Lost Credibility

Quite seriously, why in the world would any body sponsored by the UN have any credibility whatsoever? The simple fact is that the UN is a mess and is actually getting worse. The most recent excavation by that body: the election of Zimbabwe to lead the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. That would be Robert Mugabe's disaster where inflation is currently running at 2200 percent annually. The nation that used to be an enormously productive exporter of food and now cannot even feed its own citizens. The country where political opposition is beaten and jailed.

UNITED NATIONS — Zimbabwe, a country suffering from acute food shortages and rampant inflation, won approval to lead the important U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development despite protests from the U.S., European nations and human rights organizations.

Africa nominated Francis Nhema, Zimbabwe's minister of environment and tourism, for the post, and the 53-member commission approved that recommendation Friday in a vote of 26-21 with three abstentions, said Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, the commission's vice chair.

The post rotates every year among regions of the world and it was Africa's turn to sit in the chair.

"We're very disappointed in the election of Zimbabwe as chair," said the U.S. representative to the commission Dan Reifsnyder, deputy assistant secretary for environment and science at the State Department.

"We really think it calls into question the credibility of this organization to have a representative from a country that has decimated its agriculture, that used to be the breadbasket of Africa and can't now feed itself," Reifsnyder said.

Zimbabwe is suffering its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, with acute shortages of food, hard currency, gasoline, medicines and most other basic goods. Official inflation is running at about 2,200 percent annually, the highest in the world.

Will the last shred of credibility leaving the UN please turn out the lights.