UN, fake as a wooden nickel, wants Russia to pay up to Ukraine
(This is a reprint from NewsBred)
We have learnt that the UN General Assembly, with a 94–17 vote, has asked Russia to pay reparations as war-damages to Ukraine.
Russia has termed it as an attempt to legalize the seizure of its hundreds of billions of dollars and assets by the “Anglo-Saxons”, as its ex-president Dmitry Medvedev has termed it.
For good measure, Medvedev added: “We will do without such a United Nations organization.”
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The United Nations came to life in 1945 and then went to sleep.
We didn’t notice it was in slumber for the US-NATO war crimes in Americas (Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador, Bolivia etc), Africa (Rwanda, Angola, Congo etc), Asia (East Timor, Korea, Japan, Iran etc) and Europe (Greece, Yugoslavia etc) escaped us in their enormity.
We knew what happened in Vietnam wasn’t funny, or in Korea, but somehow the UN didn’t seem someone which had failed in its duty. It remained desirable, almost divine.
The nodes of information in media and academics did a good job in the cover-up; selling us the United States’ wars in the name of curbing Communism, as these days it’s in the name of “Human Rights”.
When Soviet Union slipped into history in the 1990s, and China was nowhere to what it is now, the US had the entire field we call planet to itself. Almost immediately it went for Yugoslavia, bombing it for 79 days through its war-arm NATO, dropping 20,000 bombs, quite a few of cluster and depleted uranium kind, killing more civilians than they did soldiers.
Of course, this campaign didn’t have the approval of the UN Security Council. But it did nothing to nail the Western lies such as 500,000 missing Kosovans or Albanians which after the war turned out to be no more than 10,000 persons. In the end the US had the mafia state of Kosovo it wanted, a geostrategic marvel in the heart of Europe, with its natural resources such as black coal, at its beck and call, and boots stationed.
All of this escaped us, as was the fact that within a few months, President Bill Clinton had bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Afghanistan and Iraq we would hear more often in following years, almost welcomed by us after the horrors of 9/11 which came to our drawing rooms, the barbarians who had violated the land of liberty and equality, the beacon of free world as we thought the US to be. It needed to be set aright: “The Axis of Evil” as it was sold to us by then president George Bush Jr.
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Afghanistan was immediate and lasted until now, a good 20 years. We are told that the Talibans wanted proof of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11 before they could hand him over — never mind the US had created him in the first instance — but the Hegemon didn’t brook any questions.
We now have the evidence that even after US unleashed its fury, the Talibans were willing to strike a deal to end the war quickly (The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock); as did the word from The Guardian (October, 2001) that president George Bush rejected the Taliban offer as “non-negotiable.”
We still don’t know enough of the massive tragedy. Over a lakh of those killed were civilians. Successive US presidents — the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden — lied from both sides of the mouth. When the US withdrew — with a parting, horrifying drone strike on civilians to boot — they made sure Afghanistan’s assets were frozen; and aids dried down out of concern for “human rights.”
Millions of Afghans today are starving.
The US did all those right under the nose of the UN, for 20 long years, and the global body kept sitting on its bum.
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Oh yes, Iraq.
To begin with the US first imposed inhuman sanctions on this Middle East oil power for 12 years. Saddam Hussein might have been a psychopath but the US nurtured him for long before 9/11 presented an opportunity too good to miss for its oil control.
The US went to UN but its weapons inspection team turned up nothing. When the UN Security Council vote was taken, only 4 of 15 concurred with the Hegemon. Yet NATO launched a war on what we know now was the bogus claim of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq’s arsenal.
A former Amnesty International board member, Francis A Boyle, tells us that all in all 1.5 million Iraqis died which included 500,000 children. Some 200,000 of them met a violent end, often blown to pieces by coalition airstrikes or suicide bombers, the last creation of a nincompoop named L. Paul Bremer who knew no Arabic and never set a foot in Iraq but here he was the US-appointed Iraq’s Czar. Amongst his most hideous blunders was disbanding of the Iraq army. “We created half a million angry, armed, unemployed Iraqis in 48 hours,” remarked Bremer’s predecessor.
Medical system collapsed as doctors fled in droves, children mortality hit the roof as malnutrition and starvation hit the land. The effect of depleted uranium is still felt in Fallujah among a generation of orphans. The radioactive substances caused malformations, sterility and infertility.
Here is The Independent of London on the Fallujah horror: “Dramatic increase in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia…exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945..”
But the US was only starting in the Middle East. Libya, Syria, Yemen etc happened in quick succession, indeed there are too many to recount in this piece. I would touch briefly on Libya and the rest you could look up.
