The failures of Kofi Annan or of the UN?

Here's a curious article in the Observer. Written by former UN human rights lawyer, Kenneth Cain, it berates Kofi Annan for allowing various abuses by UN troops and officials and for allowing genocidal campaigns to occur under his watch. There's a bit of an "all Cretans are liars" element to it when Cain accuses the left of standing idly by and leaving condemnation of the UN to American hard right whilst telling us that he (Cain) is a leftist himself. I think, to be fair, the left has never had much time for the UN. It was the UN that partitioned Palestine thereby inviting the zionist movement to carry out one of the first ethnic cleansing campaigns of the post-holocaust era. Also the major imperialist powers have a veto over anything the UN does. When many people who would ordinarily support an American war were anxious that America was becoming lawless even by its own appalling standards they looked for a second UN resolution to support the war on Iraq. And this is troubling for leftists; the fact that something bewilderingly wrong can actually be made OK by the imprimatur of the UN.

But Cain goes further than just criticising leftist inactivity on the question of UN incompetence and corruption.

I am co-author of a book critical of Annan's peacekeeping legacy, Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone . My co-author, Dr Andrew Thomson, penned a line that drove the UN leadership to fire him. Lamenting UN negligence in failing Bosnian Muslims whom it had promised to protect in its 'safe area' of Srebrenica - where 8,000 men were slaughtered - Thomson wrote: 'If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.'

Our book is often criticised by fellow travellers on the left because we hold Annan and the UN accountable.

I don't know what he means by fellow travellers. It's an expression that usually means people who run with a party without joining but in this instance, the party is the. left and he doesn't name any fellow travellers or leftist groups. If only the left had a kind of rabbinate or papacy that could set up a list of official leftists. Couldn't be done, one lot would split away and set up a provisional list.

Anyway that's not the only issue I have. Look at some of these criticisms, specifically, of Kofi Annan.

Next to these tributes is another installation - a reproduction of the infamous fax by the UN Force Commander, General Romeo Dallaire, imploring the then head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, for authority to defend Rwandan civilians - many of whom had taken refuge in UN compounds under implicit and sometimes explicit promises of protection.

Here, too, is Annan's faxed response - ordering Dallaire to defend only the UN's image of impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next, it details the withdrawal of UN troops, even while blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate.

Next to these tributes is another installation - a reproduction of the infamous fax by the UN Force Commander, General Romeo Dallaire, imploring the then head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, for authority to defend Rwandan civilians - many of whom had taken refuge in UN compounds under implicit and sometimes explicit promises of protection.

Here, too, is Annan's faxed response - ordering Dallaire to defend only the UN's image of impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next, it details the withdrawal of UN troops, even while blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate

Away from Rwanda:

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.

We then get details of the sheer corruption of a UN chief administration officer (CAO) in Liberia:

the new CAO tapped our phones, paid locals to spy for him and threatened to send home anyone who opposed him, all to facilitate his own quest for a 15 per cent kickback on everything we purchased.

The worst part was watching him try to coerce as many of his young 'local staff' to sleep with him as possible....

I was the human rights lawyer and these girls would come to my office in tears asking for help. I wrote memo after memo of complaint to my chain of command, but no one did anything. I even confronted the CAO personally. To no effect. When I visited the UN human resources office in New York to complain personally, they laughed at my naive outrage: 'It happens all the time in the field,' they said. 'There's nothing we can do.'

In the meantime, a quarter of a million Liberians died, and warring factions committed war crimes. And the UN did - nothing. Just as it was simultaneously doing nothing, more infamously, in Rwanda and Bosnia.

Before I met him in Liberia, that CAO, Krishna Gowandan, had been knocking around West Africa for years in various UN jobs, always mired in corruption, never disciplined, always promoted and reassigned - a pattern all too familiar at the UN - during which time the head of personnel was Kofi Annan....

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?

Ok there are parts where this article is more critical of an unnamed left than it is of Annan. But there's more:

As head of peacekeeping then, and as secretary-general now, Annan's power to effect any change on the ground, our critics remind us, is constrained by the interests of the Security Council (the US and France didn't want to intervene in Rwanda, the French again in Bosnia, and China and Russia now in Darfur). Therefore it's unrealistic to argue that Annan should risk his job by exhorting his Security Council bosses to do the right thing in the face of genocide.

And then, whilst the writer wants Annan removed

Annan is not personally corrupt or incompetent. But the UN cannot have failed more catastrophically when the stakes have been highest. If he does not lose his job for that, then for what? And if not now, when?

So the guy doesn't want Annan in post though he says that he is neither corrupt nor incompetent. If he is neither corrupt nor incompetent then turning a blind eye to genocide and syphoning money from key projects is what the UN is for. Within three years of its establishment, the UN was encouraging the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in breach of its own charter and doing so by partitioning Palestine...in breach of its own charter. Why should anyone expect any different to Kofi Annan's corrupt and incompetent way of handling UN business.