The head of the United Nations Population Fund, Dr. Thoraya Obaid, said at a recent conference that a United States war with Iraq would “open the gates of hell” and that the way to fight terrorism and oppression was through tackling poverty.
Obaid told BBC News Online,
Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, said last month that war against Iraq would ‘open the gates of hell’ in the Middle East, with instability across the region.
He was right, nobody wants war, and I pray that this one will be averted, because if it breaks out it will destroy people, lives and futures.
To fight terrorism you have to fight the root causes of injustice — poverty, disease, joblessness. Nobody can live without hope.
If by 2015 we can realize the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to halve global poverty, then we’ll be turning our faces against injustice.
First, the Millennium Development Goals are largely a bad joke — just another attempt by the United Nations to talk the world out of poverty. Look at Obaid’s own region of the Middle East. It is one of the few areas of the world that has been declining economically for the last couple decades. If anything, the Middle East is too stable with theocratic dictatorships having a stranglehold on the regions.
Second, Obaid apparently would just write off Iraqi citizens as well as the millions in the region that would be threatened should acquire nuclear weapons.
This is not to say that the case for a war against Iraq is cut and dried or even that it makes sense, but Obaid’s reasons for opposing a war don’t make a lot of sense since it’s hard to imagine the Middle East having fewer prospects than it already has.
Interestingly Obaid has no problem with lives being destroyed when it comes to forced abortion. She also complained to the BBC about the U.S. cutoff of funding to UNFPA that would have went to China,
That’s 12% of our total funding. It really is a crisis for us. We have nothing to do with abortion at all. So our other programmes are now going to suffer because of an issue we don’t even touch.
That’s just nonsense. UNFPA spending frees up money for China to spend enforcing its one child policy. All China has to do is allocate the money it spends on the one child policy on alternative family planning-related activities.
Source:
UN population head’s war warning. Alex Kirby, The BBC, October 9, 2002.