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From army barracks to government ministries and Congress, Brazilians are beginning to look for a way out of a messy U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti. The apparent weekend suicide of Gen. Urano Bacellar, the Brazilian heading the force, has highlighted intractable conditions for peacekeepers and raised questions about Brazil's diplomatic ambitions. "We cannot see a real international effort in Haiti and the U.N. structure is confused," said one high-ranking army officer in Brasilia, who served under Bacellar and asked not to be named. "It's becoming more and more difficult for me to understand why we are deploying troops abroad when...

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, on his arrival in Germany yesterday on an official visit, called Russia a “very rich, insidious, malicious and experienced enemy.” Shortly before that, Georgian Ambassador to the UN Revaz Adamia accused Russia of genocide of Georgians. Thus Georgian officials are doing everything they can to place Russian-Georgian differences on a world level and gain Western support in the issue of withdrawing Russian peacekeepers from South Ossetia and Abkhazia. A Blow against Peacekeepers The war of words between Russia and Georgia reached a new height on February 1. The cause of the escalation was a collision between...

Russia has withdrawn support for an international plan to grant autonomy to the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia, raising fears it could shift its backing more clearly towards Abkhazian calls for secession. The move came as the United Nations Security Council prepared to renew the mandate of a UN monitoring force there, and has prompted western diplomatic concern over Russia’s intentions in the region. Russia said during a closed-door meeting in New York that it could no longer allow reference to a 2000 paper drafted by the former UN special representative Dieter Boden on Abkhazia’s future. The paper talked of...

KINSHASA, Congo -- The United Nations pulled its remaining peacekeepers out of the national park where eight Guatemalan peacekeepers were killed in an apparent gunbattle with Ugandan rebels, a U.N. spokesman said Tuesday. Hans-Jakob Reichen, U.N. military spokesman for eastern Congo, said the peacekeepers were withdrawn because they had completed a two-week mission to clear Garamba National Park of rebel forces. "It was decided to pull peacekeepers out of the park since any suspected rebels had melted into the jungle," Reichen said. The park straddles Congo's remote northeastern border with Sudan. Monday's violence marked the second-biggest single loss of life...

An internal review of United Nations peacekeeping activities has found “substantial evidence of abuse” in procurement operations, leading to “financial losses and significant inaccuracies in planning assumptions”, according to a copy of the report circulating in New York. The review, which may be published imminently, also expresses “great concern” at a failure of UN management to enforce accountability and adhere to internal control procedures. The findings are likely to deal a powerful new blow to the world body headed by Kofi Annan, its secretary-general, as it tries to recover from scandal over its mismanagement of the multi-billion-dollar oil-for-food programme in...

The Ivory Coast erupted into chaos yet again overnight, with opposing gangs roaming the streets and committing violence despite the presence of United Nations peacekeepers tasked with defending a cease-fire between the two sides of the Ivorian civil war. One UN contingent finally opened fire to protect themselves, killing four Ivorians, while another shot weapons in the air and fired teargas to cover their retreat: IVORY COAST, once one of the wealthiest countries in Africa, was close to its second civil war in five years yesterday as gangs of armed thugs loyal to President Gbagbo ran amok across the southern...

(SomaliNet) President Vladimir Putin proposed on Wednesday 21st to send 2000 troops to join UN peacekeepers in southern Sudan in a move that would almost double the size of Russia's military missions outside the ex-Soviet Union. Reports Aol news. Putin sent a letter to the Federation Council upper house of parliament, a compliant body that invariably backs the Kremlin, asking for formal permission to deploy the troops. "The Secretary General of the United Nations appealed with a request to send a military formation of the Russian Federation's Armed Forces for participation in the UN operation to maintain the peace in...

UNITED NATIONS - Armed conflicts have declined by 40 percent since the end of the Cold War primarily because the United Nations was finally able to launch peacekeeping and conflict-prevention operations around the world, according to a new study. The first Human Security Report paints a surprising picture of war and peace in the 21st century: a dramatic decline in battlefield deaths, plummeting instances of genocide, and a drop in human rights abuses. The only form of political violence that appears to be getting worse is international terrorism, a serious threat but one that has killed fewer than 1,000 people...

The Plan to Have the UN Rule by John F. McManus President, The John Birch Society The very first purpose claimed for the United Nations in Article 1 of the UN Charter reads as follows: "To maintain international peace and security." The UN has always promoted itself as a champion of peace. The word "peace" (or "peaceful") appears five times in the very first sentence of Article 1. And the UN's claim that it stands only for "peace" has been repeated by journalists and government officials throughout the world ever since the organization was founded. In 1945, however, at the...

By any reasonable standard, the Bush policy on the U.N. should be more controversial than the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court. The President, who is depicted by the media as a unilateralist in foreign policy, is presiding over an unprecedented expansion of U.N. power on the world stage. Despite U.N. scandals and corruption, his administration spends more money on international organizations year after year. And global taxes for the U.N. may be on the horizon. One might think that a President who went to war in Iraq without U.N. approval and appointed the tenacious John Bolton as U.N....

