There's something kind of mesmerizing about this video, and I can't help but play it over and over again. The animation is gorgeous, even as it portrays a bombed-out generic village, overrun by ghoulish combatants, broken buildings, and a child playing with a blue ball in a field of bright red landmines. "Civil administration is destroyed and everywhere, insecurity reigns," a sympathetic voice-over intones as a U.N. personnel carrier patrols the street, the first stage in a U.N. effort to put this place right again.
The video outlines the key stages of U.N. post-conflict rebuilding: de-mining, disarming of combatants, and the reintegration of fighters into society as teachers, mechanics, farmers and small-business owners. Next come the courts, the police stations and the prisons. The ghoulish combatants go through one side of a makeshift U.N. building -- which resembles the U.N.'s temporary headquarters building at the Manhattan compound -- and come out the other looking like fresh-faced members of a new national police force. A better life, certainly, but there's something about the image of the well-ordered future it portrays that gives me the creeps.
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