Posted on 04/06/2005 7:41:38 AM PDT by jalisco555
Like its cousin, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Rwanda's stunning new genocide museum, perched on a quiet hillside overlooking Kigali, is at its most arresting when it honours the lost children. One installation invites us to consider David, a cute, shy boy, with big round black eyes: David's favourite sport was soccer; he enjoyed making people laugh; his dream was to be a doctor; he was tortured to death; his last words were: 'The UN will come to get us.'
Next to David's biography is Ariane's, four, stabbed in the eyes and head; Fillette, also four, smashed against a wall; Yves and Yvonne, three and five, hacked to death at their grandmother's house; Aurone, two, burnt alive in a chapel; and 12-year-old Mami, whose last words were: 'Mum, where can I run to?'
The children's installation is introduced by the words: 'They should still be with us.' A nearby display asks whether they could be. It honours the actions of ordinary people of courage. People like Yahaya, a 60-year-old Muslim who saved Beatha, who narrates her story: 'The killer was chasing me down an alley. I was going to die any second. I banged on the door of the yard. It opened almost immediately. He [Yahaya] took me by the hand and stood in his doorway and told the killer to leave. He said the Koran says if you save one life it is like saving the whole world. He did not know it is a Jewish text as well.' 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 blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate.
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.
His own legions have raped and pillaged. In two present scandals, over the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and sex-for-food in Congo, Annan was personally aware of malfeasance among his staff, but again responded with passivity.
Having worked as a UN human rights observer in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Liberia, there are two savage paradoxes for me here. The first is that, while the media and conservative politicians and pundits have suddenly discovered that the UN has been catastrophically incompetent, this is very old news to anyone with the mud (or blood) of a UN peacekeeping mission on his boots.
One very personal example: when I worked in Liberia in the mid-Nineties a new chief administrative officer was dispatched to Monrovia by the UN to replace the previous CAO, who was removed (then reassigned elsewhere) for taking a 15 per cent kickback on UN procurement contracts. In the name of cleaning up the old corruption, the new CAO tapped our phones, paid locals to spy for him and threatened to send home anyone who opposed him, all to facilitate his own quest for a 15 per cent kickback on everything we purchased.
The worst part was watching him try to coerce as many of his young 'local staff' to sleep with him as possible. A UN salary is enough money to support an entire extended family in a country such as Liberia, so these vulnerable women were in a tortuously compromised position by their boss's unwanted advances.
I was the human rights lawyer and these girls would come to my office in tears asking for help. I wrote memo after memo of complaint to my chain of command, but no one did anything. I even confronted the CAO personally. To no effect. When I visited the UN human resources office in New York to complain personally, they laughed at my naive outrage: 'It happens all the time in the field,' they said. 'There's nothing we can do.'
In the meantime, a quarter of a million Liberians died, and warring factions committed war crimes. And the UN did - nothing. Just as it was simultaneously doing nothing, more infamously, in Rwanda and Bosnia.
Before I met him in Liberia, that CAO, Krishna Gowandan, had been knocking around West Africa for years in various UN jobs, always mired in corruption, never disciplined, always promoted and reassigned - a pattern all too familiar at the UN - during which time the head of personnel was Kofi Annan. (Gowandan was eventually indicted by US federal prosecutors in New York for $1.5 million worth of fraudulent kickbacks on UN construction jobs. He has since died.)
What kind of leadership would tolerate this conduct 10 years ago? The answer is: precisely the same leadership that, 10 years later, permitted the oil-for-food scandal and the sex-for-food scandal. Why did it take everyone 10 years to figure this out?
The second searing irony for me is that the American neoconservative right has occupied the moral high ground in critique of Annan, outflanking the left, which sits on indefensible territory in his support. But if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, then what is? If anyone's values have been betrayed, it is those of us on the left who believe most deeply in the organisation's ideals. I am mystified by the reluctance of the left both in the US and the UK (the Guardian 's coverage, for example) to criticise Annan's leadership. The bodies burn today in Darfur - and the women are raped - amid the sound of silence from Annan. How many genocides, the prevention of which is the UN's very raison d'être, will we endure before the left is moved to criticise Annan? Shouldn't we be hearing the left screaming bloody murder about the UN's failure to protect vulnerable Africans? Has it lost its compass so badly that it purports to excuse the rape of Congolese women by UN peacekeepers under Annan's watch? Is stealing money intended for widows and orphans in Iraq merely a forgivable bureaucratic snafu?
I am co-author of a book critical of Annan's peacekeeping legacy, Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone . My co-author, Dr Andrew Thomson, penned a line that drove the UN leadership to fire him. Lamenting UN negligence in failing Bosnian Muslims whom it had promised to protect in its 'safe area' of Srebrenica - where 8,000 men were slaughtered - Thomson wrote: 'If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.'
