(Wall Street Journal) - Claudia Rosett The UN lavishes more than a quarter of a billion bucks a year on the Palestinians, darlings of every despot in the Middle East, while abandoning utterly a large group of refugees who are far hungrier, more dispossessed, and mortally in need of urgent help: the North Koreans. It's a contrast all the more bizarre when one considers that many of the UN-supported Palestinians have turned their refugee camps into bomb factories, while the hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees, almost all hiding in China and ignored by the UN, are not in the habit of blowing up anybody. For the Palestinians, the UN provides an exclusive agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, or UNRWA, set up way back in 1950 solely to minister to their needs. Over the decades, the number of Palestinians registered on the UNRWA dole has expanded from the original 750,000 to almost four million. UNRWA has become a vast entitlement program, with a network of headquarters in New York, Geneva, Cairo, Amman, and Gaza, and a staff of about 120 international workers and 22,000 Palestinians. UNRWA's annual budget last year totaled more than $280 million, with about one-third of that donated by U.S. taxpayers. This goes to needy innocents. But it also goes to the folks who danced for joy on Sept. 11, were just seen once again burning the American flag and cheering for Saddam Hussein, and who in UNRWA-supported schools have glorified the practice of sending people rigged as human cluster bombs to blow Israelis to bits. The business of UN refugee policy should be not with entitlements, but with emergencies. Scrap UNRWA, it's had its half century and then some. If the UN wants to run a special project devoted to the most vital and urgent refugee sufferings of the day, those with the true claim are the North Koreans now hiding or running for their lives inside China.
2003-01-09 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive