Sixty-five heads of state and governments, along with thousands of aid workers, politicians, civil society members journalists and celebrities, descended on Istanbul this week for the first-ever World Humanitarian Summit.
The U.N. sponsored the two-day summit hoping the high-level meetings could help jumpstart, or even fix, the world’s struggling aid system.
But leaders from some of the world’s wealthiest countries were nowhere to be seen. Only one out of the “Group of Seven” member states, who together made up nearly half of the global GDP last year, attended.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday slammed their failure to attend.
“It’s disappointing that some world leaders could not be here, especially from the G7 countries,” he said at a joint press conference with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday.
“The absence of these leaders from this meeting does not provide an excuse for inaction,” Ban continued. “They have a unique responsibility to pursue peace and stability.”
Angela Merkel was the only G-7 leader to show, most likely because she would like to avoid almost everything that’s going on for her back at home. I wouldn’t be surprised to find her at the grand opening of a petting zoo in Reykjavik next week.
There is also the fact that holding a “humanitarian summit” in Turkey to address the Syrian refugee crisis is a bit like having a college cheerleader abstinence camp in Bill Clinton’s hot tub.
It’s pretty sad that the UN can’t even command respect from the world leaders who keep it around for climate-hysteria propaganda purposes. It’s an increasingly complex and dangerous world, however.
Whenever the UN holds any sort of conference there is usually some attempt to extort guilt money from the most developed nations, so it’s easy to see why Ban Ki-moon is upset.
It’s harder to shake down people who aren’t there.
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