Our book is often criticised by fellow travellers on the left because we hold Annan and the UN accountable. As head of peacekeeping then, and as secretary-general now, Annan's power to effect any change on the ground, our critics remind us, is constrained by the interests of the Security Council (the US and France didn't want to intervene in Rwanda, the French again in Bosnia, and China and Russia now in Darfur). Therefore it's unrealistic to argue that Annan should risk his job by exhorting his Security Council bosses to do the right thing in the face of genocide.
Our response? Annan asks - no, orders - unarmed civilians to risk their lives every day as election observers, human rights monitors, drivers and secretaries in the most dangerous conditions all over the world. They do it, heroically, every day. And, in the service of peace, some pay with their lives; others with their sanity. How can he then not ask of himself the courage to risk his job in the cause of preventing genocide? At the very least, he could go down trying to save lives, as opposed to going down trying to explain why he didn't.
Annan is not personally corrupt or incompetent. But the UN cannot have failed more catastrophically when the stakes have been highest. If he does not lose his job for that, then for what? And if not now, when?
I don't know where he gets this.
The fact hat it has bubbled to the top again does NOT mean that it was unnoticed, for cryin' out loud.
It's been said long and loud:
U.S. OUT OF THE U.N.
U.N. OUT OF THE U.S.
There is no question or contest about THE U.N.'S CORRUPTION AND THE DEGREE OF ITS IRRELEVANCE AND INEFFECTIVENESS....so just throw the scumbags out of the country they HATE AND RESENT. No more U.S. tax dollars, no more U.N. in America.
Not only is Koffi NOT quitting, he has his hand out for MORE MONEY! The audacity of this person is just beyond amazing....
Why in the world would he quit? He could care less if he's criticised or not. He's sitting fat and happy and untouchable.
I'm wondering if we should be taking a fresh look at the diplomatic immunity perk.
The UN is a gang of thieves and thugs run by criminals in expensive suits. I await the day when a prominent American politician has the courage to call for it's dissolution. When that happens the dam will burst.
The UN occupies the moral high ground that could be productively held by another organization that is actually effective in preventing genocide. Until the UN is removed from the scene, it will be presumed that the UN is the only agent that can respond. But the UN is incapable of doing so in any meaningful way. As a result, millions die to maintain the fiction that the UN has a positive role for good in the World.
Controversial.
Anyway, nice to see a UN-bashing piece from the Guardian. Though there's a lot of manouevring in the piece
Every once in a while the Guardian will surprise you. Unlike it's US counterpart, the NY Times, which is staggeringly predictable.
exactly, better late than never......
My comment is my tagline.
nice piece from a lefty rag like the Guardian. exposing the UN death camps must indeed part of the conservative agenda. that is the most interesting part of the article. the "puzzling" question of a liberal in a state of confusion. the left is of course morally bankrupt which comes as no surprise to FR readers. the best question below is "if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, then what is?" as in the case of Terri S., the left doesnt care to protect the innocent and vulnerable from the machinations of their big government ideology. and by foregoing that responsibility, they have thrown out the very reason the Bill of Rights was included in the US Constitution.
{The second searing irony for me is that the American neoconservative right has occupied the moral high ground in critique of Annan, outflanking the left, which sits on indefensible territory in his support. But if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, then what is? If anyone's values have been betrayed, it is those of us on the left who believe most deeply in the organisation's ideals. I am mystified by the reluctance of the left both in the US and the UK (the Guardian 's coverage, for example) to criticise Annan's leadership.}
The article is like a Toonces the Driving Cat skit. It starts out so well, but they end up driving off the cliff.
The moral bankruptcy of the left - defending dictators, protecting regimes that oppress women, calling for the murder of the helpless handicapped is well known to us, as is the corrupt nature of the UN. However, I hope that a prominent Republican will soon call for reform or dissolution of the UN. I fear that none will have the courage. This issue is tailor-made for an unprincipled opportunist like Hillary Clinton to grab with both hands and ride to the White House
How many thugs can sit in New York
And judge what our rights should be?
Yes, 'n' How many dollars can just disappear
That were to feed an Iraqi?
Yes, 'n' How many more people will be killed
Before we're rid of Kofi?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
Hillary? eh doesnt Billy want to replace Kofi?
Just my speculation. Hillary wants to distance herself from the pack to burnish her centrist credentials and this issue seems like a good choice. As for Bill replacing Kofi, well, ain't never gonna happen. It'll be some unknown career bureaucrat from Asia, probably.
"The second searing irony for me is that the American neoconservative right has occupied the moral high ground in critique of Annan, outflanking the left, which sits on indefensible territory in his support. But if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, then what is?"
The left has no "moral high ground." They have demonstrated their insularity and contempt for the world first in their reactions to Communism now in their reaction to Islamofascism and genocide.
I think we need to get the UN out of the US and us out of the UN.
You need to get out more. Or read Free Republic more. How about a member of the U.S. House of Representatives? Not "prominent" enough for you?
Just another whiner.
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