To the Editor:
As a Penn alumnus and a parent of a graduating senior, I read with interest that the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan would be the Commencement speaker this year. Annan's term as secretary-general has been marked by scandals and mismanagement, including sex abuse by peacekeepers in Africa, the cronyism and fraud of the oil for food program and the travesty called the U.N. Relief Works Agency.
On Annan's watch, Palestinian terrorists worked unfettered in UNRWA-supervised camps, while the descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948 continued on as the modern world's only permanent refugees. Instead of finding them homes, they remain trapped in camps by an UNRWA bureaucracy committed to perpetuating their refugee status along with their own positions and perks. These unfortunate Palestinian Arabs are a stark contrast to tens of millions of 20th century refugees who have been resettled, including the many hundreds of thousands of Jews who fled Arab countries in the middle of the last century. All of this was done to them at the behest of a United Nations more interested in having a cause for condemning Israel than in helping those displaced.
For the rest of the world, refugees are those who left, not their descendants. Only the Palestinian Arabs have permanent refugee status, handed down from generation to generation like the honorifics of British nobility, fostered by a United Nations bureaucracy that has squandered billions, under the direction of Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Maybe Annan is the best Penn could do. Ken Lay is probably busy in May.
John Cohn
College '72
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