In a tumultuous world riven by wars, revolutions, famine, pestilence, and natural disasters, millions of people take comfort and hope in the knowledge that UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, is on the scene, rendering assistance to the planet’s unfortunates. When the television news cameras bring horrendous scenes of multitudes of starving waifs in Ethiopia and Somalia, and images of hordes of pathetic refugee children suffering from disease and exposure, the heart is overwhelmed. For decades, Americans have opened wide their wallets to help UNICEF provide medicines and immunizations, food, shelter, and development assistance to les miserables of the earth. Every year, the UN’s premiere charitable organization can count on compassionate Americans to cough up millions of dollars for UNICEF’s Halloween trick-or-treaters and UNICEF Christmas cards.
An Enormous Fraud
Unfortunately, UNICEF, and its whole carefully crafted benevolent image, is an enormous fraud. What little of the organization’s aid actually gets to the destitute victims it claims to champion is dwarfed by that lost to waste, corruption, mismanagement, and misdirection; and any good achieved is vastly overshadowed by the organization’s long-standing, shameful collaboration with the governments of the most brutal regimes in history.
Take Somalia, for example. In a September 14, 1993 article entitled, “UN’s relief agencies put paperwork before people,” Chicago Tribune reporter R.C. Longworth wrote:
UNICEF … is supposed to look after children in the Third World, especially in devastated countries like Somalia…. But UNICEF, by general consensus, has blown it in Somalia. So has every other UN agency sent to help this nation survive and recover….
In Mogadishu, the capital, the agencies take over the best villas — UNICEF has three — at rents of up to $5,000 a month. There the staffs live and work behind guarded walls, cut off from the steamy cities around them. It all adds up to a tower of red tape and good intentions from which the UN people look down, uncomprehending, on the alien society around them.
Meanwhile, most of the hard work in the field is done by private non-UN charities such as CARE, Concern, Save the Children Fund, Catholic Relief Services and others.
Among those interviewed by Longworth was Mark Mullan, a former UNICEF officer in the Somali city of Baidoa and an outspoken critic of the record of the UN agencies. In one case cited by Mullan, UNICEF hired a Somali man to oversee the digging of hundreds of wells:
“Contracts were let, mostly to his relatives, and people were paid,” he said, “but these wells just don’t exist. I asked Mogadishu [UNICEF] to investigate this and they sent out the same guy, this Somali, who signed the reports in the first place.”…
Mullan said he knows of no UNICEF senior officer who has ever spent a night outside Mogadishu. “They work in air-conditioned offices and live in air-conditioned villas and, apart from trips to the beach, that’s the sum total of their experience in Somalia.”
PR Machine
This picture of false piety and gluttonous excesses amidst the utter squalor and privation of the world’s most destitute has been confirmed by many other observers, not the least of whom is British journalist (and former UNICEF consultant) Graham Hancock, author of The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business. “Rather than encouraging humility and dedication,” he found, “the world body’s structure seems actively to reward self-seeking behavior and to provide staff with many opportunities to abuse the grave responsibilities with which they have been entrusted.”
“Personnel and associated costs,” notes Hancock, “today absorb a staggering 80 per cent of all UN expenditures. A body that claims it is struggling tirelessly for world development is thus also an elaborate support mechanism for its own pampered and cosseted staff….” However, thanks to an enormous public relations budget, UNICEF, like other UN agencies, successfully gulls Americans with images of saintly self-sacrifice and global compassion. “Huge sums of our own money are spent on efforts to convince us” of the absolute indispensability of the UN and its “humanitarian” programs, notes Hancock. “During the last decade, funding for the UN’s Department of Public Information (DPI) has grown at twice the pace of the rest of the world body’s budget.”
In its 1993 report, The State of the World’s Children, UNICEF declared: “It is the responsibility of government to support parents by investing in health and education for all children…. Basic needs will not be met, and basic investments will not be made, by any invisible hand.” UNICEF’s executive director, James P. Grant (CFR), announced that President Clinton’s socialized health rationing plan would greatly improve things for families and children.
