Sixty years ago, at the invitation of
President Harry Truman, Winston Churchill delivered his historic Iron Curtain
address in Fulton, Missouri, to warn Americans of the menace they faced in the
Soviet Union. On Monday, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan gave his valedictory
speech at the Truman Library in Independence to instruct Americans about the
principles of global leadership and their need for the United Nations. The
comparison says a lot about Mr. Annan's legacy and the current state of the U.N.
America, Mr. Annan said, "has historically been at the vanguard of the
global human rights movements. . . . When it appears to abandon
its own ideals and objects, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and
confused." That was a slap at the Bush Administration, which must be
wondering what it got from Mr. Annan after coming to his political rescue last
year amid Paul Volcker's Oil for Food revelations. But leaving aside this foray
into U.S. politics, how have Mr. Annan and the U.N. met their own "ideals
and objects"?
When Mr. Annan was named Secretary General 10 years ago, he did so as the
U.S.-backed candidate of reform. Jesse Helms, then-chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, told Mr. Annan that "if you choose to be an
agent of real and deep-seated change, you will find many supporters--and even
allies--here in the U.S. Congress."
Senator Helms's expectations were not met. Seven years later--thanks to U.S.
military action that Mr. Annan did everything in his power to prevent--we
learned that he had presided over the greatest bribery scheme in history, known
as Oil for Food. We learned that Benon Sevan, Mr. Annan's trusted confidant in
charge of administering the program, had himself been a beneficiary of Iraqi
kickbacks to the tune of $160,000. We learned that Mr. Annan's chief of staff,
Iqbal Riza, had ordered potentially incriminating documents to be destroyed. We
learned that Mr. Annan and his deputy, Louise Frechette, were both aware of the
kickback scheme but failed to report it to the Security Council, as their
fiduciary duties required. However, we haven't yet learned whether the senior
Annan illegally helped his son Kojo obtain a discounted Mercedes, an issue on
which the Secretary General has stonewalled reporters.
Earlier this year, Mr. Annan was also forced to place eight senior U.N.
procurement officials on leave pending investigations on bribery and other
charges. Vladimir Kuznetsov, the head of the U.N. budget-oversight committee,
was indicted this year on money-laundering charges. Alexander Yakovlev, another
procurement official, pled guilty to skimming nearly $1 million off U.N.
contracts. The U.N.'s own office of Internal Oversight found that U.N.
peacekeeping operations had mismanaged some $300 million in expenditures.
Mr. Annan's response to all this has been a model of blame-shifting,
obfuscation and patently insincere mea culpas, apparently justified by
his view that a Secretary General has more important things to do than
administer his own organization. But allow the Secretary General the conceit
that his real job is acting as the world's most important diplomat. How has he
performed in that task?
Mr. Annan came to office after a stint as head of U.N. peacekeeping
operations. The period corresponded with the massacre in Srebenica of 7,000
Bosnians and the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda, both of which were
facilitated by the nonfeasance of peacekeepers on the ground. It was later
revealed that Mr. Annan's office explicitly forbade peacekeepers from raiding
Hutu arms caches in Rwanda just four months before the genocide.
The world's worst man-made humanitarian catastrophes have since taken place
in Zimbabwe, North Korea, Congo and Darfur. Mr. Annan has been mostly silent
about the first two, perhaps on the time-honored U.N. principle of
non-interference in the internal affairs of member states other than the U.S. In
the Congo, U.N. peacekeepers haven't stopped the bloodshed, but they have made
themselves notorious as sexual predators.
By contrast, Mr. Annan has been voluble on Darfur: In his speech at the
Truman Library, he argued that the lesson of Darfur is that "high sounding
doctrines like the 'responsibility to protect' will remain pure rhetoric unless
and until those with the power to intervene effectively--by exerting political,
economic, or, in the last resort, military muscle--are prepared to take the
lead." Nice words.
However, it is amazing that Mr. Annan should utter them, given his own role
in obstructing "those with the power to intervene effectively"--namely
the U.S.--in other situations. Mr. Annan's first great solo diplomatic venture
came in early 1998, when he ran interference for Saddam Hussein to forestall
military strikes by the Clinton Administration. Saddam, he said at the time, was
a man with whom he could "do business." He did the same in the run-up
to the Iraq War and did the terrorist insurgency a moral service by pronouncing
that war "illegal." Given that Saddam was killing his own people at an
average rate of 36,000 a year, what does this say about Mr. Annan's solicitude
for the oppressed?
But the larger problem of Mr. Annan's approach is that, by insisting that only
through the U.N. could the world act to protect vulnerable populations, he has
made vulnerable people hostage to predatory regimes with seats at the U.N. and
made it all the more difficult for the world to act. Compare the fate of the
Kosovars--rescued from the Serbs by U.S. military action undertaken without U.N.
consent--with that of the Darfuris, who are still at the mercy of militias
supported by the Sudanese government in Khartoum, which has effectively blocked
serious international intervention.
Likewise, Mr. Annan's only serious post-Oil for Food reform was in replacing
a human-rights machinery that has consistently avoided condemning the world's
worst human-rights abusers. Mr. Annan asked for, and got, a new Human Rights
Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission. Six months into its
existence, the new council has succeeded in faulting only one nation: Israel.
Mr. Annan came to power at a moment when it was at least plausible to believe
that a properly reformed U.N. could serve the purposes it was originally meant
to serve: to be a guarantor of collective security and a moral compass in global
affairs. Mr. Annan's legacy is that nobody can entertain those hopes today.
