posted August 02, 2006 05:07 PM            

Kofi Annan is the embarrassment who as Secretary General stood by and still stands by while the genocide continues in Sudan.

Kofi Annan is the embarrassment who stood while a slaughter/genocide was in progress in the Balkans.

And Kofi Annan is the embarrassment who as Sec General stood by while Hezbollah armed and trained in plain sight of UN observers in southern Lebanon...in defiance of UN Resolution 1559.

In no case, did Kofi Annan lift a finger to put a stop to any of the violence or coming violence the United Nations is supposed to exist to prevent.

Rather than Israel apologizing to the the UN for bombing a UN observation post...a post where Hezbollah had infiltrated in and around the area and from which Hezbollah was launching rocket attacks into Israel, Kofi Annan should apologize and then resign in disgrace.

Instead of being promoted to Sec General after the genocide in Rwanda, Kofi Annan should have been cashiered out of the UN.

But Kofi had a good friend in his corner. Who else but Commander Corruption would have put this disgrace for a human being forth to be Secretary General of the UN?

The U.N.'s Complicity in Hezbollah Kidnappings
By Julia Weller
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 2, 2006

It's not Israeli Prime Minister Olmert who should be apologizing to Kofi Annan for the death of four UN observers in Lebanon--if indeed it was the IDF that killed them--but Annan who should be apologizing to Olmert and to the Lebanese people. For years, UN observers have watched the build-up of Hizbullah’s armory and the construction of its fortified tunnels and its bunkers in the hills overlooking Israel and they have done nothing. The UN has allowed Hizbullah to move rockets into homes, schools and mosques, in the midst of heavily populated towns, and they have done nothing. The UN observers have watched Hizbullah terrorists train and be trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guards on their doorstep and they have done nothing.

These activities are not the kind that can be conducted in stealth or at night. The Hizbullah take-over of southern Lebanon took place in full view of the UN outposts and with the full knowledge of UN observers. Yet these observers failed to inform the Security Council of what was happening under their very noses and took no action to stop the violation of UN resolutions prohibiting the presence of armed terrorists in southern Lebanon. It was obvious what would happen once terrorists began raining rockets onto Israel from launching pads hidden in population centers. The death of Lebanese civilians caused by Israel’s airforce trying to stop the bombing of its towns and cities is therefore directly attributable to the fecklessness of Kofi Annan’s leadership and the covert and overt complicity of UN observers in the arming of southern Lebanon. The UN, and not Israel, is to blame for any civilian casualties in Lebanon.

The UN has a long history of cooperation with Hizbullah terrorists in Lebanon. On October 7, 2000, Hizbullah terrorists dressed in UN uniforms crossed into Israel at Mount Dov and attacked an Israeli patrol. They kidnapped three badly wounded soldiers and took them across the border into Lebanon. An Indian contingent of UN observers watched the whole event and recorded it on videotape. For nine months, the UN vehemently denied the existence of the videotape. UN Middle East envoy Terje Larsen and Kofi Annan angrily rejected Israel’s claim that the UN observers had seen anything, even though the claim was based on statements made by one of the Indian soldiers.

Only on July 6, 2001 did the UN finally admit that the UN observers had indeed filmed the aftermath of the attack and kidnappings. The tape showed UN tow trucks beginning to remove two of the Hizbullah getaway vehicles and then, when Hizbullah terrorists appear, meekly turning them over to the terrorists.

The UN observers had already removed bloodstained items from the vehicles, including UN uniforms, insignia, weapons and explosives. Yet for months, the UN refused to hand over the videotapes to Israel or any of the items found in the cars that could have provided information on whether the soldiers were still alive. Ultimately, Israeli government officials were only permitted to see a doctored version of the videotapes with the faces of the terrorists obscured on the theory that the UN wanted to remain “neutral.” The bodies of the three Israeli soldiers were only returned to their families in 2004 as part of a prisoner exchange.

