http://www.smh.com.au/news/Opinion/Genocide-put-Annans-UN-beyond-reform/2005 /04/01/1112302233381.html Genocide put Annan's UN beyond reform By Michael Duffy April 2, 2005 Set up to save the world, the United Nations has become, in some mysterious manner, less than the sum of its parts. It is a machine that specialises in destroying the sense of proportion of those who get too close to it. I was reminded of this when reading a description of a recent meeting in Geneva. Australia was being discussed by the UN's expert committee set up under the convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination. The description was written by Howard Glenn, executive director of activist group Rights Australia. The UN committee has been critical of racial discrimination in Australia in the past decade. This time round, Glenn wrote approvingly in On Line Opinion, some members were none too impressed by the flimsy evasions of our man on the spot. The Chinese member of the committee said: "All these wonderful [government] programs, yet indigenous people seem dissatisfied. Why is that?" Glenn shows an admirable concern for people's wellbeing. It's just that the irony of Australia being questioned by a country with China's appalling human rights record seems to have escaped him entirely. The UN has been plagued for decades by this problem of police states passing judgement on democracies. Most activists think it is not crippling. (To paraphrase George Orwell, only an intellectual could overlook the absurdity involved.) But it has helped destroy the UN's reputation with ordinary people. Advertisement AdvertisementThis week the world's media was concerned about whether the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, would survive the latest report into his son's involvement in the oil-for-food affair. You may recall Annan was the head of UN peacekeeping in 1994 who told a subordinate in Rwanda not to intervene in growing civil unrest, effectively green-lighting the murder of more than 800,000 Tutsis. Annan says he was acting according to UN procedures. Still, a lot of people were hacked to death with machetes. If Annan's career could triumph over that setback - not to mention the massacre of 8000 Muslims under UN protection in Srebrenica the next year - I don't know why they even bothered to investigate his son's tiny role in the oil-for-food scandal. Annan will survive because he's proved a great success in maintaining the UN as an organisation that is continually undermined by its member states yet can be used by them as an excuse for global inactivity. With the end of the Cold War and the economic boom of recent decades, the West has a renewed capacity to help millions of people in poor countries. This could be done relatively cheaply, as has been shown by Bjorn Lomborg and others in the Copenhagen Consensus project, documented in their 2004 book Global Crises, Global Solutions. But a dysfunctional UN pumps a miasma of despair into global grand thinking, encouraging a lethargy and a meanness that suit many in the West. There's a far more important scandal affecting the UN involving sex-for-food. It's received relatively little publicity, even though it dwarfs what happened in Abu Ghraib prison, presumably because the perpetrators aren't American. The trouble started in Kosovo, where UN peacekeepers from Britain, France, Romania, Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere have been the main clients for underage girls forced into prostitution. Prostitution is illegal there, but UN forces are immune from prosecution. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, UN forces have been raping girls or having sex with starving boys and girls as young as 13 in exchange for food. The soldiers involved include many from India and South Africa. Investigations have found over 150 instances. Then there are the reports in The Australian of Jordanian troops with the UN in East Timor five years ago raping children, women and goats. Too often the UN is part of the problem, not the solution, its representatives preying on some of the world's most vulnerable people. The recent book Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures is a shocking indictment of the UN's failures by three people who worked for it in the 1990s. American lawyer Kenneth Cain recalls how, "When the Cold War ended, the power of freedom, democracy and hope weren't abstract concepts. So we piled into Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia [with] the sure knowledge that we were on the right side of history." Then history started moving in the wrong direction and "one million citizens we promised to protect died on our watch". Another of the authors, New Zealand doctor Andrew Thomson, got the job of digging up the mass graves in Bosnia and Rwanda for evidence in case anyone could be found to prosecute for the killings. "I set out to save lives and have ended up collecting the dead," he reflects bitterly on his time with the United Nations. When the women of Srebrenica spit in his face he notes, "They're right to spit. What happened here is obscene. Barely a year after the killings, we waltz back in under the same despised UN flag to clean up the cadavers. I was naive to expect gratitude." The lesson he offers from his experience is this: "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." The United Nations does some good but too often it is just a lie or a fig leaf or even a cause of evil itself. Over a long period it's proved incapable of significant reform. 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