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UN Performance Problems UN Management Accountability Struggles Where is the Rule of Law? Inadequate UN Oversight Recent Developments
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In the past few years some excellent books have assessed the cruelties of mankind in the
20th and the early 21st century.
IO Watch notes four of them here, with
a quote from one: it will add more from the other three later. "Some ordinary villages are
peaceful and well policed.
The global village is of another kind. It has feuds and vendettas which
often break into violence. All the inhabitants are armed. The part-time police force is
amateurish and weak. It is
run by a committee of villagers who rarely agree on what it should do.
Powerful neighbors sometimes suppress violence by force. Peace will only come to such a
village when the rule of law is imposed." Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Chapter 18, "The political containment of tribalism: Policing the global village:", Yale, New Haven, CT, 1999, p. 140, Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour, Unmasking administrative evil, Sage, Thousand Oaks CA and London, 1998, Eric D. Weitz, A century of genocide: Utopias of
race and nation, Princeton University, Princeton NJ (USA) and Oxford
(UK), 2003, and Benjamin A. Valentino, Final solutions: Mass killing and genocide in the 20th century, Cornell University, Ithaca NY (USA) and London, 2004.
Even more important
are two recent books which analyse directly and quite effectively the UN's
recent efforts to deal with genocide, and are among IO Watch's top sources
on UN management accountability issues overall (see UN Management Accountability Bibliographic
Lists.)
The first of these books deals specifically with the United
Nations handling of the Rwanda genocide, as seen from New York. The second
covers Bosnia, Rwanda and related crises from the perspective of a former
war correspondent in the field who is also a
scholar. Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda, Cornell University, Ithaca NY (USA) and London, 2002, and Samantha Power, The problem from hell: America and the age of genocide, Basic Books, New York, 2002. A further recent
reflection comes from the ceremonies in January 2005, including at the UN
General Assembly, to commemorate the liberation of the Nazi death camps 60
years ago. "It is a place where Adolf
Hitler's Nazis murdered the Jews, I heard myself saying. Even as I answered my 11-year-old
son's question about Auschwitz, I shuddered inwardly at the inadequacy of
the response.
Summarized in a sentence or two, the Holocaust sounded too
much like just another of the shaming, but discrete events that sometimes
deface the pages of European history.
The sadism and cruelty of
individuals sits alongside the complicity of politicians and others well
beyond Germany's borders
I wonder whether there might also
be another danger: that as the Holocaust slips into the unremembered past,
it will seem to belong to the history of the Jewish people rather than to
that of Europe.
At the most conservative
estimate, well over 60 million people died in Europe's wars and
concentration camps during the last century. The slaughter in Stalin's
terror camps
the murderous toll of Hitler's Germany
Bosnia and Kosovo
[as]
a chilling reminder
To gaze at the images of
Auschwitz and try to comprehend how so many could be complicit in such
barbarism is to realize just how thin is the boundary between civilisation
and inhumanity." Philip
Stevens, "The sense of shame that obliterates all borders", Financial
Times (UK), January 28, 2005. These genocides continue on and on, and the UN is at
the center of dealing with them, or should be. But responses
seem not to change, amounting to repeated late interventions rather than a
commitment to take all possible preventive actions. IO Watch will maintain
this topic as the last and worst UN major problem, and below presents key
quotes that have appeared along the way. IO Watch will continue to add material since this
section, too, is most regrettably open-ended.
" [UN
Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar said]
. I was, of
course, gratified by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize last year to
United Nations peace-keeping operations
. However,
. careful thought needs to be
given to how the purpose and scope of peace-keeping operations can be
adapted to the evolving and rapidly changing world situation.
.
Peace-keeping missions will have to
. be adjusted to types of situations
not encountered before.
. The financing of peace-keeping operations has
presented difficulties time and again.
. Such serious undertakings, in
which lives are at stake, cannot be initiated or conducted with divided
counsel about their details and with expectations of short-cuts. Although
linked with international diplomacy, peace-keeping by the United Nations
must conform to the highest standards of military efficiency
.