An Indian government investigation seriously criticized the behavior of the returning Indian contingent. Reports surfaced that four members of the contingent had been bribed by Hizbullah to assist in the kidnapping by giving the terrorists information regarding the location of the Israeli soldiers. At first, it was believed that the bribes consisted only of alcohol and Lebanese women, but subsequently information appeared in the press that the UN observers had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the terrorists. The UN launched its own internal investigation but whitewashed the whole sordid event, claiming that the UN soldiers had no prior knowledge of the kidnapping preparations, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Kofi Annan apologized only for the UN troops’ “error in judgment.”

Turning a blind eye--or, in the case of the four Indian UN observers, assisting in murder--is not an “error in judgment.” For years, the UN has not only tolerated terrorist activity in full sight of its observers, but allowed its outposts to be used for the vilest form of propaganda. Photographs I have personally seen that were taken of the UN observation post on the Lebanese-Israeli border last year show the yellow Hizbullah flag flying only a few feet away from the UN’s blue flag, in flagrant violation of UN resolutions calling for the demilitarization of the border. Worse, smack in front of the UN outpost is a billboard with a photograph of a masked Hizbullah terrorist holding the severed head of a young Israeli soldier. The billboard faces Israel. The message is obvious. The UN is a useless, shameless and toothless organization that has provided cover for Hizbullah for years.

No, Israel does not owe the UN an apology. At most, its bombing of the UN outpost was “an error in judgment.”
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23634

posted August 27, 2006 04:35 PM            

In spite of their stated policy of neutrality, the so called peace keeping forces posted up to date information on IDF troop movements, military strengths, armor positions, artillery firing positions and much other intelligence as it related to Israel.

This is what the UN posted about Hezbollah positions, strength of forces, weapons deployment.

Virtually Zip, Nada, Zilch, Zero.

An now, the UN wants to be in charge of the NEW peacekeeping forces to enforce the buffer zone between Lebanon and Israel.

In view of the utter corruption, the utter bungling of virtually every operation connected with the UN and the utter lack of living up to their own Resolutions and policies, the UN shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a conflict.

Kofi Annan should not be permitted to serve out the remainder of his term. Annan should be terminated from his Secretary General position with immediate effect.

What did you do in the war, UNIFIL?
You broadcast Israeli troop movements.
by Lori Lowenthal Marcus
09/04/2006, Volume 011, Issue 47

DURING THE RECENT month-long war between Hezbollah and Israel, U.N. "peacekeeping" forces made a startling contribution: They openly published daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon.

UNIFIL--the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978--is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all to see precise information about the movements of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF safety structures within hours of their construction. New information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was posted, and never more than 24 hours old.

Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah "fired rockets in large numbers from various locations" and Hezbollah's rockets "were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations" are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got.

This war was fought on cable television and the Internet, and a lot of official information was available in real time. But the specific military intelligence UNIFIL posted could not be had from any non-U.N. source. The Israeli press--always eager to push the envelope--did not publish the details of troop movements and logistics. Neither the European press nor the rest of the world media, though hardly bastions of concern for the safety of Israeli troops,
provided the IDF intelligence details that UNIFIL did. A search of Israeli government websites failed to turn up the details published to the world each day by the U.N.

Inquiries made of various Israeli military and government representatives and analysts yielded near unanimous agreement that at least some of UNIFIL's postings, in the words of one retired senior military analyst, "could have exposed Israeli soldiers to grave danger." These analysts, including a current high ranking military official, noted that the same intelligence would not have been provided by the U.N. about Israel's enemies.

Sure enough, a review of every single UNIFIL web posting during the war shows that, while UNIFIL was daily revealing the towns where Israeli soldiers were located, the positions from which they were firing, and when and how they had entered Lebanese territory, it never described Hezbollah movements or locations with any specificity whatsoever.

Compare the vague "various locations" language with this UNIFIL posting from July 25:

Yesterday and during last night, the IDF moved significant reinforcements, including a number of tanks, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and infantry, to the area of Marun Al Ras inside Lebanese territory. The IDF advanced from that area north toward Bint Jubayl, and south towards Yarun.