In September 1993, UNICEF released The Progress of Nations, its first annual report ranking nations by how well they are meeting the basic needs of children. The report said one-fifth of American children live below the poverty line — four times the rate of most industrialized countries. Grant blamed cutbacks in government services (welfare) as the cause of this poor showing. In doing so he ignored more than ample evidence showing that the very conditions he decries are the result of the destructive, thoroughly discredited welfare-state policies he espouses.
A leading UNICEF booster is Marian Wright Edelman (CFR), president of the Children’s Defense Fund, one of the premiere lobbying organizations for socialist, Big Brother “child” legislation. Writing in UNICEF’s The Progress of Nations, 1994, Edelman praises the collectivist accomplishments of the Clinton Administration: “Today, with new national leadership, a beginning has been made. We have the Family and Medical Leave Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit to help lower-income working families, a Hunger Relief Act, and a $1 billion Family Preservation Programme.” But that is just the beginning of the grand vision.
At the 1990 World Summit for Children, UNICEF and its comrades successfully lobbied 149 countries into formally committing themselves to establishing national programs of action (NPAs), i.e., programs of centralized planning. “NPAs,” says The State of the World’s Children, 1994, “offer a new, strategic approach to the somewhat discredited but still necessary task of planning for human development. With their focus on children, they can rise above political divisions and survive changes of regime.” Discredited, yes. Necessary? Absolute socialist rubbish. At UNICEF, it is clear, little or nothing was learned from the colossal failures of central planning in the USSR and eastern Europe.
Even better, however, than national planning, says UNICEF, is global planning. In The State of the World’s Children, 1994, UNICEF calls for “sustainable development following the guidelines of Agenda 21, the blueprint for the world’s environment agreed to at the ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.” Agenda 21 is a massive document that can be accurately described as a global socialist manifesto dictating centralized micro-management of every iota of the earth’s land, air, and water, and every form of human activity.
As enthusiastically explained in Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet, the most accessible version of the document, “Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on earth…. It calls for specific changes in the activities of all people” (emphasis added). Does that sound vaguely unnerving, like shades of Chairman Mao’s revolution? It gets worse. Daniel Sitarz, editor of the work, approvingly describes the global endeavor: “Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced — a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.” (Emphasis added.)
Naturally, then, UNICEF favors passage of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the ponderous, 22,000-page monstrosity marching under the false flag of “free trade.” The creation under GATT of the World Trade Organization (WTO), with the authority to override our national and state laws, is exactly the kind of globalist, sovereignty-destroying apparatus the one-world elitists at UNICEF would support.
In its 1994 reports, as in those of previous years, the collectivist bent of UNICEF is seen not only in its proposals but in the “authorities” it quotes: International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Club of Rome, Worldwatch Institute, the Population Council, the Brundtland Commission, OXFAM, the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and Paul Ehrlich, to name just a few. If the philosophies and policies associated with those names suit your fancy, then UNICEF is the organization for you.
More Foreign Aid
If there is one issue that poll after poll has shown the American public to be overwhelmingly unified on, it is opposition to foreign aid. However, according to UNICEF, we Americans are downright stingy. In The Progress of Nations, 1994, UNICEF criticizes the United States for placing 19th among the 20 major donor countries in terms of its foreign aid allocation as a percent of gross national product. This is a common complaint from an organization that would benefit handsomely from the sacrifices it proposes be levied on others. The UNICEF plan calls upon the U.S. and other industrialized nations to boost foreign aid by an additional $25 billion annually to achieve “basic human goals by the year 2000.” This even though it admits in its 1993 edition of The State of the World’s Children what many other studies have proven: that private and religious charities — “nongovernmental organizations,” or NGOs — do a better job of helping the world’s poor. “If the quality as well as the quantity of aid is taken into account,” acknowledges the report, “then the balance of this comparison tilts further in the direction of the NGOs.”
Where does UNICEF want to send your tax dollars and contributions? In 1993 UNICEF announced that it has plans underway for opening up new offices in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. It also called for more foreign aid for Russia and the still-communist-run republics of the former Soviet Union. The report quoted Al Gore’s call for a “Global Marshall Plan” from his embarrassing 1993 eco-jeremiad, Earth in the Balance.