. Lacking a
concerted effort to achieve a just and lasting settlement of the dispute
underlying a conflict, the mounting of peace-keeping operations or
mediation can produce an illusion of calm, beneath which resentments
fester, threatening new outbreaks of hostilities. This has
often been forgotten in the past, but ignoring it in future can present
incalculable dangers to peace." "Address by Secretary-General on peace-keeping in 1990s", United Nations Press Release SG/SM/1039, November 2, 1989. [emphasis added]
"For a decade, the
Cambodian question has been addressed by the United Nations as if only one
issue were of international concern: Vietnam's illegal invasion and
occupation.
The other grave issue, the crimes against humanity committed by Pol
Pot and his government, have been ignored in order to ensure that Vietnam
left Cambodia.
. The
Vietnamese army has finally gone, according to all available
information.
[Now] Pol Pot's
army is leading an offensive in a new civil war. Stopping the Khmer
Rouge cannot be considered [or dismissed as] an 'internal' problem for
Cambodians.
The international community has been actively involved in the
Cambodian war since 1979. [It should be equally involved in
seeking] a peaceful political settlement and a immediate end to the civil
war. The United Nations
could
work with the Paris conference on Cambodia for the cease-fire.
You will hear
arguments that the Cambodian question is very complicated and subtle and
requires morally ambiguous solutions. Consider only one fact: Cambodia is
at war.
. If the Khmer Rouge win, there will be nothing complicated or
subtle or ambiguous about their genocidal rule. It will
happen again." Elizabeth Becker and William Shawcross, "Act now to stop another Cambodian catastrophe", International Herald Tribune, November 14, 1989. Note: Ms. Becker is
author of When the war was over, a history of
the Cambodian revolution. Mr. Shawcross is author of The quality of mercy: Cambodia, holocaust and modern
conscience.]
"It wasn't only
that UN officials refused to take any initiative in Somalia. Far worse,
they even declined to act when asked [in July 1991]. Why was the UN so
loath to act, to play the mediating, peacekeeping role for which it was
established?
The answer is institutional, bureaucratic caution, and personal
ambition
UN officials were reluctant to try for fear of being associated
with failure.
If, in the future, the UN hopes to avoid failures
like that in Somalia, it will need to change on a more fundamental level.
. Above all, if the UN is to be effective, it must be
accountable.
'The UN is probably the least accountable bureaucracy in the
world --
a main reason not only for the cataclysm in Somalia but for the
persistence of famine through Africa', said Alex de Waal, a British
anthropologist who has studied the UN's response to famines.
. 'Officials who are responsible for hundreds of
thousands of deaths must face the prospect of prosecution, not
promotion.'
. There is also the
need for a freedom of information act, so UN officials cannot hide from
the public everything from their salaries to their mistakes to how much
they're spending on public relations. And finally, there must be an
independent watchdog organization with full power to investigate U.N.
agencies. The General
Assembly has the authority to establish a commission of inquiry to examine
what went wrong in Somalia, but it has never examined its own
performance." Ray Bonner,
"Why we went": How the United Nations turned its back on Somalia and
subverted the best chance for peace", Mother
Jones, (USA), March-April 1993, pp.
54-60.
[emphasis added] [Note: the full
article is available at MotherJones.com under the
author's name.] "It's been a bad
year for peacekeeping -- and for the United Nations, which
..
was expected to be the agency of a new world order.
. There are 13
peacekeeping operations underway, a record number.
. [and] More than
50,000 soldiers and police officers wear the blue headgear
. United Nations
peacekeepers are criticized all over the world. Their rules
of engagement, and their lack of heavy weapons and air support, prevent
them from doing any real fighting. The U.N. philosophy
. is 'to show that
you're a friend. Sometimes this works'
. Other times,
.
troublemakers 'see this as weakness.' In some hardship
posts, U.N. officials live embarrassingly well. They are paid
$140 a day for expenses in Cambodia -- where the average annual wage is
$110.
Salvadorans refer to the United Nations as the 'Vacaciones Unidas'
(United Vacations). Yet back in New York, peacekeeping and
humanitarian staffers are crushed by overwork. With the Cold War
over, the United Nations probably needs to be reinvented or at least
overhauled
. The first requirement is a clear idea of what the United
Nations can do
--
and what it should not even attempt to do." Russell Watson with
Anne Underwood, "Perils of peacekeeping: With more operations than ever,
the United Nations is stumbling badly", Newsweek, February 15,
1993, pp. 13-14.
"It is not easy to
admit the truth of Srebrenica, the Bosnian town where thousands of Muslim
men were executed and hundreds buried alive
But in its
report on Monday, the United Nations accepts its share of the blame.
. The UN
Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, should be commended for this stark
admission.
The question, however, is whether his honesty will spur bolder
peacekeeping in the future.
.
. In the
recent case of East Timor, the council supported the idea of a UN
referendum on independence but refused to send troops to deter a bloodbath
that was widely predicted. Sometimes the
United Nations' failure is built into its structure. Where a
permanent member of the Security Council opposes intervention, no action
will be authorized -- hence the current UN silence about war
crimes in Chechnya, and its early impotence on Kosovo. But in cases
where the Security Council does approve action, it is fair to insist that
it be serious.
The UN member states need to embrace force to secure peace; they
need to shove neutrality aside and denounce evil in order to combat it.
." "The UN apologizes", The Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, November 19, 1999. "Just a month after
the United Nations released a self-incriminating report on the massacre in
the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, an equally damning report has appeared on
Rwanda.
During 100 days in 1994, a staggering 800,000 civilians were
slaughtered in this small Central African state. The United
Nations had 2,500 troops in the area in early 1994. All but a few hundred
were withdrawn when the killing started.
. Given its
membership, the United Nations will never meet all of the world's many
humanitarian challenges. But it should at least avoid empty efforts
that serve to excuse the world's inaction.
. If the world's
leading governments are indifferent to genocide, the United Nations should
not act as the vehicle for token interventions to hide their shame. It should use
that shame to fight indifference; it should broadcast the horror of
genocide to voters and stir the outrage that might produce serious
intervention.
[Secretary-General Kofi] Annan likes to say that the United Nations
should not be neutral in the face of evil. Indifference to evil is not a matter
for polite neutrality, either." "Confession on Rwanda", The Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, December 21, 1999.
"A damning report
issued Thursday by an international panel of experts holds both United
Nations officials and leading member countries, primarily the United
States, responsible for failing to prevent or stop the genocide in which
hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were slaughtered in 1994.
. the leader
of the investigation, Ingvar Carlsson, a former Swedish prime minister,
said
. it was 'hard to understand' why the Security Council decimated the
peacekeeping force in Rwanda, reducing it to a few hundred from 2,500
troops when the genocide began, and then increased the force to
5,500 when the weeks of massacres were over.
. 'Information
received by a United Nations mission that plans are being made to
exterminate any group of people requires an immediate and determined
response,' the report said.
. The panel found
that a cable from [General Romeo Dallaire of Canada] in January 1994
warning of Hutu plans for massacres of Tutsi was not given to
Secretary-General [Butros Butros-Ghali], whom activists in Europe have
attempted to charge with genocide.
. [That cable] has
become the center of accusations that the United Nations could have
predicted genocide and did nothing.
." Barbara Crossette, "UN bungled intervention in Rwanda, inquiry says", International Herald Tribune, December, 1999.
"After the humiliating failures of United Nations
peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia and Rwanda there was a consensus
. that new ways of undertaking them [needed urgently
to be] developed. That is what makes the recent decision
to deploy 5,500 U.N. peacekeepers to the Democratic Republic of the Congo
so incomprehensible.
. As the United Nations itself now concedes, [the
efforts] in Rwanda and Bosnia
never had either the means or the mandate to
accomplish anything more than a bit of marginal humanitarian relief. [Yet in] the
proposed Congo deployment
. the identical mistakes are being made once
again.
The fact that they are being made with the best of intentions
alters nothing, and may, in fact, make the effects of what will almost
certainly be another catastrophic failure all the more damaging. For to the
public, the fact that the mission has neither the funding nor the
authority to do much of anything will not be clear. Instead, it
will seem as if the world tried to do something for Africa, but nothing
could be done.
Such a conclusion helps nobody, least of all those Africans who
deserve so much better from the rest of the world." David Rieff, "Making the same mistakes: Memo to the United Nations: A peacekeeping mission to Congo may do more harm than good", Newsweek, March 20, 2000. [Note: Mr. Rieff is
the author, among other books of A bed for the
night: Humanitarianism in crisis, Simon and Schuster, New York,
2002.]