Or with the posting on July 24, in which UNIFIL revealed that the IDF stationed between Marun Al Ras and Bint Jubayl were "significantly reinforced during the night and this morning with a number of tanks and armored personnel carriers."

This partiality is inconsistent not only with UNIFIL's mission but also with its own stated policies. In a telling incident just a few years back, UNIFIL vigorously insisted on its "neutral ity"--at Israel's expense.

On October 7, 2000, three IDF soldiers were kidnapped by Hezbollah just yards from a UNIFIL shelter and dragged across the border into Lebanon, where they disappeared. The U.N. was thought to have videotaped the incident or its immediate aftermath. Rather than help Israel rescue its kidnapped soldiers by providing this evidence, however, the U.N. obstructed the Israeli investigation.

For months the Israeli government pleaded with the U.N. to turn over any videotape that might shed light on the location and condition of its missing men. And for nine months the U.N. stonewalled, insisting first that no such tape existed, then that just one tape existed, and eventually conceding that there were two more tapes. During those nine months, clips from the videotapes were shown on Syrian and Lebanese television.

Explaining their eventual about-face, U.N. officials said the decision had been made by the on-site commanders that it was not their responsibility to provide the material to Israel; indeed, that to do so would violate the peacekeeping mandate, which required "full impartiality and objectivity." The U.N. report on the incident was adamant that its force had "to ensure that military and other sensitive information remains in their domain and is not passed to parties to a conflict."

Stymied in its efforts to recover the men while they were still alive, Israel ultimately agreed to an exchange in January 2004: It released 429 Arab prisoners and detainees, among them convicted terrorists, and the bodies of 60 Lebanese decedents and members of Hezbollah, in exchange
for the bodies of the three soldiers. Blame for the deaths of those three Israelis can be laid, at least in part, at the feet of the U.N., which went to the wall defending its inviolable pledge never to share military intelligence about one party with another.

UNIFIL has just done what it then vowed it could never do. Once again, it has acted to shield one side in the conflict and to harm the other. Why is this permitted? For that matter, how did the U.N. obtain such detailed and timely military intelligence in the first place, before broadcasting it for Israel's enemies to see?

posted October 02, 2006 02:45 PM            

Is there blood on his hands?
As Kofi Annan prepares to stand down as UN secretary-general, Adam LeBor investigates the accusations made against the world’s chief defender of human rights

THE CASE AGAINST KOFI ANNAN

The bodies were still warm when Lieutenant Ron Rutten found them: nine corpses in civilian clothes lying crumpled by a stream, each shot in the back at close range. It was July 12, 1995, and the UN-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica had fallen the previous day. The lush pastures of eastern Bosnia were about to become Europe’s bloodiest killing fields since 1945.

Refugees poured into the UN compound. But the Dutch peacekeepers (Dutchbat) were overwhelmed and the Serbs confiscated their weapons. “From the moment I found those bodies, it was obvious to me that the Bosnian Serbs planned to kill all the men,” Rutten said. He watched horrified as Dutch troops guided the men and boys onto the Serb buses.

Srebrenica is rarely mentioned nowadays in Annan’s offices on the 38th floor of the UN secretariat building in New York. He steps down in December after a decade as secretary-general. His retirement will be marked by plaudits. But behind the honorifics and the accolades lies a darker story: of incompetence, mismanagement and worse. Annan was the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) between March 1993 and December 1996. The Srebrenica massacre of up to 8,000 men and boys and the slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda happened on his watch. In Bosnia and Rwanda, UN officials directed peacekeepers to stand back from the killing, their concern apparently to guard the UN’s status as a neutral observer. This was a shock to those who believed the UN was there to help them.

Annan’s term has also been marked by scandal: from the sexual abuse of women and children in the Congo by UN peacekeepers to the greatest financial scam in history, the UN-administered oil-for-food programme. Arguably, a trial of the UN would be more apt than a leaving party.

