UN Tomfoolery
UN Classifies rape a ‘war tactic’
A recent BBC News article outlined how the UN Security Council had voted unanimously to classify rape as a weapon of war.
Does that sound odd to anyone else? I guess it would make more sense if they had, instead, classified it as a war crime, but to classify it as a weapon of war?
I can only assume that the UN is using the Security Council as an attempt to add weight to their stance that ‘someone’ should do something about the epidemic of rape in the DR Congo. Since simple censure and vocal condemnation has not stopped the wholesale rape of women in Africa, by co-opting the Security Council and declaring rape as the moral and legal equivalent of an act of war, the Security Council can send in troops under the guise of peacekeeping.
While I would never belittle the horror of the act of rape, it is a criminal act akin to murder and should be dealt with as such. Not only does this open the door to adding other criminal acts to the new list of weapons of war, it actually adds legitimacy to the use of rape as a tool of war. I think most people would agree that the very idea is abhorrent.
I suppose the next step is to declare AIDS as a weapon of Mass Destruction so that the UN can levy greater funding from the more affluent member nations to effect social change by force of arms.
To mis-use a phrase made popular by the new Indiana Jones movie, the UN has ‘nuked the fridge‘. The UN has long been working towards complete irrelevance and this latest act has done nothing to stop the downward spiral.
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In 1994 a few U.S. Marines and Navy Seals were given a questionaire. To make it short and sweet, it asked a bunch of questions related to firing on U.S. civilians that refused to turn in their arms, if ordered to by a superior officer, these civilians did not have to be engaged in conflict, just refusing to be disarmed, and all about U.S. involvement in U.N. actions…. the best I can tell the Marines and Seals basically put “pound sand” answers down…..
In the 80’s there were rumors floating around about Marines being discharged for refusing to wear U.N. colors…. I remember being a young Marine and asking my Captain if that were true, he could not verify it but, in our conversations we came to a sort of mutual understanding. We were AMERICAN fighting men, sworn to protect AMERICA against all enemies foreign or domestic and to obey the orders of the President of the United States… not the U.N…. and as a Commisioned Officer and I as a Non-Commisioned Officer, it was our duty to dis- obey unlawful orders.
No American President or General in the Marines/ Army or an Admiral in the Navy has ever headed the U.N….. in my eyes and those of my buddies… the U.N. was NOT in our chain of command, and therefore had no business telling us what to do….. no matter who ordered us to listen to the guys in the girlie blue helmets.
If you cannot tell, I am one of those guys who believes we should pull out of the U.N. We should take all our toys and go home and protect our sovreign nation against the current economic and cultural attack that is happening along our nations borders.
Let the U.N. worry about the world, without my tax dollars…. I haven’t seen the girlie blue helmets helping in our natural disasters…..
I think the idea behind the resolution — protecting women and girls, and bringing attention to these war crimes/atrocities — is admirable. But it is unlikely that a UN resolution will actually have any effect.
It’s happening now; it happened during WWII when the Japanese military raped Chinese, Korean, and other women all over Asia almost as if for sport. Sadly and unfortunately, rape is and has been a part of the nature of war since…well, there was war.
Resolutions can’t and won’t change that. Only the combatants/participants of war can.
Anything that can be done should be done to prevent the raping and exploitation of women (and men and children for that matter). That any kind of legislation will achieve this is doubtful, given the fact that such horrors have a long history and, it can be assumed, a long future as long as people are around who prey upon the weak in a situation where the threat of punishment does not exist.
The idea of the United Nations is a noble one, but like so many noble ideas their manifestation in reality falls somewhat short. Yet, I would hate to see that institution desolved, if only to keep its symbolism around.
As for collecting our toys and going home — that will never happen, now that the whole concept of a sovereign nation, ours or anyone’s (except maybe North Korea), is a thing of the past. Markets have always shaped geopolitics — no way we’d be in Iraq if there wasn’t oil in the Middle East, nor would we back Israel so fully — and they will continue to do so. Markets don’t recognize states; profit motive is blind to borders. As much as it might be a comfort to think of the US as a powerful nation insulated from and able to shape what it does not like of the rest of the world, we are simply a market, a horde of consumers, who don’t much care where our goods come from, as long as there are a lot of them and as long as they come in thirteen colors.
No sane person supports the victimization of women or the act of rape, but this kind of legislative sleight-of-hand is, at best, counter-productive.
This issue rightfully belongs in the UN’s Human Rights Council, not in the Security Council.
The problem lies in the innate inability of the UN to do anything requiring common sense. The inclusion of China and Sudan in the Human Rights Council and the expulsion of the US from that same council is a perfect example.
Instead of censuring and applying economic pressure against the human rights violators, they let the foxes guard the henhouse. That move neutered the council and announced to the world that petty politics are more important to the UN than actually accomplishing anything worthwhile.
It also left the UN without a viable venue to bring issues like this to the forefront.
This means that newly recognized, hot-button issues must find another forum and the UN has decided to neuter yet another council by diluting the purpose of the Security Council with non-security related issues.
The Security Council’s purpose is to address international security issues like, for example, the breeder reactors being built by the last remaining belligerent communist power, North Korea. By introducing emotionally volatile Human Rights issues to the security council as if they were actual international security issues, they distract the council, and the world at large, from the actual security issues and divert attention away from the issues the council was designed to address.
In addition, the very introduction of a this type of distraction to what is, for all intents and purposes, the martial arm of the UN, intimates that it is right and proper to suggest a military solution to a civil issue.
How is this a good thing?