Mr. Annan's Career
"You have to understand, as an Envoy, I can't want peace more than the protagonists, more than the Security Council or the international community, for that matter."At a time when we need - when the Syrian people desperately need - action, there continues to be finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council."You can bring the best in the world, but when there is a veto in the Security Council we are getting nowhere." Kofi Annan, UN and Arab League peace envoy for Syria
Kofi Annan was given an impossible task. Who else but someone with the prestigious past of having been the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, requested by the current office holder to do his diplomatic utmost at the highest level of gravity and concern to avoid yet another world-class massacre, to do the job?
Geared to failure, but never say so, strive to overcome all obstacles, reach for the impossible.
An opportunity to redeem his legacy. For under his watch much happened in the world community that was ferociously dreadful on a scale of human depravity, with great masses of human beings conspiring to bring death and destruction on a huge scale to others with whom they lived in enmity instead of amity. This is one element of the long-lamented human condition.
Kofi Annan presided over fairly miserable world events. As head of UN peacekeeping in 1994, before taking on the mantle of Secretary-General, he made the fateful decision not to press the Security Council to agree to send additional troops to Rwanda, fully armed, to prevent the resulting slaughter of almost a million Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
The bloodshed, mass rape, displacement and homelessness that took place in Darfur, when the Arab Sudanese leaders took the option of opposing Darfurian farmers' protests against the Sudanese Arabs allowing their herds to rampage through their farmed fields as pasturage, unleashing the deadly revenge entrusted to the Janjaweed, took place under his watch.
The oil-for-food debacle where the United Nations administered an exchange of Iraqi oil for basic human necessities, as a sanction imposed by the UN and the West after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 resulted in Desert Storm, and left Mr. Annan looking very vulnerable, when his own son was implicated in corruption, rigging and avidly enriching himself.
The bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing twenty-two of the United Nations' employees after he had made the decision to send senior staff back to Iraq was the stuff of nightmares that capped a career that must surely have put many years of wearying regret on his shoulders.
His self-acclaimed major achievement, 'responsibility to protect' R2P, has proven ineffective, given the debacle of Syria's regime slaughtering its own. He might think of Libya as having shed a shard of light on the potential of R2P, reflecting special circumstances, never to be repeated.
Nothing in life is ever simple.
And administering a world centre of diplomacy meant to foster goodwill and understanding between communities of fallible human beings, that centre itself becoming a symbol of all that is wrong with the world, with its own corruption, nepotism, excuses and excesses represents a far larger failure than Mr. Annan's career.
Labels: Security, Social-Cultural Deviations, Societal Failures, Syria, United Nations
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 04, 2012
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