Myanmar plays the UN and the world for suckers
Posted on 31 July 2008 by Jack
It’s hard to say which is more appalling: the way Myanmar’s elite skimmed as much as $10 million from international aid money flowing into the country for the survivors of Cyclone Nargis, or the way United Nations officials failed to notice the scam - or worse - for weeks on end.
John Holmes, the UN’s top man on humanitarian affairs, says now that the losses are “a significant problem,” amounting to as much as 15 per cent of recent cash aid flowing into the country. He admitted that the UN had been “a bit slow” to recognize the swindle.
The country’s military government forced the UN to trade hard currency for the local money by the medium of foreign exchange certificates and then set the rate of these instruments in such a way that millions of dollars flowed to bankers and others close to the junta. The usual market rate is 1,100 Myanmar khat per dollar, but the UN has been getting only about 880. The story was broken by a blog (www.innercitypress.com) which covers the UN. We wonder if news of this UN inefficiency would ever have become public without the blog’s good work.
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July 31st, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Nothing new here - fits in the same slot as the role the UN played in the ‘Oil for Food’ scam with Saddam Hussein, that arrangement became the ‘Oil for $$’ Scam. The Iraqi oil was sold on the free market by the UN schemers and their gang of thugs (the Unca Mo power corp crowd), flooded the market and kept prices artificially low. The people of Iraq starved, Saddam bought weapons to kill us, some thugs got very rich, the oil producing nations lost money.
I wish to thank this blogger for his good work, my question is: how much more rope does the UN require to hang itself?
The UN should be shut down, right now. It is a very expensive failure but it is corrupt from top to bottom; no use spending good money on a rotten apple.