On Monday the Security Council will hold a key straw poll on the candidates seeking to be the next UN Secretary-General, with South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki Moon in the lead. As Kofi Annan’s decade in office soon comes to a close, his legacy may be shaped by three major issues now facing the organization: the ongoing genocide in Darfur, the protection of victims around the globe by the supposedly reformed Human Rights Council, and the threat to international peace and security by fundamentalist and potentially nuclear-armed Iran.
On the first two, Mr. Annan has shown unequivocal moral leadership. On the third, he and his aides have issued several important statements, though not nearly as strongly or as often as the grave danger requires.
Too often in the past, UN and other international officials refrained from pointing the finger of blame squarely at the killers in Khartoum. But Mr. Annan seems to have acquired renewed moral courage. “We all know that the Government of Sudan still refuses to accept the transition” to UN peacekeepers, he said. “The consequences of the Government’s current attitude—yet more death and suffering, perhaps on a catastrophic scale—will be felt first and foremost by the people of Darfur.”
Until there is a major policy shift by the powers preventing effective action—the Sudanese government, their Arab League allies, the Chinese veto—things in Darfur are likely to get worse, not better.
The Council, now meeting in its second regular session in Geneva, has yet to adopt a single resolution holding Sudan to account for its crimes, let alone to convene a much-deserved emergency session.
The old Commission on Human Rights was widely discredited for ignoring most of the world’s abuses while targeting Israel in half of all country resolutions. Even if the Council follows the ignominious path of its predecessor, however, history ought to judge Mr. Annan favorably.
After all, it was thanks to Mr. Annan’s unique courage and candor that the hypocrisies of the previous Commission were finally exposed. He described it as a club in which countries gained membership “not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others.” Mr. Annan’s powerful March 2005 report was singularly responsible for abolishing the old Commission.
In its place, the Secretary-General proposed a solid plan for a reformed council made up of countries that actually care about human rights. But the UN’s repressive regimes had other plans. The result: the new Council has spent its first three months going from bad to worse, with 100 per cent of the country resolutions dedicated to the demonization of Israel, while abuses in all of the UN’s other 191 states were ignored.
Many UN officials have adopted a reflexively apologetic stance, trying ever new arguments to explain away the council’s blatant bias. But not Mr. Annan. In June, before its inaugural meeting, he called on the new body to avoid the selectivity and politicization that characterized its predecessor. Moreover, he addressed the most egregious example by expressly urging the Council not to focus on Israel alone.
Not all is darkness. The first half of the current three-week session showcased the bright side of the Council, that of its human rights monitors. They put a needed spotlight on torture in China, North Korea’s bizarre kidnapping of Japanese citizens, repression in Belarus, and much more. (For a full account, visit our regularly updated blog on our website)
Non-governmental organizations also made important presentations, though countries like China and Cuba made sure to keep these to a maximum of 20 minutes daily—and even then, the Castro regime sent their own phony organizations to use up half of the allotted time. Yesterday, Cuba, Morocco, Algeria, Sri Lanka—and even democratic India—interrupted with objections every time an NGO mentioned the name of a specific country.
Regrettably, we are now starting to see the Council’s dark side. On Tuesday, John Dugard, the Council’s expert on Palestine, delivered his usual scathing report alleging a litany of Israeli violations—and once again refused to say a single word about Israeli civilian victims of Palestinian Kassam missiles, or of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorism. The consistent theme that emerges from Dugard’s reports is that of Israel as diabolical criminal, the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority as angelic victim. His latest report actually condemns the UN’s own Road Map for Peace. Why? Because it fails to follow Dugard’s particular interpretation of international law—and he even criticizes the Palestinians for holding talks under the Road Map framework. And why are things not going Dugard’s way? Because, he told a seminar on Tuesday, “Holocaust guilt consumes Europe.” It’s sad when the statements of a UN human rights expert sound eerily close to those of Iranian President Ahmadinenjad.
