[softy54534]

Excerpt :
"Like other United Nations agencies, World Bank rules prevent staff from testifying in public so Wolfensohn was not at the hearing. But senior bank officials on Monday privately briefed lawmakers on its anti-corruption efforts, a bank spokesman said. "



World Bank Corruption May Top $100 Billion

Thu May 13, 4:14 PM ET

By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Corrupt use of World Bank (news - web sites) funds may exceed $100 billion and while the institution has moved to combat the problem, more must be done, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee said on Thursday.


Sen. Richard Lugar (news, bio, voting record), an Indiana Republican, charged that "in its starkest terms, corruption has cost the lives of uncounted individuals contending with poverty and disease."


He commended World Bank President James Wolfensohn for bringing greater attention to the issue, but said, "Corruption remains a serious problem."


Lugar opened a hearing on corruption at the multilateral development banks, the first public examination in an ongoing Senate investigation.


He cited experts who calculated that between $26 billion and $130 billion of the money lent by the World Bank for development projects since 1946 has been misused. In 2003, the bank distributed $18.5 billion in developing countries.


Jeffrey Winters, an associate professor at Northwestern University, said his research suggested corruption wasted about $100 billion of World Bank funds, and when other multilateral development banks are included, the total rises to about $200 billion.


Damian Milverton, a bank spokesman, later disputed the $100 billion estimate, insisting it had "no basis in fact."


"We completely reject the figure offered by one of the panelists as an estimate of funding from the World Bank that might have been misused," Milverton told Reuters.


Winters testified that the World Bank's anti-corruption effort was having "minimal effects" and the banks should all focus on supervising and auditing their lending.


"The lion's share of the theft of development funds occurs in the implementation of projects and the use of loan funds by client governments," he said.


Like other United Nations (news - web sites) agencies, World Bank rules prevent staff from testifying in public so Wolfensohn was not at the hearing. But senior bank officials on Monday privately briefed lawmakers on its anti-corruption efforts, a bank spokesman said.


Carole Brookins, the U.S. executive director on the World Bank board, defended the bank saying it was leading efforts to fight corruption, but acknowledged "there is more that could be done to strengthen the system."


More than 180 companies and individuals have been blacklisted from doing business with the World Bank and their names and penalties posted on the bank's public Web site.


Between July 2003 and March 2004, it said it referred 18 cases of fraud or corruption to national justice authorities based on investigations by its anti-corruption unit.


Specific bank projects under review by the committee include the Yacyreta dam on the Argentina-Paraguay border, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and projects in Cambodia.


Hector Morales, acting U.S. executive director to the Inter-American Development Bank, testified that his institution recently accelerated anti-corruption efforts "but still has much work to do."


Corruption may have cost 100 billion to World Bank projects: US senator

Friday May 14, 4:56 AM

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Corruption may have have sapped as much as 100 billion dollars from World Bank lending projects to help poor countries, a key US senator said.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar said if the figure presented to his panel by one university professor were accurate, it would seriously undermine the organization's efforts to fight global poverty.

The World Bank hotly disputed the figure of 100 billion dollars, adding that there was no basis for that estimate, but said the organization was working to stem corruption.

Lugar, who chaired a hearing on corruption involving multilateral lending agencies, cited an estimate by Jeffrey Winters of Northwestern University that the World Bank had participated "mostly passively in the corruption of roughly 100 billion dollars of its loan funds intended for development."

Lugar said, "Other experts estimate that between five percent and 25 percent of the 525 billion dollars that the World Bank has lent since 1946 has been misused. This is equivalent to between 26 billion and 130 billion dollars. Even if corruption is at the low end of estimates, millions of people living in poverty may have lost opportunities to improve their health, education, and economic condition."

"We completely reject the figure offered by one of the panelists," said World Bank spokesman Damian Milverton. "It has no basis in fact."

Milverton said the Bank had no estimate of its own on funds lost to corruption, but said officials took this seriously and had barred 180 companies and individuals from doing business with the Bank because of corruption or other wrongdoing.

[9mm_fan]

UN is guilty of sins of omission
by Judi Mcleod

April 5, 2004

It has to be the Lip Service Epic of all time: The one minute of silence the world will observe at 12 noon, April 7, the International Day of Reflection on the Genocide of Rwanda.

The International Day of Reflection on the Genocide of Rwanda originated with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a March 26 one-day memorial conference, in New York.

The conference began with Annan "accepting blame" for the slaughter of 800,000 civilians.

"The international community is guilty of sins of omission," Annan told the crowd gathered in the Big Apple for the summit.

No kidding, Kofi!

Head of the UN peacekeeping department at the time of the Rwanda massacres which saw children hacked to death by machete, Annan said he did what he could.

Like refusing to send more troops as requested by retired Canadian General Romeo Dallaire telephoning from the actual death arena? Or like keeping mum about how the Black Box flight recorder from a shot down 1994 aircraft was discovered in a locked file cabinet in the UN peacekeeping department?

