Kong is a third-year economics/international area studies
student.
By Benjamin Kong
The Inter-Agency Field Manual on Reproductive Health in Refugee
Situations, revised by the United Nations Population Fund and other
agencies in 1999, was praised by Mitra Ebadolahi in her
Head-to-Head column last Monday (“UN manual provides needed
aide for many refugee women,” Daily Bruin, Nov. 19).
Ebadolahi’s column is another example of the cultural
arrogance marking the policies of UN specialized agencies gone
astray from their founding principles. As a sixth-year participant
in the Model United Nations program and a great believer in the UN,
this saddens me.
The UN is a forum for nations large and small to address
pressing global issues under the principle of sovereign equality.
Unfortunately, the Westerners who dominate the bureaucracies of UN
specialized agencies and non-governmental organizations are able to
push their own population control agenda behind closed doors at
international conferences without actually submitting them to votes
by UN member states.Â
In the Field Manual itself, the Foreword merely gives lip
service to multicultural understanding before proceeding to
discount them under the dubious pretext of “universally
recognized human rights standards.” Considering that the
Manual was only supported by about 50 UN agencies, NGOs and
governments, they hardly seem universal among the UN’s 189
member nations.
Convinced about how much they know better, these same people
forced the resignation of Nicaragua’s devoutly Catholic
health minister in order for the small Central American country hit
by several natural disasters to receive desperately needed UN
aid.
So blinded by their own population control ideology, these
Western bureaucrats even became willing pawns of former Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic before and during the Kosovo crisis.
Obviously facing no obstacles from Milosevic, the UNFPA carried out
population control programs before the crisis among the same ethnic
Albanian Kosovars targeted by Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing.
In the first refugee camps, they began the distribution of portable
abortion devices (unavailable in most Western nations because of
their shoddy safety standards) to Muslim Kosovar women even before
food and medicines arrived.
Ebadolahi says that the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is an
opportunity to address refugee health care. Not to worry
““ the UNFPA is already fundraising “to make pregnancy
and motherhood safe” for Afghan women. There is no doubt what
the UNFPA has in mind and it has no apparent concern for the
feelings of the Muslim Afghan women. If the UN continues to be
manipulated by Europe and the U.S. as a vehicle to impose Western
values on the rest of the world, then we should not be surprised
that the peoples of Muslim nations view any UN Afghanistan
peacekeeping force with mistrust.