"[Jiri Dienstbier]
. the special rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, [has
bluntly declared] that the peacekeeping mission [in Kosovo] has failed 'to
achieve a single goal; neither security for people nor freedom of
movement, not to mention creating conditions for the develop of democratic
institutions in a multiethnic society.'
. This is a message Western leaders don't
want to hear --
and strenuously seek to refute.
. Just how bad is the
situation on the ground?
. Crime, gangs, and the heroin trade are all
flourishing.
. Bernard Kouchner,
the head of the U.N. administration in Kosovo, has few resources at his
disposal so far.
. Today, NATO still
insists on the fiction that Kosovo is a multiethnic autonomous province
within Yugoslavia.
. But it's time to
get real
. Peacekeeping missions are proliferating in remote areas
-- East
Timor, Sierra Leone, Georgia.
. 'If we can't turn the situation around in
a tiny area with 1.7 million people who are mostly on our side, it's the
end of humanitarian interventionism everywhere' argues NATO spokesman
Jamie Shea.
An overblown prediction, perhaps -- but only a tad, I'd say." Andrew Nagorski,
"The perils of peacekeeping" A year after the NATO air war, the result of
NATO's efforts is a highly volatile mess", Newsweek, April 17,
2000, p. 2.
"
. The Security
Council pledged 11,100 troops for the Sierra Leone operation, which would
make it the biggest current peacekeeping force and a test case for UN
resolve in Africa. It is not going well
. The UN force is
supposed to monitor a peace deal, signed last July
. [but a] recent UN
report accused the RUF rebels of continuing to terrorise civilians. 'There have
been almost daily reports of looting of villages, house burnings,
harassment and abductions of civilians, rape and sexual abuse,.'
. [and]
cannibalism and chopping off limbs have been RUF specialties.
. [This may be
occurring with rebel leader Foday Sankoh's] blessing, or even
encouragement.
His attitude to peace and the UN is troubling. He recently
told UN officers: 'The UN has no reason to be in Sierra Leone. We have no
business with you. You are not helping us, [you are] a
threat to the security of our people.' For good measure, he described
President [Ahmed Tejan] Kabbah as an agent of colonialism and called
[Secretary-General Kofi] Annan 'a nuisance.'" "Sierra Leone: Out
of control", The Economist, May 6, 2000, p. 43.
"Nine days ago, a
Security Council delegation went to Africa to assess] small hopes for
lasting peace
. A lot was at stake,
they thought: the political and economic stability of at least six
countries; the fabulous wealth of Democratic Republic of the Congo itself
. and the future of United Nations peacekeeping. [When they returned
to New York]
. Congo had all but receded to the background. But broader
concerns about Africa and its evolving political leadership had
mushroomed.
[A US official
assessed ] the costs of African wars: 'Of the 4 to 5 million people who
have died in communal and regional conflicts worldwide over the past
decade, more than 3 million have died on this continent.
. The
most obvious threat to peace comes from the barrel of a gun or the blade
of a machete
. But insecurity can also come from corrupt politicians; it
can come from crime lords and narcotics syndicates. It can come
from diamond mines as well as land mines.'
. buffeted by
events, several of the diplomats spoke at they headed home about the
profound unease they felt about Africa's future, given the demonstrated
willfulness of key leaders." Barbara Crossette, "A continent is seething: No remedy for Africa", International Herald Tribune, May 11, 2000. [emphasis added.]
"The UN seems to
survive only by forgetting. By forgetting, it it manages to repress
a legacy of shame. In 1994,
. Rwanda, in 1995,
.
Srebrenica
. Only last autumn, Secretary-General Kofi Annan vowed to
learn from these catastrophes. Now a new catastrophe unfolds.
. The UN's department
of peacekeeping operations knew that the contingents in Sierra Leone were
under-strength and poorly equipped, yet it failed to protest publicly when
the Security Council sent them anyway.
. Institutional
amnesia locks the United Nations system into a fatal compulsion to
repeat.
