The More Things Change.....

The more they stay the same. The UN is once again proving this. Color me surprised.

Cuba says it won't cooperate with UN on human rights. Now this isn't particularly surprising. Cuba has not exactly been a model of virtue in the human rights arena historically, so their unwillingness to cooperate isn't a great shock.

But what about the UN? You would think that an organization that needs to prove its relevance to its biggest financial backers would actually try to take some kind of real action to fulfill a key goal of the organization. So if Cuba is fighting to keep the UN out they must be taking some kind of real action, right? Maybe the UN was proposing immediate sanctions or was going to create a coalition of nations to blockade the island and to strangle the Castro regime. It has to be something major, right?

Wrong. The UN merely wants to send a French magistrate over to the island to report back on the state of human rights in Castro's Cuba.

Maybe they missed the articles about the 75 political prisoners jailed for terms of up to 28 years. Perhaps the overlooked the all-but-summary executions of three ferry hijackers (due process in 72 hours?) They must have overlooked the extreme poverty and suffering in the countryside as they sat on the beach in Havana.

Or maybe the UN Human Rights Commission saw a bearded anti-American thug in a military uniform. And in him, they saw themselves. To impose real sanctions on Cuba would require real sanctions on others, including nations like Libya, the head of the UNHRC.

The UN has, since the end of WWII, talked in terms of lofty goals while doing almost nothing. Here they talk of protecting human rights, while attempting to get a report on one of the worst violators in the world. Maybe they should try reading the newspaper. The more things change, the more they remain the same.