In a speech that could have been delivered by Neville Chamberlain, Annan said: "I believed at the time that I was doing my best. But I realized after (emphasis ours) the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support."

Mouthing platitudes never makes up for lost lives.

It was 10 years ago that the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed in a mysterious plane crash. "Before the wreckage even stopped smoking, the killing began," said CTV.ca in a Breaking News item. "Spurred on by hateful radio broadcasts. 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in just 100 days."

Close to three million others were left homeless.

Annan’s Lenten New York mea culpa came in yet another UN conference that has the same hollow ring as the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. In Johannesburg UN delegates dined on caviar, steak and lobster within mere miles of starving African children.

The New York memorial conference on Rwanda attracted the likes of UN sycophant Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham, who told the assembly that the world has yet to learn many of the important lessons of Rwanda.

"Or, to put it more starkly, we have learned what we need to do but I suggest, colleagues, we lack the political will to achieve the necessary agreement on how to put in place the type of measures that will prevent a future Rwanda from ever happening again."

For readers beyond the borders of Canada, that’s "starkly", Liberal Bill Graham style.

Even as Annan was receiving the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize 2001 for the Rwanda exercise, Gen. Romeo Dallaire was becoming suicidal after having watched, first-hand hundreds of thousands of Rwandans being slaughtered. Today, he says he cannot forget a massacre infused "in the pores of my skin."

The world-respected Canadian general, who led the peacekeeping mission into Rwanda in 1994, turned up at UN headquarters last week to give his take on the April 7 memorial.

"The principal objective is one, to not let the Rwanda genocide die, to let it disappear from the sights of the developed world in particular, because we tend to have a very short memory," Dallaire told CTV’s Canada AM.

He said the second goal is to take "a hard look at the prospects of such a terrible event happening again."

Dallaire, who had in Rwanda arrived three months before the massacre, reported directly to Kofi Annan, who was then in charge of the UN Peacekeeping department. On site, Dallaire could see that a genocide was coming. He pleaded with the United Nations to send more soldiers and allow troops to shoot not just in self-defence.

But the Calvary never arrived.

On April 21, the Security Council refused to help and instead cut the 2,000-strong force to just 270 troops. Dallaire has said that a force of 5,000 could have stopped the blood bath.

Of himself, Kofi Annan once said, "I’m not one of those people who believe you have to pound the table to be tough."

According to the Independent "When the first cruise missiles slammed into their targets in Baghdad, (Annan) retired to his expansive 38-floor office at UN headquarters, sat at his mahogany desk and slowly smoked a cigar."

Annan has declared April 7, 2004 the International Day of Reflection on the Genocide of Rwanda. There will be one minute of silence observed by the world at 12 noon that day.

Make that one minute of silence for 100 Rwanda days of hell, declared by the Lip-Service King of time immortal.

Canada Free Press founding editor Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 25 years experience in the print media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard and the former Brampton Daily Times.

[brraverishhh]

http://www.israelforum.com/board/sho...&threadid=5863

[HedgeYourBets]

Originally posted by Batman
I wonder if the uproar over the Arabs of Iraq being mistreated and abused versus the silence over women and girls who are abused in the Westernized location have to do with gender.
Nope. The exclusive criterion for reportage of human rights disasters is an affirmative answer to the question, "Does this hurt George Bush?"

[TorryJens]

Originally posted by David_in_NYC
Here's more, this one is about UN involvement in the Balkan sex-slave trade:

The Economics of Immorality

May 30, 2004
by Samuel L. Crapps, II
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On May 6, 2004 Amnesty International released a report titled “Protecting The Human Rights of Women and Girls Trafficked For Forced Prostitution in Kosovo” and concluded that the presence international civilian workers, including members from the United Nations Mission (UNMIK), and military peacekeepers in Kosovo has a direct correlation to the increase of the illegal smuggling and subsequent sexual slavery of women in that embittered country. "Women and girls as young as 11 are being sold into sexual slavery in Kosovo and international peacekeepers are not only failing to stop it, they are actively fueling this despicable trade by themselves paying for sex from trafficked women," said Kate Allen, Amnesty International's director in Britain.............
....... This desperate plight of girls and young women who are falsely lured to Kosovo and then are subsequently broken through beatings, rapes, and starvation will not end until the demand for this insidious market is abated through a much higher degree of personal accountability in conjunction with the willingness of military leaders, political leaders, and the international media in Germany and beyond to publicly deal with those who choose to compromise human dignity in this manner.
I wonder if the uproar over the Arabs of Iraq being mistreated and abused versus the silence over women and girls who are abused in the Westernized location have to do with gender.

**Is it more ok to abuse women and girls more than it is to abuse men?

**Is it the fact that the men are Moslem and the women are of Western cultures????

In any case this article demonstrate that the United Nations Personnel feels that it has nothing to worry about in abusing civilians of victimized nations and refugee populations. It shows once again as in the Sudan that the United Nations is guilty of misusing its funds (which pay for training/salaries of these 'peacekeepers') and aiding in the promotion of abuse of the weakest class, women and children of war torn areas.