An incorrigible moral narcissism about its own good intentions
makes it unable to recognize that its central ideal and instrument --
peacekeeping -- is so flawed that it must be abandoned
altogether.
. Where peace has to
be enforced rather than maintained, what's required are combat-capable
warriors under robust rules of engagement [with strong support] and a
single line of command to a national government or regional alliance.
. But the largest
lesson of all is that peacekeeping is destroying the United Nations
itself.
If it still values its own survival, it must abandon an ideal that
it has so comprehensively betrayed." Michael Ignatieff, "A bungling UN is undermining itself", International Herald Tribune, May 16, 2000. [Note: Mr. Ignatieff is the author inter alia of Virtual war: Kosovo and beyond.]
"
both the
Security Council and the UN Secretariat had compiled an entirely
inglorious record in the months preceding the [Rwanda] genocide.
the UN
Secretariat went far beyond being merely neutral bureaucrats carrying out
the wishes of their political masters in the Security Council. Time and
again, they imposed on UNAMIR the tightest constraints imaginable
The Secretariat did not exercise its right to
function as an advocate with the Security Council by [urging members]
to
take more positive action.
Their record is a dark stain on the UN and
themselves.
[In mid-1998],
Secretary-General Annan [ a direct participant]
traveled to Kigali and
apologized
'Looking back now
we see the signs
what we did was not nearly
enough
'
Rwandan officials, who had no doubt whatsoever about the signs
available, were furious with the Secretary-General's performance. The price of the [international] betrayal was paid by
countless Rwandans
In contrast,
[of the key Security Council or Secretariat actors]
No one resigned
Many of their careers have flourished
greatly
Instead of international accountability, it appears that international
impunity is the rule of the day." Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, Report of The International Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda and the Surrounding Events, Organization of African Unity, 7 July 2000, Chapter 15, The world during the genocide: The United Nations, Belgium, France, and the OAU", paras. 15.1, 15.34-.36, and 15.41. [emphasis added.] [Note: The entire
report is available at the Aegis Trust website at "Secretary-General
Kofi Annan has called publicly for a rethinking of the international
institutions "that were largely sidelined during the Iraq war.
. The war [in
Iraq] and more recent crises in Africa 'force us to ask ourselves whether
the institutions and methods we are accustomed to are really adequate to
deal with all the stresses of the last couple of years.' Suggesting that
some world leaders at the upcoming General Assembly should set aside time
for basic discussions on these issues, he said: If we are going to make
preventive action, or war, part of our response to these new threats, what
are the rules?
Who decides? Under what circumstances? Did what
happened in Iraq constitute an exception? A procedure others can exploit? What are the
rules?'
. At one point,
recalling the bitter dismissals of the United nations last winter, he
said, with a bare hint of satisfaction, 'I did warn those who were bashing
the UN that they had to be careful because they may need the UN
soon.'" Felicity Barringer, "Annan urges rethink of UN role in crises", International Herald Tribune, August 1, 2003. [Note: in comparing
this quote with
former Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar's wise comments of
1989 above, it is sad to note the almost total lack of UN progress in
thinking about developing lasting preventive solutions rather than just
putting out fires.]
"While much U. S.
political debate is focused on
. reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan
. [Sudan seems destined to get nothing although] it is on the brink of a
historic peace agreement that could end the world's longest and most
destructive civil conflict.
.
. More than 2
million have perished [in Sudan's 20-year civil war]
.
. 5 million have
been internally displaced
. and in southern Sudan there is a total lack
of economic transport or communications infrastructure. If peace
finally arrives, the need for transitional aid will become extremely
urgent.
These people will
have no chance of resuming productive lives without very significant
assistance
.
. A
peacekeeping force, which should be deployed under UN auspices, may be the
most important element in any sustainable peace for Sudan.
.[and] Given
the high levels of humanitarian assistance that the United States has
provided
. for well over a decade, this seems the most ill-considered of
times to withhold promised funding.
. Sudan has suffered
decades of invisibility on the global stage, and Sudanese lives have
suffered a deeply disgraceful moral discounting. At its moment
of greatest hope this broken nation must not be betrayed once again." Eric Reeves, "A promise the U. S. must keep", International Herald Tribune, October 28, 2003. [Note: Once again (and in addition to the United States), where was and is the UN, and where is the "international community," in this urgent situation?]
