http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12413208%255E32522,00.html
UN's utopian vision masks real horror
JANET ALBRECHTSEN
02mar05
WHILE Hollywood is going gaga over the latest batch of Academy
Award-winning films, a less glamorous film should be playing to the
cosmopolitan audience found at the UN headquarters in New York.
Hotel Rwanda tells the real-life story of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda
where Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu and manager of a luxury hotel in
Kigali, sheltered about 1200 Rwandans. As the massacres continue,
Rusesabagina tells his wife not to worry.
"They are preparing an intervention force," he says. But as history
records, "they" – meaning us in the West – never did intervene. In
three short months, Hutu death squads killed more than 800,000 Tutsis.
If genocide means anything, there it was, on show for the world. UN
commander Romeo Dallaire tried to warn the West. But the US, under
president Bill Clinton, and the UN, with Kofi Annan as head of
peacekeeping operations, refused to call it genocide so they could
avoid intervening. Since then the apologies have been profuse.
"Rwanda's tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my
presidency," writes Clinton in his 957-page tome, My Life. He devoted
two paragraphs to that greatest of regrets.
Fast forward to 2005. Earlier this month, the UN Security Council
received a UN report that said the systematic killing of people in
Darfur by the Arab leaders in Khartoum does not amount to genocide.
With the death toll at 70,000 and rising, and another 2 million
displaced people, the UN is behind the curve again, playing word games
while massacres continue. The UN report concluded that the atrocities
in Sudan were instead "crimes against humanity".
Does it matter what we call these crimes? As The Wall Street Journal
pointed out recently, it does. As always, with UN machinations, there
is a method to its madness. That no genocide here finding gave the UN
a licence to do nothing, something the UN is getting mighty good at
these days.
The 1948 genocide convention, a response to the extermination of 6
million Jews, requires that signatories "prevent and punish genocide"
whenever it occurs. In other words, it calls for action. And genocide
is widely defined to include killing or seriously harming people,
"with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group".
Yet on the government-sanctioned, scorched-earth policy against
Darfuris, the UN will not utter the G-word lest that requires the
A-word. That way, the UN and its ardent supporters can be within the
letter of international law as they sit idly by doing nothing to stop
the slaughter of black African farmers by the Janjaweed, the
government-backed militia.
US President George W. Bush says this slaughter of black Muslims is
genocide. Aid agencies at the pointy end of this terror agree. But the
UN knows better. In his dulcet tones, Annan told the Security Council
the UN report on Darfur was a "chilling read" and "concrete measures"
are needed to halt the violence. Unfortunately, he says that the "the
best means" to stop the slaughter is to send in the lawyers. That's
right - unleash the new International Criminal Court.
Now, I thought the traditional order went like this: stop the crime,
nab the guilty parties, then prosecute them. Or, even better, prevent
the crime. But that means troops on the ground. The US has offered to
send in 10,000 soldiers, surely a more concrete measure than a team of
lawyers. Which brings us back to the ICC.
The US refuses to sign up to the ICC, arguing it will become, like
everything else associated with the UN, a political beast. And given
the present strain of anti-Americanism and the fact US soldiers are
usually called on to do the hard work, the US fears its soldiers will
end up in the dock more often than the killers roaming free in western
Sudan.
US suggestions for a specific war crimes tribunal in Tanzania to deal
with Darfur have fallen on deaf ears. Hoping to declare checkmate, the
UN is intent on forcing the US to change its mind on the ICC or be
slated as opposing prosecutions of the butchers in western Sudan. In
other words, condemning innocent Sudanese to death in order to score
political points against the US.
And so it has come to this. The stench of rotting carcasses emanating
from UN headquarters. Not just from an out-of-date charter that fails
to address modern crises. Or a warped UN system that appeases and
rewards oppressors: Sudan continues to sit on the UN Commission on
Human Rights. Or the UN tendency to celebrate tyranny. When Yasser
Arafat died, the UN flag flew at half mast. It is not just about
monumental mismanagement and fraud unfolding in the UN oil-for-food
scandal. Or even ineffective, inert leadership.
No. The root cause, to use UN speak, of the UN's demise is the
inherently flawed, utopian vision that if you line up the flags of
nations along First Avenue in New York, an "international community"
with common interests would emerge. In the real world, countries act
according to self-interest. That is why China and Russia blocked US
moves for UN Security Council sanctions against Sudan. China is
Sudan's largest oil investor and Russia supplies arms to Sudan.
If the world cannot agree to intervene in the catastrophe engulfing
Darfur, then it is time to take down the flags and acknowledge there
is no such thing as an international community. If multilaterialism
has a future, it is not on the grand, unworkable scale of the UN. Its
future will be with like-minded countries coming together to act when
genuine humanitarian intervention is needed. Genocide or no genocide,
let's hope they do so in Sudan.
© The Australian
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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