Amid Tsunami of Scandals, UN Ignores Massive Corruption

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As the United Nations continues to drown in mega-scandals ranging from the systematic rape of children by UN “peace” troops to the vicious persecution of the whistleblowers who expose UN crimes, the global outfit’s own inspectors have revealed that the prevailing approach to fraud within much of the UN is to basically ignore it. Indeed, many UN entities “continue to remain in a state of near denial with regard to fraud,” the investigators reported. The findings of the UN Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) highlighting widespread fraud, corruption, and impunity across the UN system, among other problems, represent another devastating blow to the embattled global organization. In short, it sounds like the UN does not care how corrupt the bureaucracy becomes or how much of your money is stolen by criminals with immunity.

Making matters worse, the revelations about pervasive and unaddressed corruption come even as the UN is demanding vast new powers and resources in its quest to become what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon refers to as the “Parliament of Humanity.” The UN is even pushing what it calls its global “Declaration of Interdependence.” The scheme, better known as UN Agenda 2030, calls for empowering the UN over everything from education and health to planetary wealth redistribution. The global body is also trying to expand the size and scope of its scandal-plagued “peace” armies even as they are exposed in countries around the world for ruthless predatory behavior, including widespread rape and abuse of children. On top of that, the UN is demanding a stronger UN “police” force, wider jurisdiction and more power for its kangaroo courts, and more.

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However, as the UN demands more power and money, a major backlash is brewing. In the United States, the U.S. Congress has been holding hearings into UN abuses, and even threatening to cut off funds for child-raping UN “peace” troops. The recently released report outlining widespread fraud and impunity is likely to further inflame anti-UN sentiment among a global population that is increasingly rejecting the establishment and its corrupt institutions. Still, as serious as the latest corruption and fraud revelations are, they pale in comparison to other problems plaguing the UN — oftentimes systemic problems that have sparked a growing movement in the United States for an American exit, or “Amexit,” from the global so-called “dictators club.”

While other scandals may be more serious, the condemnation of the UN’s widespread corruption by its own internal investigators is serious. “Much more needs to be done to combat fraud in the United Nations system,” the report acknowledges in its executive summary. The document also blasts the “inability and/or unwillingness to acknowledge and deal with” the fraud and corruption, saying multiple UN organizations “continue to remain in a state of near denial with regard to fraud.” The probe ends by recommending that the UN and its agencies implement proper anti-fraud procedures, instead of its current non-approach. It also blasts what it refers to as an “environment of impunity.” In fact, the UN system seems almost designed to encourage fraud and impunity.

Incredibly, the report says that the UN does not even have a “system-wide definition of the term ‘fraud,’” making the crime rather difficult to address. “In some cases there is lack of a common understanding of what fraud is even within the same organization,” the report says, noting that UN staff and managers might not even know what constitutes fraud, much less how to stop it. Because of those and other problems, the scope of the fraud and corruption within the UN remains largely concealed. Indeed, as this magazine and many other sources have documented, that is exactly how top UN officials like it. When whistleblowers expose major UN crimes — from child rape by UN forces to the violation of sanctions to provide technology to North Korea’s murderous dictatorship — the UN typically responds by persecuting the brave officials who blow the whistle.

In short, even the UN’s investigators realize impunity reigns at the UN — as do the UN’s employees. In a survey conducted by the investigators, some 60 percent of UN employees polled said fraud “goes unpunished in my workplace.” As far as anybody knows, the other 40 percent might be involved in the fraud. The report also explained that “there is a perceived sense of impunity for fraud perpetrators within the United Nations system organizations.” And top UN leaders seem to like it that way, as revealed in leaked documents from top UN officials conspiring to destroy whistleblower Anders Kompass, who sought to stop the abuse of children by “peace” troops in the Central African Republic.

To their credit, the Joint Inspection Unit investigators acknowledged the sentiment among UN officials. “Many interviewees indicated that the long and protracted life cycle of the process, including the investigation, the disciplinary process follow-up and the tribunals promote a sense of impunity among fraud perpetrators in the United Nations system,” the JIU found. “It results in possible perpetrators not being deterred to commit fraud, and staff not inclined to report fraud, as they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the organization is not disposed towards follow-up action or the perpetrator may not be punished even when sufficient evidence is present.”

Of course, the sense of impunity goes way beyond just impunity for fraud, as this magazine and other sources have documented. As just one example, consider that in a 2008 survey in one African town occupied by UN troops, eight out of 10 underage girls admitted to being regularly raped and sexually abused by UN troops. Virtually none of the rapists are ever punished. Similar horror stories have emerged from practically every country occupied by UN troops in history, along with the slaughter of innocent civilians from Mali and the Ivory Coast to Congo and Haiti.

As is the case with the sexual abuse of women and children by UN “peacekeeping” forces, the problem of fraud, theft, and corruption are severely under reported. According to the JIU, the lack of systems and anti-fraud detection mean that only a tiny fraction of the fraud within the UN may actually be reported — and when it is detected, practically nothing is done, as impunity and immunity reign supreme. “Under-reporting and/or non-detection [of fraud] in the United Nations system could be significant and endemic,” the JIU investigators concluded.

