Our mission was to conduct an oil field survey across a region that was held by well armed and motivated rebel forces – what we would call a high risk mission. We had a good team who planned smart and executed well. What we discovered was heart breaking.

This leaking oil valve was but one across a vast facility that had been leaking for months. Opposition forces had overrun the facility and intentionally damaged it knowing that reduced oil output would weaken the government economically and increase the political position of the opposition.

This moronic ‘economic terrorism’ not only hurts the civil population, the majority of whom are well below the poverty line already, but it also destroys the environment and causes long term health issues for the agrarian society that live off the land.

A type of ‘collective punishment’ it is amongst the worst forms of terrorism that rarely gets mentioned in the press yet it is also relatively easy for a professional government to deal with. Unfortunately, for a lot of developing nations, the rulers have come to power not through popularity or competence but rather through brutality…a trait which rarely translates well into good governance – including the governance necessary to raise, train and sustain a professional security force. A strong advertisement for democracy!

The only way out of poverty is to increase employment and this is all about developing markets; both domestic and foreign. In order to develop these markets businesses, require both political and physical security for their investments. In the above mentioned country Billions of dollars of investment has been lost and the clean up bill will be phenomenal if it is ever even tackled. The loss of output and investment has damaged the economy for a generation and increased the likelihood of violence as the local population will struggle even more to meet their basic needs.

Unfortunately, the UN in this instance, and in many others around the world, failed to act. On the contrary, it resupplied the opposition forces who were destroying the nation. Knowingly airdropping food supplies to civil populations in rebel held territories ensured the rebels were better fed than the Government forces and able to sustain their collective punishment indefinitely.

The UN was born of blood – including many members of my own family. To see where it has got to today has me seriously questioning its leadership and whether it is fulfilling its stated goal ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’.