This is not surprising, since UNICEF has been an enthusiastic proponent of aid to totalitarian communist regimes from its very beginning. In fact, it has lavished millions of dollars on some of America’s and the Free World’s worst enemies. In a May 1975 column entitled “UNICEF Aided Vietnam Fall,” Detroit News columnist Robert Heinl exposed UNICEF’s treachery in aiding the bloody-handed Ho Chi Minh:
Last fall, when you gave the kids trick-or-treat money for UNICEF or ordered UNICEF Christmas cards, did it occur that you, and behind you, the U.S. Government, were bankrolling the Communist takeover of South Vietnam? Well, you were….
UNICEF collected and disbursed a total of $13,649,433 for its Indochina children’s programs…. Of this eight-figure sum, $8,976,587 went to Communist recipients: $6,313,130 directly to Hanoi and $1,975,567 more — via Haiphong and Hanoi, of course — to the Viet Cong.
These UNICEF funds did not reach the Vietnamese children in the form of vaccines, food, or school materials — which came as no surprise to those familiar with the Viet communists’ penchant for slaughtering children in the most grisly fashions imaginable, as a form of terrorism to cow peasants into submission. As Heinl reported, the shipments “consisted primarily of trucks, bulldozers, heavy engineer construction equipment, and construction tools and materials,” which were “precisely the materials most needed for support of continued warmaking.” As Heinl so aptly put it, the UNICEF gambit was “a trick you might say, on the American public; a treat for Ho Chi Minh.”
This UNICEF support for a communist dictatorship was not an aberrant example of the agency’s distribution of largesse; communist regimes from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe — Cuba, Nicaragua, China, Tanzania, etc. — have been showered with millions upon millions of UNICEF dollars over the decades.
Trick or Treat for Genocide
One of UNICEF’s most shameful activities is its assistance to the communist occupational government of Tibet. Since 1949, the communist government of China has occupied the mountain kingdom of Tibet, carrying out a brutal, ongoing campaign of genocide, religious persecution, and cultural destruction that has claimed as many as one million lives. The Beijing regime transferred two-thirds of Tibet’s territory to Chinese provinces and has moved in hundreds of thousands of Chinese to replace native Tibetans.
Tears of Silence: Tibetan Women and Population Control, a recent report by the Tibetan Women’s Association in Dharamsala, India, details the oppressive depopulation campaign being waged against the Tibetan people — a campaign receiving assistance from UNICEF and the United Nations Family Planning Agency (UNFPA). The Communist Central Committee and State Council responsible for control of population growth have stated, “Family planning should be practiced among minority nationalities to raise the economic and cultural levels of minority areas and to improve national quality.” In 1993, the communist Chinese authorities announced a new law, “On Eugenics and Health Protection,” designed to “avoid new births of inferior quality and heighten the standards of the whole population.” The “threat” of “inferior quality,” according to this new law, are those segments of the population coming from “the old revolutionary base, ethnic minorities, the frontier and economically poor areas” — which is to say, the non-Chinese.
In Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, the government’s 1993 propaganda campaign included street posters with slogans such as, “Control the population and create a civilized nation.” Under current policies, report the authors of Tears of Silence, “A Tibetan woman must be between the ages of 25 to 35 and married in order to have a child. Tibetan women desiring a second child must wait four years before becoming pregnant again. Women who become pregnant outside of these parameters must have an abortion and/or be sterilized, or face severe social and economic sanctions.” The authors cite the testimony of a Tibetan nurse who worked for three years at Lhasa People’s Hospital and who verified that “sterilization is done automatically on women delivering their second child at Chinese hospitals.”
Throughout the world, UNICEF works with UNFPA, the World Bank, Planned Parenthood, and other anti-natalist organizations to promote abortion “access” and coercive population controls.
Global Child Grabbers
UNICEF’s totalitarian advocacy is now at America’s doorstep. As the organization noted in June 1994 with the release of The Progress of Nations, “The U.S. is the only industrial power that has neither signed nor ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty guaranteeing children’s rights to survival, protection and development.”
Rather, the treaty is a trap, a Trojan Horse using a deceptive appeal of concern for children to conceal a damnable plan to subvert parental rights and transfer increasing authority over child-raising to the collective parenthood of the “global community” — as represented by the UN.
Seen in the light of the terrible potential of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF’s slogan, “Every Child Is Our Child,” takes on a very chilling meaning.
