Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Disability and the UN System

... ha ha ha, there was no need to invent this title. The UN - so far! - is a forum of the disabled. {Anyone to sue me? You're welcome!) Imagine: Libya f. e. amongst members of the Human Rights Council. Thankfully there's no need of a comment. Alfred E. Neuman years ago put it nicely.
"The U.N. is a place where governments opposed to free speech demand to be heard!"

6 comments:

  1. and yet... I am glad it exists.

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  2. Has the United Nations ever done and stopped anything when something horrifying happens somewhere in the world?

    Just read an article about the world we live in. Not just Israel and Gaza. It mentions China, killing 1/2 millions Tibetans. Sri Lanka, killing 25,000 of its own civilians. Iran, torturing and murdering its own dissidents. Turkey, killing 30,000 to 40,000 Kurds in the last 30 years, and occupying North Cyprus. Sudan, and 200,000 people dead in Darfur. Russia, and the Chechens. And Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the Congo. Iraq with Saddam Hussein, and since.

    Would anything worse happens if UN isn't there? I don't know...I'm asking?

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  3. Andrew,
    when I was young - once in the past millennium - I pinned great hopes into this institution. Nowadays I am not sure if I should feel glad it exists.
    Still, I hope the concept is improvable; that's why I added the '- so far -'.

    Claudia,
    ... and I do just add Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ruanda, Srebrenica and - the so-called Congo Crisis (Catanga_War, Lumumba, the death of Dag Hammarskjöld.
    I was seven/eight years old then and I did not know that this was the year I became a thinking individually thinking individiual.

    You see, for many months I had voluntary (?!) included the 'poor people of Catanga' in my night-prayer.
    See?! I prayed.
    And praying for the 'poor people' of Catanga was result of what I had heard when my parents were discussing / commenting what they thought had been objective and unfiltered news.
    Strange, hm. From this time onwards I refused to/did not pray.

    Ha ha, and still I did not let myself get involved in what (in German) is called the 68-er Bewegung.
    Probably I considered them as disabled as the UN? :)

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  4. Thank you for the extra links.

    Prayers are not always answered instantly. And sometimes not even when the praying people are still alive.

    I want to believe also that, with the right people, some sort of system would work...where oppression and killing would not be accepted in silence...where justice would prevail, and world peace be possible.

    But.......

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  5. Well, err..., UNHCR does quite a few good things, amongst others.

    BP

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  6. Bertus - It does? Really? Thank you for a small ray of light in the darkness which surrounds us.

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