Is UN used as a tool by powerful members?

Editor,The issue is not Steven Hege and his group of pyromaniacs. It is a UN system that has now become a tool used only by a few powerful members and their powerful lobbies rather than serving its entire membership. It is these same handful of states which appoint the Secretariat’s senior bureaucrats who, in turn, appoint the Heges with a brief to ride roughshod over the rights of the less powerful members, especially from Africa. African members of the UN must unite and reach out to other developing countries in Asia and Latin America to wrest control of the UN secretariat from the small cabal of mostly western countries who now dominate its decision-making process and use that domination to continue their colonial control of our affairs.Hege, his group and their shoddy work are merely a symptom of how the UN has become more of a hindrance than a tool for the majority of member states.Mwene Kalinda---------------------------------------Editor,Steven Hege characterizes the FDLR militia, whose leaders are either under indictment at the International Criminal Court at the Hague or on trial in Germany, as if its members are somehow victims, and not perpetrators, of mass atrocities. In a ‘fact sheet’ written in 2009 and entitled ‘Understanding the FDLR,’ Hege also described, falsely, the current Rwandan government as made up of illegitimate outsiders, a ‘Ugandan Tutsi elite,’ and that peace in our region is only possible ‘when international opinion eventually sours on the Rwandan regime’.With this in mind, can any solution or suggestion from Hege (on Rwanda) be credible No way, the UN made earlier faults, and even its former secretary general Mr. Kofi Annan recently was expressing his failure to act (to stop the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda). This is the time for the Security Council to understand that a regional approach may offer the right solution to the Congo crisis, not the biased so-called experts.Titus Gakwaya, Kigali(Reactions to the story, UN Experts in political campaign against Rwanda, The New Times, October 18)

Opinions

Is UN used as a tool by powerful members?