The charge sheet would include guarding its own interests over those it supposedly protects; endemic opacity and lack of accountability; obstructing investigations, promoting the inept and marginalising the dedicated. Such accusations can be made against many organisations. But the UN is different. It has a moral mission.

It was founded by the allies in 1945 to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights”. Its key documents – the Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the genocide convention – are the most advanced formulation of human rights in history. And they have been flouted by UN member states for decades.

A more specific charge would be that, under the doctrine of command responsibility, the UN is guilty of war crimes. Broadly speaking, it has three principles: that a commander ordered atrocities to be carried out, that he failed to stop them, despite being able to, or failed to punish those responsible. The case rests on the second, that in Rwanda in 1994, in Srebrenica in 1995 and in Darfur since 2003, the UN knew war crimes were occurring or about to occur, but failed to stop them, despite having the means to do so.

Charge one: Rwanda

That in 1994, Annan and the DPKO refused the UN commander General Romeo Dallaire (below) permission to raid Hutu arms caches, despite his warning mass slaughter was planned, that they failed to inform the security council, and failed to clarify the extent of the genocide

Unamir, the UN mission to Rwanda, was deployed in October 1993 to implement the Arusha peace accords, with the aim of ending the civil war between the Hutus and Tutsis. The Hutu government continued to plan a mass slaughter of Tutsis. By January 1994, ethnic tension was at boiling point. The 2,500 Unamir troops were under-equipped. Dallaire lacked everything from intelligence-gathering capability to batteries for troops’ torches.

By January 1994, Dallaire had received detailed information about the planned mass murder from a source inside the Hutu militia known as “Jean-Pierre”. The general asked the DPKO for authorisation to raid the arms caches and offer sanctuary to Jean-Pierre and his family. On January 11, 1994, he cabled New York: “Since Unamir mandate, he [Jean-Pierre] has been ordered to register all Tutsis in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1,000 Tutsis.” He said he planned to raid the arms caches within the next 36 hours. He concluded: “Peux ce-que veux. Allons-y” – “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let’s go.”

There was no will and no way. Annan’s office replied, in a cable signed by his deputy, Iqbal Riza: “We must handle this information with caution.” Dallaire warned of mass slaughter, but Annan counselled prudence. “No reconnaissance or other action, including response to request for protection, should be taken by Unamir until clear guidance is received from headquarters.” Dallaire was furious. The next day his boss, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, replied to Annan, backing Dallaire, emphasising that Jean-Pierre only had a maximum of 48 hours before he was due to distribute the arms for the massacres. Annan’s reply, again signed by Riza, was negative. He ordered Dallaire not to proceed with the planned raid. It was, he said, beyond Unamir’s mandate under resolution 872. This was untrue. UN mandates were interpreted by DPKO officials as they saw fit. Resolution 872 mandated Unamir to “secure the city of Kigali” within “a weapons-secure area established by the parties in and around the city”. This was sufficient mandate. Dallaire was not even allowed to help Jean-Pierre. “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,”
Annan’s cable concluded.

Had Annan permitted Dallaire to carry out his raids, the genocide might never have taken place. Not only did Annan and Riza twice refuse this, they then sat on his fax. They neither alerted other UN departments nor brought Dallaire’s warnings to the attention of the security council. The council then downsized Unamir from 2,500 troops to around 250. Dallaire stayed on. He helped save thousands of lives but, tormented by memories of those who died, he later became depressed and attempted suicide. He retired in 2000 and is now a senator in the Canadian parliament, active on human-rights issues.

Charge two: Srebrenica

That from July 6 to July 11, 1995, Unprofor, the UN mission in Bosnia, repeatedly failed to authorise air strikes to save the town, despite having the means to do so, and was in grievous breach of its obligations to protect civilians

Srebrenica was one of six “safe areas” under security-council resolutions 819, 824 and 836, passed in 1993. UN commanders could call for Nato air strikes but only to defend themselves. UN officials were obsessed with preserving the UN’s neutrality, over and above its humanitarian obligations. Probably none more so than a Japanese diplomat called Yasushi Akashi.

