Kofi Annan Update

As if you needed anymore, here are some great reasons Kofi Annan should be fired. Read this article by Kenneth Cain in the Opinion Journal. It is genocide, not oil-for-food that is the issue upon which the Kofster should be judged. Speaking of Rwanda, Cain states,

But it isn't just the stench of death I remember so vividly; the odor of betrayal also hung heavily in the Rwandan air. This was not a genocide in which the U.N. failed to intervene; most of the U.N.'s armed troops evacuated after the first two weeks of massacres, abandoning vulnerable civilians to their fate, which included, literally, the worst things in the world a human being can do to another human being.

It did not have to happen. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the U.N.'s force commander in Rwanda, sent Mr. Annan a series of desperate faxes including one warning that Hutu militias "could kill up to 1,000" Tutsis "in 20 minutes" and others pleading for authority to protect vulnerable civilians. But at the crucial moment, Mr. Annan ordered his general to stand down and to vigorously protect, not genocide victims, assembled in their numbers waiting to die, but the U.N.'s image of "impartiality."

The outline of this story is well known, but its most important detail is not: Tutsis often gathered in compounds (large church complexes, schools and even stadiums) where they had assumed they would be safe based on implicit, and sometimes explicit, promises of protection by Blue Helmeted peacekeepers. The U.N.'s withdrawal was, therefore, not a passive failure to protect but an active, and lethal, perfidy.

Nice going Kofi. How about this in Serbia,

Some 3,300 miles directly north from Kigali is the town of Srebrenica, a grim, shell-pocked village on the border of Republika Srpska and Serbia. A few kilometers down a decrepit road is a sprawling abandoned battery factory. Ten years ago, thousands of Muslim civilians concentrated here seeking shelter at a U.N. base. But Serb militias separated the men and boys from their women and put them on buses. Armed Blue Helmeted U.N. Peacekeepers--tasked under Mr. Annan's leadership to protect Srebrenica's civilians in this U.N.-declared "Safe Area"--watched passively. The women of Srebrenica never saw their men again.

Thanks again Kofi! Then there's this item in the New Yorker describing the UN's policy on whistleblowers. They fire them. When they write things like this in a book,

The U.N. was here—in Rwanda—when the massacres started, twenty-five hundred troops. U.N. headquarters in New York knew it was being planned, they had files and faxes and informants, and they sat in their offices, consulted each other, and ate long lunches.

- posted by Base10 @ 1:30 PM