Derechos: Human Rights Listings

I must declare a personal interest here. I was in Rwanda at that time and
witnessed the failures and the bravery of the UN. The heroism at local level by
individual soldiers surpassed anything I have seen anywhere else in the world;
the failures at leadership level, but most notably on the Security Council,
were shameful and catastrophic.

On this genocide and on the horrors of Bosnia and other latter-day conflicts,
LeBor is unflinching in his analysis of the failings of the Security Council
but also the Secretariat, the bureaucracy with the Secretary General at its
head which is responsible for running the UN.

He does well also to highlight the extraordinary situation of countries
whose human rights behaviour regularly violates the UN charter being given
seats on the UN's human rights commission.

LeBor has clearly had good access to senior decision-makers as well as
those given the unenviable task of implementing UN policy on the ground in
troubled places. His greatest strength is that he avoids ranting polemic,
making his judgments with care and always backing them up with evidence.

Caught as it is between the competing demands of its member states, most
notably the permanent five on the Security Council (the UK, America, China,
France and Russia), I doubt the UN can ever be the decisive force that LeBor
would like to see. Just look at the mess of Darfur and the wrangling between
China and Russia on one hand and the American, French and British on the other.

And we live now in an age in which the conduct of international relations has
been changed utterly by the attacks of 9/11 and the wars that have followed in
their wake. As one seasoned diplomat put it to me when I complained to him
about the inaction over Darfur: 'All the oxygen is being used up by the war on
terror. People are too preoccupied with their own battles to get sucked into
some African war.'

Twelve years after Rwanda, that is where we are.
_______________________________________________________________________________
The Irish Times
25 November 2006
Book Reviews

What good is the UN ?

Daniel McLaughlin

In each of its members, every community possesses the potential to be brave,
selfless and visionary, cowardly, blind, and venal, and the United Nations
is no different.

And, like most members of most societies, UN states like to look after
their own interests and to get their own way. Inside the UN, however,
they are expected to make collective decisions. So they usually agree
on the lowest common denominator of an issue and do the bare minimum to
solve a problem, unless it directly affects their own political, economic
and military goals.

The most common result of this process, as in most spheres of human effort,
is mediocrity. And when mediocrity infects the world's moral and practical
response to the extraordinary threat of genocide, then many, many people can be
murdered with impunity.

In _Complicity With Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide_,
Adam LeBor examines the world's failure to stop genocide during the 1992-1995
Bosnian war, in Rwanda in 1994, and right now in the Sudanese region of Darfur.

Those failures, he finds, stem from the UN's inability to defend the towering
principles that it claims to uphold, and the tendency of its member-states,
institutions and employees to protect themselves while finding reasons to
abandon the people who need it most, like the Muslims of Bosnia, Rwanda's
Tutsis and the Darfurians.

LeBor, who covered Bosnia's war for the London Times, uses UN documents and
interviews with key officials to reveal how the organisation made, relayed and
implemented decisions in Bosnia and Rwanda - and it makes bleak reading.

In both countries, he argues, UN officials at every level shied away from
making bold decisions that could jeopardise their lucrative careers, and
preferred to safeguard the UN's neutrality rather than acting robustly to stop
an obvious aggressor - the Bosnian Serbs and Hutu militia - from slaughtering
civilians.

UN member-states, meanwhile, protected their political and financial interests
and refused to make a major military commitment to a collective cause: from top
to bottom, the UN's impartiality was used as a fig leaf for inaction.

In Bosnia, so feeble was the mandate of UN peacekeepers that a single
Bosnian Serb soldier blocking the road could stop an aid convoy from reaching
towns and villages where thousands of Muslims were in desperate need of help.

Peacekeepers were allowed to use their weapons only when directly fired upon,
creating absurd and horrific situations - in one incident, French soldiers
allowed Bosnian Serbs to open one of their armoured cars and shoot dead the
Muslim deputy prime minister inside. Then they prevented British troops
from intervening in the grim debacle.

In Rwanda, fearful western governments recalled their soldiers just before
Hutus started slaughtering about one million Tutsis, so that when the killing
began, there were only 270 UN peacekeepers left in the whole country.

Now, in Sudan, Janjaweed militiamen backed by the government have killed some
400,000 people in Darfur and forced about two million more to flee their homes.

In 2004, the then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, declared that genocide
was taking place in Darfur, but that Washington need not take extraordinary
steps to stop it. More than two years on, the torture and killing continue,
while China protects its huge oil interests in Sudan, and the US ponders its
value in the so-called war on terror.

Even when the Security Council agrees on a resolution, it is often phrased so
vaguely that every country can interpret it as it wishes: when the UN finally
used significant force in Bosnia and Rwanda, prompted by public outrage at the
mass slaughter of civilians, it did so under reinterpretations of longstanding
resolutions.

