Bolton's sin is telling truth about system
May 15, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Remember the tsunami? Big story, 300,000 dead; America and other rich countries too "stingy" in their response; government ministers from every capital on earth announcing on CNN every 10 minutes more and more millions and gazillions. It was in all the papers for a week or two, but not a lot of water under the bridge since then, and as a result this interesting statistic may not have caught your eye:
Five hundred containers, representing one-quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on Dec. 26, are still sitting on the dock in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed.
At the Indonesian port of Medan, 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.
Four months ago, did you chip in to the tsunami relief effort? Did your company? A Scottish subsidiary of the Body Shop donated a 40-foot container of "Lemon Squidgit" and other premium soap, which arrived at Medan in January and has languished there ever since because of "incomplete paperwork,'' according to Indonesian customs officials.
Well, those soapy Scots were winging it -- like so many of us, eager to help but too naive to understand that, no matter the scale of devastation visited upon a hapless developing nation, its obstructionist bureaucracy will emerge from the rubble unscathed. Yet, among the exhaustive examples of wasted Western generosity unearthed by the Financial Times, what struck me was not the free-lancers but the permanent floating crap game of international high-rollers who couldn't penetrate the labyrinth of Indonesian paperwork.
The rest of the article is at the link and it tells a tale of the UN and government bureaucracy at work. Most Americans according to the polls support the UN. In my ignorance even I did at one time but not now. The truth needs to ring out and the American people once they hear it enough their support will erode away and wash out like the tide. It should not take a tsunami of dead and dying to get the truth but mankind is sorta deaf that way. ¶ 5:39 AM 12 comments
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/09/nslave09.xml
I've run out of tears, says girl sold around Britain as a sex slave at the age of 15
By Nigel Bunyan(Filed: 09/05/2005) May Ninth, 2005 for the confused
She is 16 now and sitting on the sofa that, at night, becomes a put-up bed for her and her elder sister.
Behind, set against the floral wallpaper and clutter of cheap ornaments, are the pictures of Roman Catholic saints so treasured by her grandmother.
Elena at her home in Lithuania, eight months after escaping gangsters who touted her around Britain
It is eight months since the once-confident teenager escaped from the gang of people-traffickers who sold her into slavery.
The scars on her wrists have begun to fade, but still she is reluctant to hold her visitors' gaze. Whenever she does, her deep brown eyes carry a sadness that no child should have to bear. There are no tears, though. "I have run out of tears," she says.
She can only talk about her ordeal while her 76-year-old grandmother is away from the tiny fourth-floor flat. She knows nothing of the girl's suffering, nor of what the teenager perceives as shame.
Elena is just one of thousands of eastern European girls smuggled into the West every year - most of them sold as sex slaves.
Last year, in Britain, she was passed from one pimp to the next, initially for £4,000, eventually for £1,500, her value as a human trophy diminishing as her childhood was stripped away.%2
