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December 20, 2004
The Son Also Steals
The Wall St. Journal editorial and op-ed pages, which led the charge against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac long before their accounting scandals were discovered, is now leading a charge to get Kofi Annan to resign. Today Kenneth Cain, who served in four UN peacekeeping operations, argues that the real reason Kofi should resign is not that he oversaw the biggest fraud in world history (Oil for Food, from which Annan's son reaped a significant illegal windfall).
That debate is 10 years too late and addresses the wrong subject. The salient indictment of Mr. Annan's leadership is lethal cowardice, not corruption; the evidence is genocide, not oil.
Cain's argument is that the UN was too cowardly to take action to head-off preventable genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. It is particularly fitting in the light of my visit to Bosnia this fall, where one finds cemeteries of people who all died in the same year (usually 1993 or 1995) and cities destroyed by an out-of-control-war. Bosnians are not quick to forget the murder by Serbs of the Srebrenica's 8000 men who were in a UN safe area guarded by UN troops.
One woman at the Screbrenica cemetery mourning the murder of her entire family told Cain: "If the U.N. goes somewhere now, how can the people there believe or trust that the U.N. will save them?"
Certainly the Annan tenure marks a new nadir of the UN's usefulness, but sacking Annan is only a first step. There are some very interesing proposals to create a UN of only democratic governments that could act more decisively, leaving the existing UN to do what it does well, like teaching family planning and digging irrigation ditches in Rwanda--not preventing wars or genocides.
Still, Cain's conclusion speaks for itself:
If anyone's values have been betrayed at the U.N. over the past decade it is those of us who believe most deeply in the organization's ideals. Just ask the men and women of Rwanda and Srebrenica.And Darfur.
Posted by adrianjo at December 20, 2004 04:10 PM
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