Kofi gets spanked

From yesterday's NYT:

Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, accused the United Nations Security Council today of having failed to help rescue his country from Saddam Hussein, and he chided member states for bickering over his beleaguered country's future.

“Settling scores with the United States-led coalition should not be at the cost of helping to bring stability to the Iraqi people,” Mr. Zebari said in language unusually scolding for an occupant of the guest seat at the end of the curving Security Council table. …

“The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years, and today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure.”

No wonder Kofi Annan got a little flustered.

“Now is not the time to pin blame and point fingers,” [Annan] told reporters. Saying that Mr. Zebari was “obviously entitled to his opinion,” Mr. Annan said that the United Nations had done as much for Iraq as it could under the circumstances and was prepared to do more.

“Quite honestly,” he said, “now is not the time to hurl accusations and counter-accusations.”

The truth hurts…and it could hardly smack around a more deserving guy.

During a 30-year career in the U.N. bureaucracy—head of human resources, director of the budget, administrative officer for the Economic Commission for Africa, chief of personnel for the High Commission for Refugees—Annan developed an organization man's phobia of risk. The tension first became clear during his tenure as chief of U.N. peacekeeping, from 1993 to 1996. On his watch the U.N. bungled its response to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. To take the sorriest episode from the Bosnian escapade: In 1993, in the town of Srebrenica, U.N. peacekeepers negotiated a cease-fire with Bosnian Serbs in exchange for the disarmament of the town's Muslims. The United Nations promised the Muslims that they didn't need the weapons because the U.N. would protect them in a “safe area.” Two years later, 600 Dutch peacekeepers guarded the Muslims residing in the eastern Bosnian U.N. “safe area.” But when the Bosnian Serbs mounted their July 1995 assault on Srebrenica, the U.N. betrayed its promise of security. By all accounts, Annan's office in New York sent muddled commands to the field. As a result, the Dutch fired not a single shot; they gave the Muslims the misimpression that they would be protected by NATO air strikes, and, as Serb General Ratko Mladic rounded up Muslim men, the peacekeepers stood aside. In the end, by the best estimates, the Serbs killed an estimated 7,414 Muslim men from the town.

But it's Rwanda that provides the clearest window into Annan's mind. Four months before the Hutus embarked on their 1994 genocidal rampage—800,000 Tutsis killed in 100 days—Annan's office in New York received a fax from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian head of the U.N. contingent in Rwanda. The memo, labeled “most immediate,” quoted from a well-placed informant who described in eerily precise terms the planning of the Hutu “anti-Tutsi extermination.” Dallaire asked for permission to evacuate the source. He also announced that in the next 36 hours he would raid a “major weapons cache” that had been stockpiled in preparation for the genocide. Annan denied both requests. His office cabled Dallaire, “[T]he overriding consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions.” What's worse, he ordered Dallaire to inform Rwanda's Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana of the informant, even though the informant had explicitly named the president's cronies as the planners of the genocide. At these key moments in Bosnia and Rwanda, Annan showed his fundamental timidity by his insistence that U.N. troops adhere to the strict letter of Security Council mandate—even if it meant sacrificing lives—and by his refusal to treat either the Hutus or Serbs as forces of evil rather than negotiating partners.

These failures didn't derail Annan's career. In fact, they largely did the opposite. Because he didn't resign in anger or make a fuss about U.N. inaction, he cemented his reputation as innocuous. He failed upward. And then he repeated his mistakes.

(There's much more where that came from, though unfortunately TNR now locks its archives behind a subscription-only firewall.)