Amid the cynical realpolitik laid bare by LeBor's book, a few heroes emerge -
people such as Diego Arria, Venezuela's diplomat-defender of Bosnia's Muslims,
and Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who led UN peacekeepers in Rwanda.

But more often that not LeBor shows how and why the UN has repeatedly failed to
fulfil its pledge to defend universal human rights, and challenges Kofi Annan's
replacement as secretary general to use his powers more wisely and vigorously
than the Ghanaian.

For the new man in the UN's top chair, Ban Ki-moon, this book is essential
reading. For the rest of us, it is a clear-sighted look at how one of our
greatest collective endeavours is riddled with our most basic human flaws.

/Daniel McLaughlin covers central Europe and the Balkans for The Irish Times./
____________________________________________________________________________
The Independent (London)
17 November 2006
- Arts & Books Review -

Never say never again

ANNE PENKETH

The Best Intentions
By James Traub
Bloomsbury £20 (464pp)

Complicity with Evil
By Adam LeBor
Yale £17.99 (336pp)

Peux ce que veux: where there's will, there's a way. These fateful words
of the courageous UN force commander in Rwanda could be the motto of the
United Nations. Unfortunately, in the light of the Darfur tragedy, among
others, they will not define the legacy of Kofi Annan.

On 11 January 1994, General Roméo Dallaire sent what has become known as
the "genocide fax" to the UN peacekeeping department, then headed by Annan,
warning of a looming mass slaughter of the Tutsi minority. He ended his message
"Peux ce que veux". Annan's response: "We must handle this information with
caution." Four months later, the killing of almost one million Rwandans began.

As Annan prepares to leave office, the first two books to scrutinise his
record ask whether the lessons of Bosnia and Rwanda have been learnt. Both
conclude that the UN cannot prevent genocide. They retread the genocidal events
of the last 15 years, and the slow-motion genocide in Darfur, and of course
point the finger of blame at the big players in the Security Council for
lacking political will. But all of these upheavals happened on Annan's watch.
As secretary-general, he had the opportunity to seize the high moral ground.
On that front, with some notable exceptions, the genial Ghanaian who rose
through the UN ranks has been found sadly lacking.

James Traub's book on the UN in the age of American hegemony quotes Bill
Clinton’s aide Nancy Soderberg, who addresses the Rwandan genocide in the
light of the trauma of the "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia, which left
18 US Rangers dead and paralysed American peacekeeping for years. For her, "The
ugly truth is that at the root of the failure to act is a belief [that the US]
has little responsibility to protect the lives of the victims of an ongoing
genocide". Now, 12 years after Somalia, and despite a declaration by the
then secretary of state Colin Powell that atrocities in Darfur by the Sudanese
government and its allied militias constitutes genocide, this analysis still
holds true. This time it is Iraq that has stymied the international response.

If states are not prepared to intervene to stop crimes against humanity,
despite the ringing declarations of "never again", who is ? That is
where the buck stops, with the UN and its leader. Traub, a New York Times
contributor who gained access to Annan and his top aides after accompanying
the secretary-general on his peace mission to Baghdad in 1998, does not do
a hatchet job. He deftly wields a stiletto, which he buries deep between
the shoulder blades of the world’s top diplomat.

Annan is depicted as a cipher, an empty vessel into which world leaders
pour their own desires. Traub describes a meeting in July 2004 in El Fashier,
Darfur, between Annan and Sudanese government representatives ­ four months
after a senior UN of-ficial in Khartoum, Mukesh Kapila, publicly warned on the
Today programme that a great humanitarian catastrophe was unfolding, on a par
with Rwanda, and that the Sudanese government was behind it. He had issued
the radio equivalent of Dallaire’s genocide fax. In El Fashier, Annan meekly
sat through a rant. Instead of reading the riot act to the provincial governor
and interior minister over support for Janjaweed militias, he said he was happy
"that you say that the government accepts that it is a government responsibility
to ensure law and order". Traub wonders if "such delicacy had been lost on the
audience".

As Adam LeBor points out in Complicity with Evil, caution has become the
hallmark of the Annan years. Annan's first public comments on Darfur were issued
in December 2003, nine months into the crisis. In his personnel policy, he was
too aware of diplomatic niceties to fire corrupt or incompetent officials who
have only left office after press revelations. He failed to deal effectively
with sexual abuse by peacekeeping missions that tainted the reputation of
the UN. His authority was seriously undermined by the Iraq oil-for-food
investigation, which concluded that he had shown poor judgement in failing
to pursue inquiries against his son, Kojo, and accused him of mismanagement.

LeBor pulls no punches in his indictment of the UN under Annan. With
key documents to hand, he rightly identifies the main failings of the system
as its lack of accountability, and a cult of neutrality in which "all sides
are guilty". He argues that there is no place in the UN for the perpetrators
of genocide. So what about the expulsion of Sudan ?

/Anne Penketh is The Independent’s diplomatic editor./

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