United Nations a waste of money & corrupt

UNITED NATIONS GOOD OR BAD

Don't donate any money for NGO's

(Non-Government-Organisatons) like World Vision, Unicef

Cambodia, for example has over 650 different Organisations - world record. That's how NGO's live:

They're driving brand-new Landcruisers (+$US50 000) - paid by the organisation & you.
NGO's living rent-free in big, luxurious houses - paid by the organisations & you.
NGO'S earning $US10 000 and more per months for nothing - taxfree of course
They're having cooks, drivers, gardeners, maids, security - paid by the organisations / you
At nighttime you'll see them in expensive restaurants, discos and brothels
NGO's living a jet-set luxury style - from your donated money!
NGO UN MEETINGS: delegates in Thailand known to get chits for accommodation then staying at relatives homes!
Don't donate any money for Charities - you have been warned!
The Uniter nations is a total wrought for those who work in the Organisation
Thais knowing this: There aren't any independent foreign NGO\'S working in Thailand!

UNITED NATIONS IS JUST A

WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY

By Toby Poston, BBC News business reporter: Ashraf Ghani: "More than 90% of the more than $1bn that was spent on about 400 UN projects in Afghanistan in 2002 was a waste of money" When he says millions of dollars worth of aid money is being wasted, both donor nations and aid agencies take note. Complete waste of money. Mr Ghani believes the Afghan government could build a school for about $40,000 (£23,000), a fraction of the $250,000 cost racked up when one international aid agency took on the task of delivering 500 schools.The difference would arise because the Afghan government would use locally hired contractors, while the aid agency spent 80% of its funds on hiring external technical assistants, he explains.Another case of money being wasted was the reconstruction of the road between Kandahar and the capital Kabul, which the government estimated would cost $35m.It was eventually built by USAID and ended up costing more than $190m, Mr Ghani says.Moreover, these are not isolated cases, Mr Ghani insists, as he estimates that more than 90% of the more than $1bn that was spent on about 400 UN projects in Afghanistan in 2002 was a waste of money.

More harm than good But the billions of dollars of aid pumped into Afghanistan over the past four years have not merely been wasted; the cash injections might even be doing more harm than good, Mr Ghani suggests

Lucrative work ODI workers on the ground say Mr Ghani has a point.They say Afghanistan is brimming with expensive foreign contractors and consultants who are often duplicating or replacing work that could be carried out by the government."There is a tendency for UN agencies and non-government organisations to rush in with thousands of small projects, each requiring international staff and drivers," says Clare Lockhart, a research fellow at the ODI and a former advisor to the Afghan finance ministry.These experts cost far more in overheads like living expenses and repatriation costs than in actual fees for their services, but with further lucrative work in the pipeline, it is not in their interests to pass on their skills to their Afghan counterparts, Ms Lockhart explains.

Halliburton and other U.S. contractors are being paid at least $1.9 billion from Iraqi funds under an arrangement set by the U.S.-led occupation authority, according to a review of documents and interviews with government agencies, companies and auditors.

Most of the money is for two controversial deals that originally had been financed with money approved by the U.S. Congress but later shifted to Iraqi funds governed by fewer restrictions and less rigorous oversight.

We talk about it a lot – the United Nations is corrupt, and probably is a source of much anti-American sentiment around the world. We would propose that we withhold funding from the United Nations until they implement the reforms that have been discussed so many times here in Washington. Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina

FOOD FOR OIL JOKE:

Few outside U.N. circles have heard of IHC Services, a private company that for years was one of hundreds of firms selling goods and services to the U.N. As a rule, the U.N. keeps secret most details of these deals. But scandals involving IHC have begun lifting the lid on how the U.N. handles taxpayers' money.More than 4,500 companies took part in the United Nations oil-for-food program and more than half of them paid illegal surcharges and kickbacks to Saddam Hussein, according to the independent committee investigating the program.The country with the most companies involved in the program was Russia, followed by France, the committee says in a report to be released Thursday. The inquiry was led by Paul A. Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.The IHC story suggests that the U.N.'s failures of governance are not confined to such special projects as the Oil for Food program. If anything, Oil for Food looks more and more like a large outcropping of U.N. business as usual. And as with Oil for Food, which ran from December 1996 until the fall of Saddam in 2003, the timeline of IHC business with the U.N. starts in December 1996. That was the month before Kofi Annan took over as secretary-general, and it is on his watch that the IHC-U.N. tale has unfolded. The U.N. itself carries a large part of this responsibility and needs reform.

Srebrenica & the UN stood By:

The fall of the town of Srebrenica and its environs to Bosnian Serb forces in early July 1995 made a mockery of the international community’s professed commitment to safeguard regions it declared to be “safe areas” and placed under United Nations protection in 1993. United Nations peacekeeping officials were unwilling to heed requests for support from their own forces stationed within the enclave, thus allowing Bosnian Serb forces to easily overrun it and—without interference from U.N. soldiers—to carry out systematic, mass executions of hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilian men and boys and to terrorize, rape, beat, execute, rob and otherwise abuse civilians being deported from the area. Bosnian Serb soldiers engaged in extrajudicial executions as Dutch U.N. troops looked on.The U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, the World Conference on Human Rights, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have all decried the atrocities in Bosnia-Hercegovina as genocide. Yet the international community has failed to fulfill its moral and legal duty to prevent genocide and to insist that those who commit acts of genocide, as well as those responsible for parallel war crimes and crimes against humanity, be brought to justice.

Kofi Annan's son Kojo joined in the Circus with his Father

Kofi Annan's son Kojo - who had a $30,000-a-year job but managed to find a spare quarter-million dollars sitting around to invest in a Swiss football club - has been under investigation for some time for his alleged ties to the Oil-for-Food programme. But the investigators have now broadened their sights to include Kofi's brother Kobina Annan, the Ghanaian ambassador to Morocco, who has ties to a businessman behind several of the entities involved in the scandal - one Michael Wilson, the son of the former Ghanaian ambassador to Switzerland and a childhood friend of young Kojo. Mr Wilson is currently being investigated for suspected bribery over a $50 million contract to renovate the Geneva offices of the UN World Intellectual Property Organisation. The actual head of the Oil-for-Food racket, Kofi sidekick Benon Sevan, has resigned, having hitherto insisted that a mysterious six-figure sum in his bank account was a gift from his elderly aunt, a lady of modest means who lived in a two-room flat back in Cyprus. Paul Volcker's investigators had planned to confirm with auntie her nephew's version of events, but unfortunately she fell down an elevator shaft and died. It now seems likely that the windfall had less to do with Mr Sevan's late aunt and more to do with his soliciting of oil allocations for another company.

Meanwhile, Alexander Yakovlev, a senior procurement officer for UN "peacekeeping" missions - and, if you're on a UN mission in Africa, no, he can't fix you up with a hot-looking eight-year-old from the local village; Mr Yakovlev apparently dealt with the non-child-sex aspects of UN procuring - anyway, Mr Yakovlev salted away just shy of a million bucks in kickbacks in his account in Antigua. He's just been arrested in New York and pleaded guilty to money laundering, wire fraud, etc.

Despite the current investigations into his brother, his son, his son's best friend, his former chief of staff, his procurement officer and the executive director of the UN's biggest ever programme, the Secretary-General insists he remains committed to staying on and tackling the important work of "reforming" the UN.

Unfortunately, his Executive Co-Ordinator for United Nations Reform has also had to resign. Officially, Maurice Strong, Under-Secretary-General, godfather of the Kyoto treaty and chief UN negotiator on North Korea, resigned because he'd put his step-daughter on the payroll - she's also quit - and because of his ties to Tongsun Park, a Korean businessman charged by the US Attorney's office with taking millions of dollars from Saddam to act as an unregistered foreign agent for Iraq. Mr Park allegedly invested a million of those Saddamite greenbacks in a business of Under-Secretary-General Strong's son - a now bankrupt Canadian petroleum company.

Air Harbour Technologies

By happy coincidence, Under-Secretary-General Strong and Kojo Annan were both appointed, on the same day, to the board of a company called Air Harbour Technologies, a business registered in the Isle of Man and whose directors also included Michael Wilson, the guy under investigation for the UN office renovation contract in Geneva. It's a small world, at least at the UN. AHT was wholly owned by the son of Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister. Yamani Jnr was putting together a $60 million oil deal with Saddam, and seemed to think the presence of UN officials and offspring on his board might help him.

But not to worry. To demonstrate his ongoing commitment to "reform", Kofi Annan has now put his Deputy- Secretary-General, Louise Frechette, another Canadian, in charge of the "reform agenda". In a February report by Mr Volcker's committee, Mme Frechette is said to have helped Mr Sevan block efforts to bring details of the Oil-for-Food boondoggle before the Security Council.

How do we know all the above? We only know because the US invaded Iraq and the Baathists skedaddled out of town leaving copious amounts of paperwork relating to the Baghdad end of Oil-for-Fraud, since when Claudia Rosett and a few other dogged journalists have been systematically unstitching the intricate web of family and business relationships around the UN's operations.

You'd think that by now respect for the UN would be plummeting faster than Benon Sevan's auntie down that lift shaft. After all, these aren't peripheral figures or minor departments. They reach right into the heart of UN policy on two of the critical issues of the day - Iraq and North Korea - or four, if you're one of those Guardian types who's hot for Kyoto and peacekeeping. Most of the Ghanaian diplomatic corps and their progeny seem to have directorships at companies with UN contracts and/or Saddamite oil options. I had no idea being a Ghanaian ambassador's son opened so many doors, and nor did they till Kofi ascended to his present eminence.

The other day I sat behind a car from Massachusetts bearing the bumper-sticker "War is Never the Answer". Well, it depends on the question. In this case, without the war, we wouldn't even be asking the questions. Without the paper trail in Baghdad, who would have mustered the will to look into Oil-for-Food and see it through to the point where it's brought down a clutch of career UN bigwigs? They're no great loss to humanity: Mr Strong's "legacy", the Kyoto treaty, is already seen as a joke that's likely to crash the economies of those few countries who've made the mistake of taking it seriously (New Zealand), and, as for his North Korean outreach, we should be grateful it ended before a full-fledged Kim Jong-Il Nukes-for-Food programme was up and running.

But this is how the transnational jet set works, and those sensitive flowers who don't have the stomach to look under the rock could at least do us the favour of ceasing to bleat about, in Clare Short's marvellously loopy phrase, the UN's "moral authority". In The Times the other day, Matthew Parris demanded to know whether I could now admit the Iraq war had been a mistake. No. I'm still in favour of it 100 per cent - and these rare shafts of light on the sewers of transnationalism are merely one more benefit. Source Uk Telegraph

[ Read more UN Aid workers abuse ]

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