"A number of
[Secretary-General] Annan's closest associates
believed their boss was
treated unfairly in the Rwanda report, because nothing he could have done
in the months before the genocide would have made the member states
more
willing to act
This amounts to saying that the genocide was inevitable, and the
peacekeeping mission useless from the outset. Annan himself
said much the same thing when we talked
before he left Sarajevo.
'I say, when
[the member states] knew, what did they do?' he told me. 'They
went to Rwanda, picked up their nationals, and left.' By
then, all hell had broken loose.
Even if Annan's decision to keep his
force commander's warnings to himself did no measurable harm -- and that is a
big, and unprovable, if -- the fact remains that not doing wrong
is a far cry from not doing right. The Security Council's pusillanimity in
the face of the slaughter is not in dispute, but what are we to make of
Annan's certainty that it would have been pointless to raise the alarm
months earlier?
How can he know when he didn't even try? 'Maybe we were
overly cautious', he said." Philip Gourevich, "The optimist: Kofi Annan's U.N. has never been more important and more imperiled", The New Yorker, March 3, 2003, pp. 51-73 [69]. [Note: Mr.
Gourevich is the author of We wish
to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories
from Rwanda, Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, New York, 1998, and
Picador, London, 1999, [Winner of the Guardian (UK) First Book
Award.] "In the Darfur
province of western Sudan, a slow-motion genocide has been taking place
while the rest of the world either pretends not to notice or finds excuses
for refusing to intervene.
The Darfur
atrocities have been going on for 16 months. If they are
not stopped immediately, the world will witness a human calamity on the
scale of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The UN special rapporteur
[said]
recently that the number of black Africans killed by Arab militias in the
Darfur region is 'bound to be staggering.'
Human rights groups
and others gripped by the horror of Darfur know what needs to be done to
save these refugees from death by starvation or from the cholera and
malaria that will inevitably rage through their crowded camps. But Khartoum's
pattern is to impede, obstruct and delay.
There is no other
way to stop the Darfur genocide other than a humanitarian
intervention.
In accord with the 1948 Convention on Genocide, the UN Security
Council should pass such a resolution and invite a coalition of willing
life savers to enter Darfur and rescue a million fellow human beings." "Stop the killing in Darfur", The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, July 16, 2004.
I am afraid
that moral condemnation, trade penalties and military efforts by African
countries are simply not going to be enough to stop the killing [in
Darfur]
--
not nearly enough. I know because Ive
seen it all happen before
[as the Canadian commander of] UN forces in
Rwanda when civil war began there and quickly turned into genocide. The conflict
was often portrayed as nothing more than an age-old feud between African
tribes
The United Nations,
emasculated by the self-interested maneuverings of the five permanent
members of the Security
Council, fails to intervene. Its only concrete step, the Security
Council resolution passed in July, all but plagiarizes the resolutions on
Rwanda 10 years earlier.
So in the end we
get [a]
few hundred observers from the African Union.
I believe that
mobile African Union troops supported by [well-equipped] NATO soldiers
could protect Darfurs displaced people, and eliminate or incarcerate the
Janjaweed. [Rwanda has
provided troops for Darfur as it vowed to do]
Having called what
happened in Darfur genocide and having vowed to stop it, it is time for
the West to keep its word as well. Romeo Dallaire,
The worlds failure to act: Looking at Darfur, seeing Rwanda, International Herald Tribune, October 5, 2004. Note: Mr. Dallaire
is a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University and
author of
Shake hands with the devil: The failure of
humanity in Rwanda, Caroll & Graf, New York, 2004 .
[emphasis added.]
"A debate currently
rages about whether Kofi Annan enjoys the moral authority to lead the
United Nations because the Oil for Food scandal happened under his
command.
[But] the salient indictment of Mr. Annan's leadership is lethal
cowardice, not corruption; the evidence is genocide, not oil.
10 years ago, [in
Rwanda]
some 800,000 bodies rotted in the African sun.
Most of the
U.N.'s armed troops [had] evacuated
abandoning vulnerable civilians to
their fate, which included, literally the worst things
a human being can
do to another human being. [In] Srebrenica ten
years ago, thousands of Muslim civilians [sought]
shelter at a U.N.
base.
