By Craig Cormick
Based on highly reliably international contacts, leaked documents and horoscopes from several TV magazines, Nostradamus' Media Watch presents a highly accurate forecast of political events across the globe.
In an effort to revive the flagging finances and credibility of its peacekeeping, the UN accepts a radical plan to commercialise peacekeeping forces.
Firstly, a peacekeeping contract is put out to tender to member nations, with the lowest quotes being received from Burma, El Salvador and Papua New Guinea.
The Burmese bid is the first to be rejected, because the troops are willing to operate only within the borders of Burma.
The PNG bid is also rejected when it is discovered that their prices for weapons, troops and ammunition are being underwritten by Australia.
The El Salvador troops are tried briefly in Rwanda, but are rejected when they insist on shooting civilians at random.
The UN next adopts a plan put forward by a consultant from the Harvard School of Business Studies to contract peacekeeping services to private industry. Again a short list is chosen. It consists of McDonald's, a consortium of Rollex-Raybans-Reeboks and the Church of Scientology.
Again the trials prove less successful than the UN hoped.
McDonald's bid is based on keeping warring nations standing in long lines and being too bankrupt to buy ammunition, too overweight to fit into their uniforms and more inclined to throw up than throw grenades.
The consortium's bid is based on a strategic plan put forward by a combined working group of their senior advertising executives, based on the premise that most wars are due to a lack of personal self-esteem, and if combatants only had their own Reebok shoes, Raybans sunglasses and Rollex watches, then their self-esteem would be lifted to the point that they no longer deemed it necessary to engage in warfare.
The plan is tried in the Middle East, but only serves to increase the dress sense and punctuality of combatants.
Finally, a crack squad of the Church of Scientology is sent into Cambodia, armed with clipboards, broad smiles and illustrated pamphlets. They quickly antagonise all the factions by constantly stopping busy soldiers on jungle tracks and coercing them into taking personality tests.
The Security Council finally gives in to constant calls from a distant cousin of one of the key members, who comes before the assembly to outline the Amway peacekeeping proposal.
The Amway Plan is based upon pyramid peacekeeping: each person converted to the cause of peace is awarded two personal body hygiene products and 50% of the products of the next persons they in turn recruit, and so on.
For six months the plan works, and peace is returned to the Balkans, until the bottom of the pyramid is reached, and then, one Serbian freelance militia, finding there is nobody left to exploit for an increased supply of bodily hygiene products, begin the fighting back up the pyramid, attacking other ethnic groups to claim their products and giving a whole new meaning to the term ethnic cleansing.