Mick Hartley

Former UN human rights lawyer Kenneth Cain, in the Observer, blasts the record of Kofi Annan:

[W]hen 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. […]

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?