Akashi was the political chief of Unprofor. On May 7, 1995, the Bosnian Serbs shelled Sarajevo, killing and injuring several people. General Sir Rupert Smith, the British commander of Unprofor in Bosnia, recommended Nato launch an air strike. Akashi withheld permission. He sent a cable to Annan arguing that air strikes might “weaken Milosevic [the Serbian president]”, who he believed was needed to help negotiate a peace settlement. By refusing to make a distinction between aggressor and victim, and by treating both as equal partners, the UN became a de facto ally of those carrying out the atrocities.

Conditions inside Srebrenica were appalling. More than 20,000 people, half-starved and diseased, were jammed into the town. Fleas, cockroaches and vermin flourished. The Bosnian Serbs refused soap and disinfectant for the inhabitants, and fuel and ammunition for UN peacekeepers. “There was no support from Unprofor headquarters in Sarajevo,” recalls Ron Rutten. “They did not care what was going on. From the moment we got there, in January 1995, we were sitting in a mess, surrounded by the Bosnian Serbs. All the major troop-contributing countries to Unprofor knew what was happening. There were SAS guys who were sending messages to General Smith in Sarajevo. I listened to their messages; they were reporting about everything.” But none of the information had any effect.

The Serbs launched their final attack on Thursday, July 6, and the town fell the following Tuesday. The UN refused its commanders’ repeated requests for air strikes, claiming they didn’t fall within the UN guidelines. Outnumbered, the peacekeepers fired only over the heads of the advancing Bosnian Serbs, fearful they would be wiped out if they fought. Once the town fell, Rutten and the other troops looked in vain to Lt Col Thomas Karremans and his deputy, Major Robert Franken, for leadership. Rutten tried to convince his commanders to get the civilians inside the UN compound and alert the world. “Fighting the Serbs would have been a suicide mission because of our poor logistics and useless ammunition. But we could have done something more.” Nothing came of his plan. “At the very moment when we needed leadership, Karremans and Franken gave us no direction. Every soldier was prepared and willing to do something, but nobody was given the command.”

Rutten forced his way into a building known as the White House, which was holding hundreds of men and boys. Their identity cards and passports were piled up outside. Their terror was almost tangible. “You could smell death. I saw the men, I saw the passports and how it was organised. How much more do you need to see to be sure that this is well prepared? The Bosnian Serbs were trying to erase the whole male population.” Despite Rutten’s protests, Dutch troops helped the Bosnian Serbs take the men and boys away. He photographed the process. They believed that by keeping order the prisoners would be in less danger, says Rutten. “The troops thought they could stop the atrocities by guiding people onto the buses. But we should know our history, what happened when people were taken away.”

Perhaps the greatest betrayal was of Ibro Nuhanovic, a local man who had assisted Franken. One of Nuhanovic’s sons, Hasan, worked as a UN translator. Ibro and Hasan were listed as UN staff. Ibro’s wife, Nasiha, and his younger son, Muhamed, were not. The list was the difference between life and death. Despite Ibro and Hasan’s pleas, Franken refused to add their names, and ordered them off the base.

Initially, the attack caused few ripples at the DPKO. Annan was away. The secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was travelling. Shashi Tharoor, the DPKO team leader on Yugoslavia, was on leave. So was General Sir Rupert Smith. On Saturday, July 8, Boutros-Ghali, Annan, Smith, and other senior UN officials met in Geneva. They barely discussed Srebrenica. Incredibly, they sent Smith back on leave. By the time Tharoor finally returned to his desk, Srebrenica had virtually fallen. It was left to Peter Galbraith, the then US ambassador to Croatia, to alert Washington. “In Akashi’s world, the reaction to something like this was that the UN had to be careful because it was dangerous and could lead to military action. The UN always needed proof and they had strategies to ensure there was no proof. They would sit on reports or ensure the information was not highlighted, and when it was reported to the press it just became more of the same from Bosnia.”

Once out of Serb-controlled territory, Dutchbat got roaring drunk and danced in a line. The men and boys of Srebrenica were also being lined up, but not to dance.

Charge three: Darfur

That the UN, in particular the Department of Political Affairs (DPA), repeatedly ignored reports from humanitarian officials of atrocities because they were politically inconvenient, and that the UN still refuses to take action to stop the slaughter

The crisis in Darfur erupted in 2003 after rebels rose up to demand a greater share of resources. Khartoum’s response was ferocious, launching a systematic “scorched earth” campaign. Hundreds of villages have been burnt down, over 2m people displaced, and over 400,000 have been killed or died of disease or malnutrition. Rape is used as a weapon of war. The perpetrators are members of a militia named the Janjaweed: trained, armed and funded by the Sudanese government.

The UN has launched a large-scale humanitarian operation that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But the powerful DPA helped ensure little pressure was exerted on Sudan over Darfur, for fear of jeopardising an accord that ended a separate, decades-old conflict between the government and rebels in the south. Over 10,000 peacekeepers have been deployed in Unmis, the UN mission to southern Sudan, to implement the accord, but there are still none in Darfur. “There was a fundamental feeling among very senior people that Darfur was a very inconvenient development and they would rather not know about it,” says Dr Mukesh Kapila, the former UN humanitarian chief in Sudan, seconded by the British government in March 2003. He set up a crisis cell, dispatching human-rights investigators across Darfur. Kapila sent reports to the secretariat detailing abuses committed by the Janjaweed and the Sudanese army and how they were protected by the Sudanese government. None had an impact in New York. “Trying to alert the DPA about what was happening in Darfur was like speaking into a well, where your words just disappeared into nothingness. I told them this was not purely a humanitarian issue, it was a political issue as well. But the DPA washed their hands of Darfur.”

Despite Kapila’s warnings, Annan did not speak publicly about Darfur until December 2003, almost a year into the crisis. It was only after Kapila gave an interview to Radio 4’s Today programme in March 2004, describing the carnage, that his boss, the UN humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, briefed the security council. Before he left Sudan in April 2004, Kapila sent a lengthy memo to the DPA leadership, other senior UN officials and Annan’s chief of staff, Iqbal Riza. It detailed a “scorched-earth policy” of “organised pogroms” of “extreme violence”. He asked Riza to pass a copy to Annan. “Nobody could say I had not followed the proper track.

I had made repeated representations within the secretariat and to important countries on the security council. I had documented the human-rights violations and every time there was an incident I wrote to the Sudanese government.” Like Dallaire and Lt Rutten, Dr Kapila stood up for what he knew was right. “Because of my experience in Srebrenica and Rwanda, and because people in authority have a personal responsibility for taking action when dealing with extraordinary crimes against humanity, I had a duty to speak out.” He didn’t receive a reply.

THE CASE FOR KOFI ANNAN

UN officials argue that the organisation is merely the sum of its member states and the secretariat are impartial civil servants waiting for instructions from the security council. If member states lack the political will or means to stop a conflict, there is nothing the UN can do. This argument has undoubted appeal, not least to the consciences of those responsible for the UN’s failures. If everyone is guilty then nobody is guilty. If everyone is responsible then nobody is responsible. But it is not adequate. However responsibility is divided between the secretariat, the security council and the general assembly, the UN functions as an institution itself. It has decades’ worth of experience of conflict zones, a powerful institutional memory, considerable moral authority – however battered by recent scandals – and, for many, symbolises the hope for a better world.

Most discussion about UN reform focuses on arcane theoretical questions. A concrete start would be to make the secretariat accountable. Annan has expressed regret over Rwanda. “I believed at that time I was doing my best. But I realised after the genocide there was more I could have and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support,” he said in 2004. But many questions about his term as DPKO chief remain unanswered. Why did he refuse General Dallaire permission to raid the Hutu arms caches? With whom did he discuss this decision? Why did he not pass Dallaire’s faxes warning of massacres to the security council? When did he first hear that the Serbs were massacring the men and boys of Srebrenica? And where was he when the Serb attack began in early July? Stephane Dujarric, Annan’s spokesman, referred all these inquiries to the UN’s reports on Rwanda and Srebrenica, which do not provide answers.

If there is any sense of shame about the UN’s failures, it is no hindrance to promotion. Annan brought several of his protégés with him to the 38th floor. Shashi Tharoor was made his director of communications and special projects. In 2001, Tharoor was promoted to run the UN’s communications department. India has nominated him for secretary-general and he has been lobbying hard for the top job, with Annan’s tacit support, according to the UN insiders’ website unforum.com. Iqbal Riza, Annan’s deputy in the DPKO, was promoted to Annan’s chief of cabinet, one of the most influential behind-the-scenes positions. Riza resigned in December 2004 in the wake of the oil-for-food scandal. He is now Annan’s special adviser on the Alliance of Civilizations.

Not all UN officials approve of the lack of accountability. “It is a much-debated question here whether officials should be called to account in a judicial or at least an administrative process,” says David Harland, head of the DPKO’s Best Practices Unit. “Opponents says no, because then nobody will contribute to peacekeeping missions if we get into the blame game. But this lack of accountability is convenient. There is this endless ping-pong game between the secretariat and the member states. The states blame the secretariat for making mistakes and they blame the member states for a lack of political will.” But consequences flow from people’s decisions, argues Harland. “Are those people, from the officers on the ground up to the security council, responsible for what happened at Srebrenica? [If you mean] responsible in the sense of a causal link, that the victims might be alive if they had taken other decisions, then the answer is yes.”

There are some signs of change. A UN report on peacekeeping, published in 2000, criticised the emphasis on impartiality. It noted that when one party to a UN operation repeatedly violated its terms, “continued equal treatment” of both sides “can in the best case result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil”. In September 2005 the UN adopted a new principle, the “responsibility to protect”, as a basis for collective action against war crimes and genocide, possibly including military action. Accepting the principle was one thing, implementing it another.

This August the security council finally authorised Unmis to deploy in Darfur, but Sudan has categorically refused to accept UN peacekeepers. Even where peacekeepers are deployed, little has changed, argues one UN human-rights official: “Every mission now has a standard paragraph in its mandate saying that the peacekeepers are obliged to protect civilians at risk and not only themselves when they are at risk. Member states do not yet understand and have not internalised what it means to go into a country and claim responsibility for that situation.”

What can change after Annan? In recent months, Annan has strongly condemned both the continuing violence in Darfur and the UN’s inaction. The conundrum is that a new secretary-general could help reinforce the reputation of the organisation as a force for good, and return it to its humanitarian ideals.

But a secretary-general who took resolute moral stands on humanitarian issues would doubtless threaten the security council’s power brokers, and so is unlikely to be appointed. The council will continue to prefer an emollient, helpful secretariat over a confrontational one.

SUMMING UP

Hasan Nuhanovic, who pleaded in vain with Major Franken to add his family to the Dutch peacekeepers’ list, survived. His mother, father and brother were never seen again. In November 2002, Nuhanovic launched legal action against the UN, through Liesbeth Zegveld, a human-rights lawyer based in Amsterdam. His case is based partly on the concept of command responsibility.

“Whatever mistakes the Dutch peacekeepers made on the ground, the UN was in full operational command and control over them. Therefore, Dutchbat’s conduct is – at least in part – legally attributable to the UN,” argues Zegveld. The UN disputes this. Hans Correll, undersecretary-general for legal affairs, replied that Nasiha, Ibro and Muhamed Nuhanovic had not been staff members of the UN and Hasan had not designated them as dependents.

“Your claim is not of such a character as to disclose any violation of your client’s legal rights by the organisation.” Zegveld then argued that Hasan had assumed that, as his family was staying in the UN compound, they would be protected. She is still waiting for a reply.