An Open Letter to the U.N. on the Gas Chambers: A U.N. that Fails to Act Has Lost Its Reason for Being

Dear Sir or Madam,

Permit me to be blunt. A growing majority of the people of my country, the United States of America, believes that the United Nations has no values, no standards, no decisiveness, and a soft, cowardly paralysis in the face of every crisis that rightfully demands action. Preventing another Holocaust was the reason the U.N. was created, but nearly sixty years later, the U.N. lacks the will to act against crimes of comparable horror and scale. As you know, a significant portion of the U.N.’s funds come from the U.S. government, which by law reflects the changing priorities of the American people.

The situation in North Korea today is an excellent illustration of U.N. cowardice and inaction; it calls the justifications for the U.N.’s existence into question. Three days ago, the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote to
the Secretary General and directed his attention to press reports in the BBC and The Observer (UK) that North Korea places entire families in gas chambers, forces them to strip naked, and gasses them to death in the course of “scientific experiments.” It also informed you of North Korea’s use of poisoned food to inflict hideous, painful deaths on scores of female prisoners. The Wiesenthal Center asked the Secretary General to fully investigate of these allegations. The Yad Vashem Memorial has since joined in these calls. A thorough search of your Web site reveals that the U.N. has had absolutely no reaction to this urgent request.

Recently, the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea released a report stating that 200,000 North Koreans are kept in horrific conditions in concentration camps, where many of them are executed, deprived of adequate food and medical care, and forced to perform slave labor. Tens of thousands of them die each year. Press reports and testimony in the U.S. Congress tell us that North Korean concentration camp guards routinely murder babies born to female prisoners, by lethal injection, by stomping on their necks, or by leaving them outside to die of exposure. Amnesty International has recently added new light to he “famine” in North Korea, which has killed up to three million people in the last decade. A new Amnesty report accuses the North Korean government of using food as a weapon against those whose political loyalty it distrusts by selectively denying them food rations. A genocide is happening today, and the U.N. dithers. Dithering is a choice the U.N. may make; opposing the funding of this dithering is a choice that you can expect increasing numbers of Americans to make in response.

This fall, as I ponder the question of which candidates I will support, I will carefully consider how the U.N. responds to these latest reports. As the candidates discuss the competing and urgent wartime priorities for U.S. taxpayer funding, I will strain to understand how the U.N. has earned a share. I will try again to discern an effective U.N. response to ANY the great humanitarian disasters of the last decade–Iraq, Rwanda, the rule of Saddam Hussein and its 300,000 victims, North Korea, or the suffering and exploitation of hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees hiding in China and denied their rights under international law there. On only one of these issues–Iraq–was it possible to discern that the United Nations had a position. That position, regrettably, was to oppose any effective action against a regime that had defied eighteen of its resolutions. Today, the U.N. timidly averts its eyes from what may well be a new Asian Auschwitz. It cannot even summon the courage to speak empty but sympathetic words for those who may be breathing their last painful gasps on cold, bloody cement floors, beside the bodies of their murdered children.

Shame on the United Nations. I will strongly urge my elected representatives to give your cowardly organization the nothing it has justly earned.