Time To Confront Darfur
By Adam LeBor
September 21, 2007
The New York Sun
Original Source: http://www.nysun.com/article/63183

The United Nations 62nd General Assembly opens today and the genocide continues in Darfur. Sudan's Islamist regime has caused the death of more than 400,000 people and displaced 2.5 million, yet Sudan remains a member of the United Nations in good standing. It's darkly ironic that the United Nations was founded in 1945 in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. But nowadays the United Nations has strayed so far from its founding ideals that even Nazis get their moment of glory. Loyal servant of Hitler, and U.N. secretary-general from 1972-82, Kurt Waldheim, died on June 14 and they still miss him. The next day the General Assembly held a moment of silence in his memory. The secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, praised Waldheim as a man who had lived history, who led the organization with prudence, perseverance and precision.
The president of the United Nations's 62nd General Assembly, Srgjan Kerim, is from Macedonia. He knows that in the Balkans they remember Waldheim differently. During World War II Waldheim worked with army units that murdered Allied prisoners of war, partisans, and Serbs and that sent the Jews of Salonika to Auschwitz. Waldheim was listed as a suspected war criminal by the United Nations's own War Crimes Commission. As secretary-general Waldheim was a lackluster sycophant. Still, that's hardly the exception over at Turtle Bay. Like his predecessors, Mr. Ki-Moon is obsessed with neutrality, impartiality, and the equal treatment of all U.N. states, even if they commit genocide. He prefers refuge in a make-believe world where things are always improving even as they get steadily worse. In this Mr. Ki-Moon is at least consistent, for the pattern of the United Nations's failure in Darfur was set in Rwanda and Bosnia.
In January 1994, as the Hutu militias prepared to slaughter the Tutsis, General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, the U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda, asked U.N. headquarters for permission to raid the Hutu arms caches. Kofi Annan, then head of peacekeeping, refused. Mr. Annan's office replied, in a cable signed by his deputy, Iqbal Riza: The overriding consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions. Soon after, the Security Council reduced General Dallaire's troops to 250 from 2,500. Over the next few months Hutu extremists slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
The appeasement continued in Bosnia. In May 1995 the top U.N. official in former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, refused permission for an airstrike against the Bosnian Serbs because he said it might weaken President Milosevic, who he believed was needed for a peace deal. In July 1995 the Bosnian Serbs attacked a U.N.-declared safe area, Srebrenica. There were empty desks at U.N. headquarters as General Mladic's forces advanced. Mr. Annan was away. So was Boutros-Boutros Ghali, then secretary general; the head of the Yugoslavia department, Shashi Tharoor, and the British commander of U.N. forces, General Rupert Smith, were on leave. Several days into the attack, Messrs. Boutros-Ghali, Annan, Smith, and other senior U.N. officials met in Geneva. They barely discussed Srebrenica. Incredibly, they sent Mr. Smith back on leave. Dutch peacekeepers at Srebrenica handed over up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys to the Bosnian Serbs, who then slaughtered them. Haunted by Rwanda, Mr. Annan eventually built up some momentum to confront Sudan over Darfur. He called for perpetrators of war crimes to be held accountable. He berated U.N. member states for failing to stop or halt genocide. All member states signed up for the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, civilians in danger. Certainly, much of the blame for not stopping carnage in Darfur lies with the five members of the U.N. Security Council: America, Britain, France, Russia, and, most of all, China, which buys Sudanese oil. But the Secretary General and his officials still have powerful moral authority to shape policy. It seems that like Yasushi Akashi, Mr. Ki-Moon will go to absurd and bizarre lengths to avoid confronting the perpetrators of genocide. The problem in Darfur, he now argues, is rooted in ecological problems. Writing in the Washington Post, the day after he eulogised Mr. Waldheim, Mr. Ki-Moon said: Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change. They doubtless agree in Khartoum. The crisis in Darfur may be exacerbated by climate change. But its primary cause is simple: The Islamist regime in Khartoum has, since spring 2003, waged a campaign of genocide. The United Nations's own 176-page report on Darfur, published in early 2005, established that Sudan and the Janjawid are responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.
Security Council Resolution 1769, passed in July, has been hailed as a great step forward. It authorizes 26,000 U.N. police and peacekeepers, with a mandate to protect civilians and aid workers. But as usual with the United Nations, the devil is in the details. As Darfur activist Eric Reeves shows, 1769 has no mandate to seize weapons or halt air attacks on civilians. It introduces a hybrid joint African Union-United Nations command structure that will inevitably lead to confusion. Sudan's insistence that most troops be African will also cause further delay. So today, as every day, Mr. Ki-Moon and the United Nations dither and the carnage in Darfur continues. But perhaps we should no longer be surprised that the United Nations is unable to confront those involved in genocide. It seems it prefers to honor them.
Mr. LeBor is the author of Complicity With Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide.