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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
In response to Smith's hearings last year, the U.N. sent its own team to China to investigate. It was headed by Niek Biegman, a former Dutch ambassador to NATO and current NATO ambassador to Macedonia. Biegman chaired several meetings at the U.N. Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, at which China agreed to a plan that stated, "The aim of family-planning programmes must be to enable couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children."
After his trip to China, Biegman concluded, "The UNFPA is very much in the business of helping the Chinese government fulfill its obligation under the Cairo Plan of Action, which is entirely based on a voluntary approach to family planning." He says that with UNFPA's help, the Chinese tested this "new paradigm" in six counties, later expanded to 32. "The UNFPA is expressly active in those cantons where [the Chinese] changed their policy to move away from coercion towards a voluntary policy and a choice of family planning methods," he says.
Of course, the U.N. might be expected to exonerate itself. Yet other delegations have come to similar conclusions. In April, a British delegation chaired by M.P. Edward Leigh, a Catholic member of the Conservative Party, went to China to investigate PRI's charges. Upon returning, Leigh told the Washington Times that "there was evidence UNFPA is trying to persuade China away from the program of strict targets and assessments. My personal line is British or U.S. funds should not be used for coercive family planning, and I found no evidence of such practices in China."
The U.S. State Department has come to similar conclusions. Its 2001 human rights report says that the counties in China where UNFPA operates "have eliminated the system of overall countywide birth and population targets that tends to generate coercive enforcement." Women in those counties can still be fined for having too many children, but Scruggs notes that while such fines are a human rights violation, if the UNFPA was limited to countries with spotless human rights records it wouldn't be able to work in much of the developing world.
Despite all the evidence disproving PRI's claims, the Bush administration recently dispatched a State Department team to investigate its allegations. That group has now returned, but Bush hasn't said whether he'll release the money if the team's report exonerates the UNFPA, as Scruggs expects it will. Meanwhile, a bill is making its way through the Senate that would force Bush to release the UNFPA funding "unless otherwise prohibited by law." On June 5, Bush threatened to veto it. "This is all about appeasing the far right even at the expense of Bush's credibility and honor," says Maloney.
The result of Bush's freeze has been a reduction in medical services to women worldwide. According to the UNFPA, in Bangladesh, where 67 percent of pregnant women receive no medical care, programs to train doctors to deal with pregnancy complications will be put on hold. In Vietnam, according to UNFPA field worker Tran Thi Van, a program to train 4,000 health workers in reproductive issues and to provide medical equipment and drugs to 500 remote clinics is in jeopardy. In Kenya, where the UNFPA has been working with the Catholic Church to prevent teenagers from getting AIDS, the church's request to expand the program will probably have to be rejected. Overall, UNFPA's funding shortfall is $52 million, because some other countries failed to meet their contribution targets due to financial constraints. The agency estimates that the lack of resources will result in 3 million unwanted pregnancies, 7,140 maternal deaths and, ironically, 1,215,000 abortions.
Nicholas Kristof suggested what some of the consequences of Bush's funding freeze could be in an April 26 New York Times column about Aisha Idris, a young Sudanese woman with fistula, a condition in which a woman's rectum, urethra and vagina are torn during childbirth, "leaving her incontinent and causing bodily wastes to seep through her vaginal canal and down her legs." The UNFPA, he wrote, "supports precisely the kind of third-world maternal health care programs that can save women's lives in childbirth and avoid medical complications like fistula. Yet the White House for now is crippling the fund by withholding the 13 percent of its budget that the United States provides."
What baffles people in the U.N. is why the U.S. is willing to let programs suffer based on reports by an organization fundamentally hostile to the UNFPA's mission. "It's not really understood by the rest of the world how a superpower like America can be influenced in such a deadly way by four or five fanatics," says Biegman. "It's amazing."
While, according to Mosher, PRI has 20,000 "supporting family members," only a handful of people seem to be active in the group. Nevertheless, those few have demonstrated an absolute genius for spreading their message through the media and attacking UNFPA and other international aid organizations. PRI is a fixture in the Washington Times, the right-wing newspaper owned by Sun Myung Moon. Mosher's Op-Eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, and he's appeared on ABC News to discuss his book "Hegemon: China's Plan To Dominate Asia and the World." Late last year, PRI's allegation that UNFPA was distributing abortion kits to Afghan refugees was picked up by the Vatican news agency Fides, which led to coverage by the French wire service Agence France-Presse. The charges were lies, Scruggs says -- in fact, the kits were for safe birthing and included rubber sheets, soap and clean razor blades for cutting umbilical cords.
Occasionally, PRI's attacks go beyond guerrilla media. During the 1999 war in Kosovo, PRI sent Austin Ruse to investigate UNFPA's work among Albanian refugees. Ruse made the rounds of local hospitals telling people that UNFPA was allied with Slobodan Milosevic. Ruse has made no secret of this -- in a January 2000 article for the Human Life Review titled "UN Pro-life Lobbying: Full Contact Sport," he called the U.N. one of the "key sources" for the "river of death" and wrote, "This still unfolding Kosovo tragedy really began in quiet and carpeted conference rooms at U.N. headquarters in New York City." Reached by phone, Ruse says, "The UNFPA gets really cozy with some very unsavory regimes."
Biegman, who learned of the PRI's rumor mongering when he went to Kosovo in 1999 to visit Dutch troops, called Ruse's actions "criminally irresponsible." Had the traumatized Albanians believed that the UNFPA had been complicit in Milosevic's genocide, "they might have killed the UNFPA people."
Mosher dismisses the idea that his people endangered overseas aid workers in Kosovo, writing via e-mail from Mexico, "UNFPA is not the victim in this scenario. It is important to focus attention on the victims and work towards their liberation."
To Mosher, the victims are the women the UNFPA serves. To Scruggs, they're the women it doesn't. "A woman dies every minute from pregnancy-related causes," he says. "Seventy-five to 80 percent of those deaths could be prevented. We're responsible for saving women's lives." That's why Congress and the administration agreed to fund it in the first place.
