The UN gives hypocrisy a bad name, By SHLOMO AVINERI
Jan. 27, 2003
If it were not so profoundly sad, it would qualify as the joke of the millennium: Libya has been elected as chairman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
The procedure, of course, was perfectly legal. The chairmanship rotates every year from one global region to the other. This year it was Africa's turn to nominate the chairman, and it nominated Libya. Only the United States and Canada voted against. To their everlasting shame, seven European countries abstained.
This is a revealing commentary on the moral bankruptcy of the UN. And it comes at an especially delicate time for the organization, which has been challenged by President George W. Bush to show that it takes its own mandatory decisions about Iraq seriously.
If not, it may end up in the same ignominious situation as the League of Nations, which proved so impotent in the 1930s when confronted with the aggressive policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. To have Libya elected just now to chair the UN body responsible for human rights does not add to the legitimacy of the world body.
Libya is a totalitarian, fundamentalist tyranny. Its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, combines erratic behavior with extremist policies, supporting dictators around the globe. He heads one of the world's most oppressive regimes, where there is no pretense of any sort of elections.
Under his rule, Libya has supported terrorist organizations everywhere from the IRA to various extremist Palestinian groups. It is still under UN sanctions for its role in the downing of the PanAm flight over Lockerbie.
OVER THE decades, the position of the UN as a symbol of the ideas of a peaceful world community has been steadily eroded. It proved utterly unable to stop the wars in the Balkans; and in at least one case Srebrenica a Dutch UN peace-keeping force stood by and witnessed the worst massacre in post-1945 Europe, when Bosnian Serbs murdered around 6,000 defenseless Muslim men. (Why not have ministers charged in Belgium, just like they wish to do to Sharon, Fallguy?......Snooker
A Dutch commission of inquiry subsequently revealed that the UN Dutch battalion was, in fact, implicit in war crimes. (Anything you'd like to say about this para, Fallguy?.....Snooker
In Rwanda, once the genocide started, the UN official responsible for peace-keeping operations ordered the evacuation of UN forces from the country, and thus left the field open to the bloodiest genocidal massacre since World War II. That UN official's name was Kofi Annan.
It is a depressing record, which the UN is trying probably in vain to rescue by appearing in the Iraq crisis as the voice of international legitimacy. But at a time when UN inspections in Iraq seem to be like sending the Salvation Army to clear out a band of gangsters, raising Libya to head the Commission on Human Rights may go down in the annals of history as the epitome of the failure of an organization which started life after 1945 with so much hope.
Organizations usually don't die and certainly there is too much raison d'etat to make sure that the UN will continue to hobble on. But it will be a mere shadow of what it should and could be.
It gives hypocrisy a bad name.
The writer is a former director-general of the Foreign Ministry.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1043640065078
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1995-2003 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/