UN, of course, was AWOL.
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The US-NATO carried out 10,000 air strikes and several hundred cruise missile attacks on Libya for seven months in 2011. The US-NATO claimed Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi was about to unleash a genocide on its own people in Benghazi.
The US secured a UN Security Council Resolution which authorized a no-fly zone to protect civilians. It soon morphed into a full-scale invasion, and then into an avowed mission to unseat Gaddafi, clearly an illegal war but the UN wasn’t outraged. As for the threat of genocide, an independent British parliamentary inquiry determined that “Gaddafi wasn’t planning to massacre civilians. This myth was exaggerated by rebels and Western governments…”
And what did they destroy? The CIA World Facebook noted Libya had a literacy rate of 94.2%. The World Health Organisation (WHO) was gushing on country’s health care service in 2011. Life expectancy was 75 years (better than India’s). Libya had the highest GDP in Africa. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.
That this havoc in Libya had its horrific consequences in Niger, Tunisia, Mali, Chad and Cameroon is better left unsaid for some other day.
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I do think that a few of us, thanks to social media, have a bit of an idea of suffering humanity in the last two decades. But the early years of an impotent UN are shrouded in obscurity. I would seek your indulgence for a minute on North Korea.
North Korea, much reviled and a pariah in international community for the crimes we don’t know about, has suffered as few nations have ever. It was virtually destroyed during the Korean War in the 50s. Every single family in North Korea lost a loved one during its course. No less than 30% of its population — some 9 million people — were extinguished. 78 of its cities and thousands of its villages were razed to ground.
General Douglas MacArthur, the architect of this annihilation, later admitted in US senate: “I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man.”
Today, North Korea is said to be a “rogue nation”, one of “axis of evil”, a threat to world peace though we all know which nation justifiably be called the terrorist state of our world.
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“[The US] is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
―Dr. Martin Luther King (1967)
“[The United States] is the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”
―Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States (2019)
The government bombs; the people shop.
The term, post-War is a misnomer. We know 15 millions lives were snuffed out during the World War 1. It was 26 million during WW II. Since then, US-led wars have accounted for over 20 million dead. The induced anarchy has brought terrorist groups home to roost everywhere, be it in Africa, Asia or Europe.
So rigged is our world that the US president Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2009. A few years later he was bombing seven countries simultaneously.
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Reparations? Of course none to these and countless other suffering nations.
Such is the disdain for international laws that president George W. Bush once reacted thus to if US had violated the international law on Iraq: “International law? I better call my lawyer; he didn’t bring that up to me.”
To be fair, the United Nations evokes as much sympathy as it does disdain.
For the last 30 years, the UN General Assembly is unanimous in voting against the inhuman sanctions on Cuba, but for the US and Israel. Yet that inhuman sanctions have lasted for over 60 years.
Palestine is recognized by 138 of the 193 nations. Only last week, the UNGA passed a resolution — 98 in favour, 17 against — to request the World Court to urgently weigh in on Israel’s “prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory.”
But nothing happens say on Cuba or Palestine because the UN has been reduced to impotency by the financial muscle of the West. The Security Council has a fractured vote on dire issues; the UNGA can’t move a fly. It’s only used as a tool by West to push its globalist agenda.
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This call on Russia to provide reparations to rebuild Ukraine is a joke.
Neither the UN Charter nor other international laws authorize the UN General Assembly to demand reparations.
UN has shot itself into foot for now reparations could be sought from a Cuba to Serbia, Iraq to Libya to Serbia to North Korea.
It indeed looks a ploy to legally seize the huge Russian assets in the shadow of UN.
The West has created a task force for the purpose, called REPO (Russian Elites, Proxies and Oligarchs) as a mechanism to loot Russia’s assets which is upwards of $300 billion as of now.
The REPO — made up of the US, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the European Commission — has its hands in the honey pot.
The lion’s share in this $300 billion of course is frozen reserves of Russian Central Bank in various European banks.
There is embargo on gold imports from Russia so that the latter can’t make up for the loss in revenue due to sanctions.
The Spanish authorities have seized a $90 million super yacht of Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg. Fijian law has managed to lay hands on a $300 million yacht owned by another oligarch, Suleiman Kerimov.
Since Volodymyr Zelenskyy has quoted a figure of $600 billion for postwar recovery of Ukraine, it’s clear how the West intends to supply the funds. Ukraine has demanded frozen Russian assets and has had vocal support from several European nations, such as Lithuania and Estonia.