But Dugard is only the beginning. On display before the plenary, starting today, are an endless stream of anti-Israel reports: the “fact-finding mission” on Gaza (headed by, you guessed it, John Dugard) which is mandated to cite only Israeli actions, and to completely disregard Hamas violations; the “high-level commission of inquiry” into Lebanon, mandated to cite only Israeli actions and to completely disregard Hezbollah violations; and much more of the same, under a special anti-Israel agenda item that was adopted in June, the only permanent fixture of all council sessions.
In addition, four experts will present a joint report next Wednesday on their mission to Israel and Lebanon, while the Council’s “right to food” expert will report in November on his own special mission—to Lebanon only.
To top it all off, High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour yesterday announced that she will make her own visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Perhaps because, in her opinion, the Human Rights Council and its officials have yet to pay sufficient attention to this region?
Have Mr. Annan and his officials properly confronted Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, his call to “wipe Israel off the map,” his terrifying pursuit of nuclear weapons? The evidence is mixed.
To his credit, Secretary-General Annan strongly condemned Ahmadinejad’s genocidal incitement last year. In his recent trip to Tehran, Mr. Annan—who played a key role in the UN’s adoption of an annual day to commemorate the Holocaust—made a point of contesting Iran’s Holocaust denial, and his spokesman in New York implicitly denounced Ahmadinejad as “a bigot.” In a statement this week in memory of the massacres at Babi Yar, where the Nazis murdered many thousands of Jews, Mr. Annan rejected “the false claims of those who say the Holocaust never happened or has been exaggerated.”
But Mr. Annan can and should do far more. Loudly and clearly, he needs to precisely name and shame the Iranian government and its leader—and we wish he would do so every time Ahmadinejad repeats his wicked words.
We were also disappointed that the most senior UN human rights official in New York, Craig Mokhiber—while addressing a September 14th UN seminar on the Holocaust and genocide—held back from specifically condemning Ahmadinejad’s odious remarks, even after two other Annan advisers had expressed their grave concern.
Edward Mortimer, Mr. Annan’s Director of Communications, was the first at the seminar to rightly raise the issue, asking the panel to address what the international community should do in face of “the head of one of the member states of the United Nations who has been publicly questioning the reality of the Holocaust, something which the General Assembly said should not be done.”
Dr. David Hamburg, Chair of the Secretary-General’s Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention, agreed that the matter was very serious. “Since Hitler, it is hard to think of someone who so repeatedly and explicitly called for genocide. Here is a man calling for genocide—repeatedly and explicitly against one group—with nuclear weapons. We need high level diplomacy that is much stronger than what has been done-the European Union and Japan and democracies worldwide should be in the lead.”
However, Mr. Mokhiber, the New York representative of High Commissioner for Human Rights Arbour, failed to specifically condemn Ahmadinejad. When asked about Holocaust denial in general, yes, he absolutely condemned it. But when asked directly what specific steps the UN should take before Ahamadinejad addressed the Gerneral Assembly, Mr. Mokhiber replied, “I probably don’t understand that question at all.” As a human right official, he implied, he could not see how the issue of Ahamadinejad—i.e., the issue of incitement to genocide—fell within his purview.
Later in the evening, Mr. Mokhiber admonished those who he said complain about violations against a specific people, and instead urged equal concern for all crimes committed by any country. Specifically, however, he only named four: “the government of Sudan or the government of Iran, or the government of Israel or the government of the United States…” See full analysis here.
After Mr. Mokhiber so cautiously avoided criticizing any specific countries the whole evening, we find it hard to believe that his selection of those particular nations was random. Rather, the implication seems clear: Iran, a country that incites to genocide, is in reality no different than Israel, the target of its genocidal hatred. Similarly, the genocidal Sudanese regime is in reality no different than the U.S.—which, despite its flaws, remains the leader of all international attempts to end that genocide.
So long as leading UN officials fail to grasp basic moral distinctions, the organization will fall short of fulfilling its founding ideals.
