Sergio Burga, a young researcher who works out of our Latin American office, has just spent three tumultuous days at the UN's so-called World Youth Conference. Here is his first-hand report.
Vol. 12/No. 24
PRI's Sergio Burga, providing on-the-scene, in-depth coverage from Mexico as the U.N. launches its new attack on children and families.
The United Nations officials who set up the World Youth Conference 2010 (WYC) thought that they had everything under control. They had carefully choreagraphed the event in order to achieve the results that they wanted. But things at the conference, held in the city of Leon from August 25–27, did not go entirely as they had planned. The conference agenda was greeted by strong protests by many of the young people in attendance. The UN did not look kindly upon this deviance from its agenda, and expelled these young people from the event.
UNICEF, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNAIDS and other UN agencies had begun their preparation for WYC 2010 by handpicking about two hundred youth delegates from around the world to attend.
Their selection criteria was highly restrictive, so it is no accident that almost all of these "youth representatives" were actually radical activists of one stripe or another, ranging from leaders of pro-abortion organizations, to members of homosexual and radical feminist groups. At the same time, these UN agencies attempted to exclude all young people belonging to pro-life, pro-family groups. As the protests inside the conference showed, this effort was not enitrely successful.
Among the mainstream groups that were excluded from the conference was the International Youth Alliance (IYA). This is an umbrella organization that includes over 50 youth groups from Mexico, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and the U.S. The IYA publicly rejected the UN's pro-abortion and pro-homosexual policies and demanded that the UN respect the Latin American culture, with its strong emphasis on family values.
The UN, supported by the government of Mexico, had picked as the theme of the 2010 WYC the phrase “Say it Strong.” The International Youth Alliance brought together hundreds of young people excluded from the 2010 WYC on a march under the banner of "Say it Right." The contrast between the UN's loud propagandizing of falsehoods about life, family and human sexuality, and the IYC's insistence on telling the truth about these same subjects could not have been starker.
Another UN gambit—this one used to maintain iron-fisted control of the wording of the “Final Declaration”—was to make participation in the conference incredibly complicated. The public was given the impression that the declaration represented the collective voices of young people worldwide, but in fact it was drafted by UN bureaucrats. To further complicate matters, the WYC was divided into three tracks: the Social Forum (which itself was subdivided into an NGO forum and a gathering of the youth), the Government Forum, and the Legislative Forum. The three of these forums operated almost simultanously from the beginning to the end of the conference.
Even the hand-picked UN delegates had little input into the “Final Declaration.” These young people, as a few of them belately realized, were there only to provide window dressing. They were kept busy participating in workshops, thematic conferences and roundtables, and had little or no opportunity to ensure that their real opinions were reflected in the final document.
The Legislative Forum provided another example of this kind of anti-democratic manipulation. The Legislative Forum, according to the UN, will work independently of the Government Forum, since both will give their findings on the same day without any contact with each other. But this is just more window dressing. It is not difficult to see how the UN will use the Legislative Forum, which is packed with more of its hand-picked supporters from around the world—all there on the UN's dime—to approve another pre-fabricated “Declaration” which dovetails with the others.
Like China's one-party dictatorship with its rubber-stamp National People's Congress, the UN bureaucracy pays lip service to democratic forms while ensuring that its own party line prevails. And so we hear its young puppets declaring that abortion is a human right, the family is a social construct, and any expression of sexuality is OK.
Don't believe it.
