UN Peacekeeping Suffers as US Debt Mounts

[babylonsister]

UN Peacekeeping Suffers as US Debt Mounts
by Mithre J. Sandrasagra

UNITED NATIONS - As U.S. President George W. Bush addressed the 62nd annual General Assembly here Tuesday morning, the U.S. was on its way to owing nearly two billion dollars to the United Nations, the U.N. Foundation warned.0926 06

A principal driver of U.N. peacekeeping, the U.S. has a responsibility to see that peacekeeping missions have the resources they need to succeed. Yet Washington is falling further and further behind in dues payments for U.N. peacekeeping, according to the New York-based U.N. Foundation.

The U.S. has accrued more than one billion dollars in outstanding bills at the U.N. for regular U.N. dues, peacekeeping operations and the capital master plan.

Compounding the problem, the U.S. Fiscal Year 2008 budget request of 1.1 billion dollars falls far short of the estimated 2.26 billion dollars that the U.S. will likely be assessed for peacekeeping in 2008.

The approval of the new hybrid peacekeeping mission for Darfur, Sudan (UNAMID) has expanded U.S. funding requirements. But to date, neither Congress nor the Bush administration has budgeted fully for UNAMID.

Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly on Darfur, Bush called the situation there a genocide and stressed that the ‘United Nations must answer this challenge to conscience and live up to its promise to promptly deploy peacekeeping forces to Darfur.’

‘President Bush admonished the U.N. to ‘live up to its promise to promptly deploy peacekeeping forces to Darfur.’ However, the administration has requested funding for only 20 percent of its share of the Darfur mission, and is heading towards a debt of more than one billion dollars for U.N. peacekeeping overall,’ Timothy E. Wirth, president of the U.N. Foundation, said following Bush’s remarks.

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[PDJane]

1. Typical Bush...........

point fingers, make statements about human rights violations (except the US violations), tell everyone what they have to do to solve the solution, but refuse to take any responsibility for the anything.