Kofi Fiddles While The World Burns
By Randall Nunn (02/21/05)
On the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide in 2004, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan unveiled his 5-point “plan” to prevent future genocide, saying “Let us not wait until the worst has happened, or is already happening.
Let us not wait until the only alternative to military action are futile hand-wringing and callous indifference.” These high-sounding pronouncements from the former head of the UN Peacekeeping Department at the time of the Rwanda genocide are cold comfort to the 800,000 or more who died while Mr. Annan dithered and dodged with callous indifference but, I might add, without any unseemly hand-wringing at the inception of the genocide. Mr. Annan’s guidance to the head of the UN Peacekeeping forces in Rwanda at the time was to “avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions.” Annan was paid for his 1994 callous indifference with promotion to Secretary-General of the most ineffective and costly international organization the world has ever seen—the United Nations. Compared to Kofi Anna, Emperor Nero was a mere piker when it comes to callous indifference.
The recent Oil for Food scandal has focused attention on Kofi Annan as never before, despite the fact that the mainstream media is doing all it its power to save the embattled Secretary-General, both through silence and artful reporting designed to minimize the scale of the corruption. We now know that over $21 billion disappeared and that Annan’s son, Kojo, may have been involved and that Annan’s hand-picked head of the Oil for Food program, Benon Sevan, almost certainly was involved. The Oil for Food scandal grows bigger and nastier day by day, yet the only real outrage seems to come from conservatives. Why is this? It is because liberals in the United States and leftist internationalists all over the world know that Kofi Annan is a symbol of the United Nations and that anything that weakens Annan and his regime at the UN contains the seeds of destruction of the United Nations as presently structured.
The same crowd who shouted about $40 million or so being spent on the Starr investigation or the cost of the war in Iraq are strangely silent about the many billions of dollars diverted from the program and used to bribe corrupt officials and others, as well as to purchase weapons for Saddam Hussein and to fund terrorists. Under the Oil for Food program, some of the oil vouchers from Saddam Hussein went to Abu Abbas, the man behind the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murder of an American passenger. The abysmal lack of control in the Oil for Food program is not an isolated occurrence. It has come to light that, in 2003 and 2004, the UN Development Program was funding two Hamas front organizations. The former head of the UN Development Program, Mr. Mark Brown, recently became Kofi Annan’s chief of staff. It is beginning to look like there is an interlocking directorate at the UN, with many of the higher-ups having reasons to protect each other from the effects of the almost daily leaks and disclosures of ineptness, lack of control, bumbling and outright corruption. It seems that more time and energy of these highly-paid bureaucrats is being spent on CYA activities than on international relations.
A visit to the UN Secretary-General’s web site is revealing. Mr. Annan’s biography states that his goals are “to encourage and advocate human rights, the rule of law and the universal values of equality, tolerance and human dignity.” It also states that Mr. Annan has “used his good offices in several delicate political situations.” All this sounds noble and genteel until one compares the words with the results of actions and inactions in Rwanda, Srebrenica, Cambodia, Cuba, the Sudan and other countries. The massacre in Rwanda was a sad and gruesome human disaster of staggering proportions, not a “delicate political situation”.
With a death toll in the millions of people murdered while waiting for UN action and a financial scandal unparalleled in world history for such an organization, it is time for both a new symbol and a new organization. It is not a time for Mr. Annan to troop from one photo op to another looking like a bewildered (but very cultured and erudite) deer caught in the headlights while lecturing the United States about the “illegal” war in Iraq. It is interesting to note that one word you will not find anywhere on the Secretary-General’s web site is “liberty”. Apparently too much liberty—like that enjoyed by the people of the United States—leads citizens to be less than impressed with a world organization heavily populated by dictatorships, tyrannical regimes and rogue states and to question the funding of such an organization by their tax dollars.
Kofi Annan apparently thinks that adherence to diplomatic processes is more important than protection of life and liberty. The Secretary-General acts as if he believes that advocating human rights, equality, tolerance and human dignity from the safety of New York City is more honorable than actually fighting a dictatorial regime that violated UN regulations, treaties and principles of international law on a daily basis. The United States and its allies are doing nothing more than attempting to enforce the rule of law and, in the process, secure those rights for oppressed peoples. There is no doubt that it is much safer to pontificate from a podium in a free and powerful country than it is to actually confront the evil that seeks to destroy human life and liberty, without which there can be no human rights, equality, tolerance or human dignity. The quest of Kofi Annan and his supporters for world government and “international legitimacy” sponsored by the UN reminds one of the description by Terry Goodkind of the mice trying to argue with the owls. The mice think the ways of the owls are wrong. The owls think the mice are dinner. But for the strength and resolve of the United States and countries like it, the owls of this world would have long ago eaten all the mice they could find, notwithstanding the learned arguments of mice diplomats in striped pants.
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