SUKHUMI, September 30 (RIA Novosti) - The president of Abkhazia, a self-proclaimed independent republic on Georgian territory, said he would not agree to the deployment of U.S. and EU peacekeeping forces in the region. "The CIS peacekeeping troops were sent to the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict zone in line with the May 14, 1994 agreement on a ceasefire and the disengagement of forces," Sergei Bagapsh said, responding to a proposal by Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to involve the United States and the European Union in the peacemaking process. "Abkhazia does not plan on making any amendments to the document." "No other countries...

Following five years of United Nations control and billions of dollars of international aid, Kosovo is a lawless region "owned" by the Albanian mafia, characterized by continuing ethnic cleansing and subject to increasing infiltration by al Qaeda-linked Muslim jihadists, according to a whistleblower interviewed by Cybercast News Service. The U.N.'s repeated failure to act on received intelligence has allowed illegal paramilitary groups to flourish and engage in terrorist attacks aimed at destabilizing regional governments in the Balkans, said Thomas Gambill, a former security chief with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), self-described as the world's largest regional...

Chaos swirls around Abkhazia, breakaway republic in once-Soviet Georgia. The grenade-thrower who targeted President Bush in May, $80,000 on his head, has been captured in a raid which may or may not have involved the FBI. Last month, Russia agreed to pull its forces from all Georgian territory -- through Abkhazia, where the agreement has no force and the Kremlin keeps hundreds of peacekeepers. And in 2003, Georgian Minister of State Security Valeri Khaburdzania warned anyone reading the National Interest that "Wahhabi organizations have sprung up on the territory of Abkhazia, and where Wahhabis are, terrorists are not far behind."...

This week marked the 10th anniversary of the United Nations' second greatest failure since its creation in 1945 -- the genocide in Rwanda being the undisputed No. 1. With much fanfare, the ceremonies focused on the massacre of "up to" 8,000 Bosnian men and boys by General Ratko Mladic's Bosnian Serb army in Srebrenica in July of 1995. In the vast majority of recent media reports, the background and responsibilities for the disaster in Srebrenica were absent. Preferred was the simple explanation: a black and white event in which the Serbs were solely to blame. As someone who played a...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, July 14 (Reuters) - Opposition groups and residents of two Port-au-Prince slums say dozens of innocent people were killed during anti-gang raids by U.N troops and Haitian police last week, but U.N. and police officials denied the accusations. The Lawyers Committee for Individual Rights, a group known as CARLI and regarded as one of the most independent rights groups operating in Haiti, said U.N. peacekeepers and Haitian police killed unarmed residents, including children and elders, in the slums of Bel-Air and Cite Soleil, strongholds of supporters of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. "We have credible information that U.N. troops,...

Failed, useless, dubious, impotent, pernicious, morally exhausted… Every crisis is an opportunity, a time when the fissures and cracks of received wisdom and worn-out habits of thought are exposed. The years since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have been such a time for the United States. Decades of intellectual corruption, moral flabbiness, and blithe indifference to the reality of a dangerous, unpredictable world all culminated on 9/11. Yet despite the gruesome severity of that lesson, the same bad habits persist. Nothing demonstrates this truth more clearly than the unwillingness of many Americans, including the current administration, to accept once and...

On Wednesday, June 4, 1997 there was a rollcall vote on the House floor which was overwhelmingly rejected 54 to 369, for an amendment to the State Department reauthorization bill that would have required the United States to withdraw from the United Nations (U.N.) and close the U.S. mission there. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) the amendment's sponsor, argued that membership in the U.N. is unconstitutional, along with all the various U.N. "treaties" that have been "ratified" by the Senate. Several U.N. supporters in Congress rose in opposition to Mr. Paul's amendment. Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) said, "world poverty can be ...

AUSTRALIAN soldiers drew arms to protect themselves from Jordanian peacekeepers after a Digger blew the whistle on other Jordanian soldiers' sexual abuse of East Timorese boys. Corporal Andrew Wratten had to be evacuated and Australian commandos sent to protect Diggers in Oecussi, an East Timorese province in Indonesian West Timor, after he told the UN of the pedophilia that occurred in May 2001. The Australians drew their Steyr assault rifles after being confronted by Jordanians armed with M-16s, in an escalation of verbal threats triggered by the later betrayal of Corporal Wratten by a Jordanian officer in the Dili headquarters...

MOSCOW, March 24 (RIA Novosti) - The old frictions between the Georgians and the South Ossetians detonated in the winter of 1989-1990 as a result of the nationalist policy of the then Tbilisi leadership. At the end of 1989, Georgian authorities sent Interior Ministry forces to Tskhinvali. The Ossetians then formed their National Guard, and military actions broke out. Uncontrolled militia groups also appeared. When Zviad Gamsakhurdia was in power in Georgia between 1990-1991, Tbilisi toughened its "Georgia for Georgians" policy and intensified attempts to solve "the Ossetian problem" militarily using heavy armaments. On December 9, 1990, the Supreme Soviet...

Renewed call to oust U.N. in response to rape reportAlleged assault of Haitian by peacekeepers spurs group to get world body out of U.S. --WND Responding to new allegations of rape by United Nations peacekeepers, an activist group renewed its call to evict the world body from the U.S. U.N. peacekeeperMove America Forward, co-chaired by California campaigner Howard Kaloogian, has collected nearly 100,000 signatures on its petition to "Get the U.N. Out of the U.S." and stop American funding of the organization. "It has become an almost daily occurrence to read about allegations of rape and molestation by U.N....