The corruption is also hardly new. Earlier this year, the former president of the UN General Assembly, John Ashe, was arrested by U.S. authorities for corruption involving billionaire Ng Lap Seng, a Communist Chinese operative with longtime financial links to the Clinton family and the Democrat Party. Ashe died last month under reportedly mysterious circumstances, before he was scheduled to provide testimony on the mega bribes he received as a UN official. And who could forget the infamous UN “oil-for-food” scandal, dubbed the “biggest financial scandal ever,” in which UN officials and their allies in UN member dictatorships were caught stealing unfathomable amounts of public money? Just in recent weeks, the head of a key UN agency, Irina Bokova, a Bulgarian communist dogged by numerous corruption charges, faced fresh accusations of corruption in the use of UNESCO funds and resources to promote her own candidacy for higher office. There are countless examples.

The JIU investigators acknowledged the growing global outrage surrounding the UN and its well-documented fraudulent activities. “Most United Nations system entities are under pressure to address fraud not only for its direct negative impact on the internal workings of the organization, but also on account of a number of external factors: startling disclosures in the media alleging fraud; recommendations by internal and external oversight bodies; and, above all, intense pressure from the major contributors who, in turn, are subjected to similar pressure from their own supreme national audit authorities, parliaments, media, civil society and the public at large,” the report stated. Still, the UN has done little to address the major concerns.

The problems plaguing the UN are “manifested” in several ways, according to the UN investigators. “The most important among them are: the absence of a strong ‘tone at the top’ in dealing with fraud; no promotion of an encompassing anti-fraud culture; no systematic assessments to determine the level of fraud risk exposure; calling for ‘zero tolerance to fraud’ without ever attempting to give it an operational content; the absence of a commonly understood definition of fraud; the absence of a clear policy and/or strategy to fight fraud; the lack of business process ownership and serious governance deficits in dealing with fraud; delays in investigations of alleged fraud compounded by shortages of trained and qualified forensic investigators; the lack of proportionate resources dedicated to anti-fraud activities; weak implementation of multilateral frameworks for common debarment of third parties and other sanctions regimes; the lack of systematic follow-up to investigations, especially with national enforcement authorities; and the absence of a robust disciplinary regime to deal with employees engaging in fraudulent activities,” the report said.

From the inside, more than a few whistleblowers have also started speaking out about the fraud, corruption, lawlessness, and impunity that pervades the UN system. Indeed, many whistleblowers have reached out to The New American magazine in recent months and years to share their stories about their own experiences with the corruption, persecution, and lawlessness in the UN and other globalist institutions. More information on the subject should be published in the coming months.

One of the most recent shoes to drop is a book by Rasna Warah, a journalist and former UN staffer, entitled Unsilenced: Unmasking the United Nations’ Culture of Cover-ups, Corruption and Impunity. Among other problems, the book “reveals the web of lies, cover-ups, corruption and impunity within the United Nations that has allowed wrongdoing to continue unabated.” According to Warah, much of the wrongdoing occurs because, instead of protecting whistleblowers, the UN persecutes them, and most “experience severe retaliation.” The book also takes aim at the immunity provided to UN officials, “and the conflict of interest inherent in the UN’s internal justice system” that allows criminals and unethical officials to go unpunished.

The situation has become so bad that some academics have concluded that it is time to shut down the UN’s out-of-control bureaucracies. A paper by Sonoma State University Professor Emeritus Jamal Munshi published by the Social Science Research Network, for example, makes a solid case for ditching the UN environmental bureaucracy. Under the headline “The United Nations: An Unconstrained Bureaucracy,” the June 2016 paper concludes that “unconstrained and undisciplined public sector bureaucracies do not serve the interest of the public” and that “such UN bureaucracies can safely be dismantled without any harm to the public interest.”

In a note to The New American, Professor Munshi said that “the case study is specific to the UNEP, however, the broader conclusion that we can draw from the UNEP case study is that a public sector entity without accountability and constraint and without adequate oversight and discipline mechanisms tends to serve itself and not the public.” That, he added, “would apply to the whole of the UN.”

In one sense, leaving aside the embezzling of public resources, Americans and all of humanity are probably much better off with the UN drowning in fraud, corruption, and criminal activity. The more tax money handed to the UN is lost or stolen, the less there is available for the UN to try to impose its extremist vision — and the vision of its globalist supporters — on the nations and peoples of the world.

But to suggest that merely stopping fraud and corruption, or even the horrific exploitation of children by UN troops, would redeem the UN, is to miss the point. Contrary to the public narrative, the UN was designed with sinister purposes in mind right from the start, as evidenced by the fact that its first leader and a leading U.S. representative in its creation, Alger Hiss, was later exposed as a Soviet spy. Top U.S. officials and architects of the UN have also outlined its real purpose. John Foster Dulles, for example, who went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, explained in his book War or Peace, “The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization.” The hopelessly corrupt dictators club remains a dangerous tool of tyrants to this day.

Instead of trying to fix the systemic UN corruption and fraud, Americans would be much better off working to tackle the root of the problem: the fact that the dictators club exists in the first place. There is already legislation in Congress to secure an Amexit from the UN. Among other things, the American Sovereignty Restoration Act (H.R. 1205) would end U.S. participation in the UN, evict its headquarters from U.S. soil, protect American troops and resources from being commandeered by the organization, and more. In addition to permanently dealing with the fraud, corruption and impunity by protecting Americans from it, the law would, more importantly, protect American independence and liberty in the face of an increasingly hostile UN. And unlike UN fraud, those benefits are priceless.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected]