Who is the Congress Punishing over the UNESCO vote?

The Congress is punishing millions of innocent people. They are wrong to do so. We the American electorate are to blame!

Last month the General Conference of UNESCO voted to grant membership to Palestine. The vote was 107 yes, 14 no, with 52 abstentions. The U.S. Congress a couple of decades ago passed laws stating that if any UN specialized agency ever gave Palestine membership, the United States would withhold its contributions -- assessed and voluntary -- from that Agency. So the United States promptly announced we would immediately start withholding contributions to UNESCO, starting with the $20 million due in November 2011, as well as the 22 percent of the budget we contribute to the biennium in the next biennium and all voluntary contributions.

So who suffers? The most immediate people to suffer were people on contract to UNESCO. The Director General in immediate response to the financial crisis that the American action had caused ordered that all the contracts for personal services be cancelled immediately. Of course, the contract personnel had nothing to do with the vote of the diplomats in the General Conference. I once worked on contract for a specialized agency of the UN system  (I had a young son and my wife was not working at the time) and I could empathize with the people who were suddenly and unexpectedly out of work with only a few days notice.

Here is another example. The United States is trying to reestablish government functions in Afghanistan as our military is pulling out after the invasion and a decade of occupation. An important part of that effort is putting an effective police force in place, and thousands of policemen are being hired. Unfortunately the educational system in Afghanistan has been so poor and so damaged that many of these young men are illiterate. So the U.S. Government agreed to make a voluntary contribution to UNESCO so that the Organization could manage the effort to train these thousands of policemen to read and right. Now of course, we will not fund that work. So thousands of young men in Afghanistan who were led to believe that they would be taught to read and write will find that the United States is reneging on that promise. It is bad enough to condemn young men to lives as illiterates, and worse to offer hope and then withdraw it. But denying policemen the power to read and write threatens their safety as well as that of the people they serve.

UNESCO is coordinating the development of a global warning system against tsunamis. As the Indonesian tsunami in 2006 and the Japanese tsunami this year demonstrated, a tsunami that hits without warning can kill tens of thousands of people. If the cut in funding delays UNESCO's work in creating a warning system, and a tsunami hits, people may die. Even if no tsunami hits, the delay will have placed people at unnecessary risk of their lives.

Hundreds of millions of children around the world are denied the right to go to school. UNESCO is the key player holding national governments responsible for coming through on their commitments to educate these kids. With a budget shortfall, UNESCO will be less effective in that effort, and some kids who would have been educated with UNESCO's help, will wind up denied that schooling. They will suffer the rest of their lives.

Thus our legislators in their wisdom are inflicting suffering and risk on huge numbers of blameless people. It is not the diplomats that voted in Paris who will suffer, nor the officials in their nations' capitols who told them how to vote who will suffer.

Remember the kid with the only ball in the neighborhood who threatens to take it home with him if he is not chosen to be team captain? That is the way that the Congress has behaved, but it is the American public that is seen by the world as a bully that uses its money to deny the majority will.

And of course, they will be right. We the American voters have put our legislators in office and we have failed to pay attention to the laws they passed in order to demand that bad laws be repealed and mediocre laws be improved. It is our fault that our legislators are hurting blameless people in retaliation for an action in Paris for which they had no influence.