But Serb militias separated the men and boys
and put them on
buses.
Armed Blue Helmeted U.N. Peacekeepers -- tasked under Mr. Annan's
leadership to protect them in this U.N.-declared 'Safe Area" watched
passively.
Across the street [now] lies a new cemetery and memorial for
the 8,000 fallen men of Srebrenica.
If anyone's values
have been betrayed at the U.N. over the years it is those of us who
believe most deeply in the organization's ideals. Just ask the
men and women of Rwanda and Srebrenica." Kenneth L. Cain,
"The real reason Kofi Annan must go", Wall Street
Journal, WSJ.com, Opinion Journal, December
21, 2004. [Note: Mr. Cain served in U.N. peacekeeping operations in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Liberia.] "Good intentions
pervaded ceremonies this week in the UN General Assembly to commemorate
the liberation of the Nazi death camps 60 years ago.
The event -- at
least on a symbolic level -- was a long overdue recognition of the moral
imperative of the United Nations' origins.
In [Kofi] Annan's
speech
, he lamented that 'the world has, to its shame, failed more than
once to pressure or halt genocide.' He invoked Cambodia, the former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He then said, 'Terrible things are
happening today in Darfur, Sudan.' But there is a
strange disconnect between Annan's words and deeds. In 1994, as
chief of UN peacekeeping, he disregarded pleas from the UN force commander
in Rwanda to intervene and stop a genocide in its planning stage or its
first few days.
And today Annan is presiding over a club of governments that
refuses to save civtims of genocide in Darfur from a Sudanese government
that is seated in the General Assembly. His profession of good intentions is
not enough to save lives. Under his leadership, the United
Nations is failing to live up to its original covation: the prevention of
more genocides." "The UN commission of inquiry that has compiled
devastating documentation of crimes against humanity in the
The
commission did find that the murdered civilians of
Moreover, the commission said these crimes were perpetrated 'on a
widespread and systematic basis.' Yet in what seems a
politically-motivated contortion of language and logic
the commission
decided that
In denying the existence of the
"UN
denial on "
Next to these tributes is another installation - a reproduction of the
infamous fax by the UN force commander, General Romeo Dallaire, imploring
the then head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, for authority to defend
Rwandan civilians - many of whom had taken refuge in UN compounds under
implicit and sometimes explicit promises of protection. Here, too, is Annan's faxed response - ordering
Dallaire to defend only the UN's image of impartiality, forbidding him to
protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next it details the withdrawal of UN
troops, even while
the assassins reigned
The
museum's silent juxtaposition of personal courage versus Annan's passive
capitulation to evil is an effective reminder of what is at stake in the
debate over Annan's future: when the UN fails, innocent people die. Under Annan,
the UN has failed, and people have died." Kenneth Cain, "How many more must die before Kofi
quits?", The Observer ( [Note: Mr. Cain is a former UN human rights lawyer
who served in U.N. peacekeeping operations in "It has been ten years since a five-day killing spree
under the eyes of the United Nations went on in the eastern Bosnian
enclave of Srebrenica. Ten years since the men were lined up
in the fields, holding each other and whispering, 'Are they going to kill
us? They
can't kill us,' before they were mowed down
Eight thousand men disappeared
Most of the bones
have not been found.
Most of the killers, the men who pulled the trigger
and tossed bodies in mass graves, still sit in cafιs in Srebenica; sipping
coffee and gloating over their victory.
The fact is, Srebrenica was more than a genocide
It
was a victory for ethnic cleansing. Srebenica
[now lies inside] the
Republika Srpska. The few Muslims who have gone back are
brave, because this is a haunted, spooky place. I sit in the cafι near the mosque and talk to
returned refugees huddled over their coffee cups.
How can you forget what happened? If women as gentle
as Senada or Nurija want to rip the throats off of the men who killed
their beloved men, how can these people ever live together again?" Janine de Giovanni, "Srebrenica: Anniversary of a
genocide", International Herald Tribune, July 9-10, 2005. [Note: Ms. Di Giovanni is the author of
Madness visible: A memoir of war, Knopf,
2003.] |
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