countries the differences between them are
increasing. |
