United Nations Special 
From the May 5, 2003 issue: Human rights, U.N. wrongs. 
05/05/2003, Volume 008, Issue 33 
http://www.weeklystandard.com/images/spacer.gif \* MERGEFORMATINETHuman Rights, U.N. Wrongs 
The United Nations has been front and center since April 9, when U.S.-led coalition military forces took control of Baghdad and effectively ended one of the bloodiest tyrannies in recorded human history. At U.N. headquarters in New York, of course, Secretary General Kofi Annan and his diplo-functionaries have been frantically attempting to reinsert themselves into the postwar Iraqi picture, claiming a unique mandate of legitimacy from the international community to administer the country they did absolutely nothing to help free. Things have been plenty busy in Geneva, Switzerland, too, where the U.N. Human Rights Commission has been wrapping up its annual six-week confab. And how has the international community, there assembled, taken note of the Baath party human rights atrocities now being uncovered on a near-daily basis? Let's have a peek at the commission's recent agenda: 
April 9 
Crowds of Iraqis celebrate and pull down a statue of Saddam as Baghdad falls. Western newspapers publish reports from inside the infamous White Lion prison in the southern city of Basra, where for decades victims of the toppled regime were hung from ceiling hooks and tortured with hot irons, cigarettes, boiling water, pliers, and baths of acid. 
The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, announces himself deeply disturbed over civilian deaths and injuries resulting from the U.S.-led coalition war of liberation. 
April 14 
Western newspapers publish reports from inside suburban Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam's largest, where thousands of people were tortured and murdered: forced to sit on glass bottles until their intestines were perforated, their lips and ears and tongues amputated with box cutters, and so forth. 
Vieira de Mello tells the BBC that war is always too high a price to pay for freedom, that coalition forces are guilty of serious breaches to the Geneva Convention, breaches that his agency will investigate if, as I hope we will be able to, his staffers are allowed to return to Iraq. Meantime, the commission approves a resolution expressing deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism and authorizing an inquiry into the situation of Muslim and Arab peoples with special reference to attacks against their persons and properties in the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001. 
April 15 
U.S. Marines discover and free 123 prisoners, some of them women, from deep underground bunkers at the Baath party's Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Askariya torture facility west of Baghdad. All the prisoners are emaciated and some have survived by eating scabs off their sores. 
In Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Commission approves three separate resolutions condemning Israel for the gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law involved in its policy of liquidation against Palestinians and Syrians in the Golan Heights, which policy the commission calls an offense against humanity. 
April 16 
Western newspapers publish reports on the thousands of documents British troops have recovered from Basra's Mother of All Battles Branch of Saddam's Baath party, documents detailing a decades-long and hair-raising program of systematic terror against Shiite locals. 
The U.N. Human Rights Commission passes yet another resolution of censure against Israel, but declines to take any action on the epic human rights violations by Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe or on the recent wave of political arrests and executions by Fidel Castro's government in Cuba. 
April 23 
Western newspapers publish reports from inside Al Hakemiya, a Baath party secret-police interrogation center in Baghdad, where surgical units apparently harvested organs from the bodies of murdered torture victims. Western television networks broadcast film from Abu Ghraib prison, where crowds have begun gathering at recently discovered mass graves, now being exhumed so that relatives can inspect the decomposed corpses in hopes of identifying their loved ones. 
The U.N. Human Rights Commission approves a resolution urging U.N. member states to respect the rich and diverse nature of the community of the world's democracies while bearing in mind that each society and every context has its own indigenous and relevant democratic institutional traditions. There is no one model of democracy, the commission concludes, and therefore we must not seek to export any particular model of democracy. To underscore the point, the Commission formally rebukes (but does not name) one particular democracy-exporting nation for its planned use of military tribunals as a means to bring terrorism and war-crime suspects to justice. 
April 24 
Digging continues at Abu Ghraib prison as a newly formed Iraqi human rights group, the Committee of Free Prisoners, begins allowing public access to millions of documents recovered from Saddam's General Security Directorate, documents meticulously recording the torture and murder of tens--maybe hundreds--of thousands of people. Included in the archive are the before-and-after torture-session photographs Baath officials appear to have routinely recorded. 
Speaking to a closing session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission annual assembly in Geneva, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan reiterates his regret over the coalition's decision to go to war without specific authorization by the Security Council. Annan says I hope that U.S. and British forces will act strictly within the rules regarding prisoners of war and that they will otherwise accept their responsibilities as an occupying power. In the future, Annan concludes, wars like this one should be avoided; the world will be safer in a system governed by the international rule of law and principles set out in the United Nations Charter. The Commission officially declares itself in agreement with Annan, approving a resolution identifying peace as a fundamental precondition for human rights and calling upon member states to renounce the use of force against other member states irrespective of their political, economic, or social systems. 
Also, Western newspapers report--and Kofi Annan's spokesman confirms--that the United Nations continues to recognize Baath party diplomats as the only properly credentialed representatives of Iraq. More than a dozen such diplomats remain officially accredited at Iraq's U.N. mission in New York, and some two dozen others remain active at U.N. agencies in Geneva and Vienna. 

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