Monday, May 08, 2006
The UN Kills
And as I wrote on this page in July 2004: "The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead." And as I wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph in September 2004: "The US agreed to go the UN route and it looks like they'll have a really strongish compromise resolution ready to go about a week after the last villager's been murdered and his wife gang-raped."
Several hundred thousand corpses later Clooney is now demanding a "stronger multinational force to protect the civilians of Darfur".
Agreed. So let's get on to the details. If by "multinational" Clooney means a military intervention authorised by the UN, then he's a poseur and a fraud, and we should pay him no further heed. Meaningful UN action is never gonna happen. Sudan has at least two Security Council vetoes in its pocket: China gets 6 per cent of its oil from the country, while Russia has less obviously commercial reasons and more of a general philosophical belief in the right of sovereign states to butcher their own.
So forget a legal intervention authorised by the UN. If by "multinational" Clooney means military participation by the Sudanese regime's co-religionists, then dream on. The Arab League, as is its wont when one of its bloodier members gets a bad press, has circled the camels and chosen to confer its Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on Khartoum by holding its most recent summit there.
So who, in the end, does "multinational action" boil down to? The same small group of nations responsible for almost any meaningful global action, from Sierra Leone to Iraq to Afghanistan to the tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia and on to East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The same core of English-speaking countries, technically multinational but distressingly unicultural and unilingual and indeed, given that most of them share the same head of state, uniregal. The US, Britain, Australia and Canada (back in the game in Afghanistan) certainly attract other partners, from the gallant Poles to the Kingdom of Tonga.
But, whatever international law has to say on the subject, the only effective intervention around the world comes from ad hoc coalitions of the willing led by the doughty musketeers of the Anglosphere. Right now who's on the ground dragging the reluctant Sudanese through their negotiations with the African Union? America's Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick and Britain's International Development Secretary Hilary Benn. Sorry, George, that's as "multinational" as it's gonna get.
Clooney made an interesting point a few weeks ago. He said that "liberal" had become a dirty word in America and he'd like to change that. Fair enough. But you're never going to do so as long as your squeamishness about the projection of American power outweighs your do-gooder instincts.
The American Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg penned an almost comically agonised piece fretting about the circumstances in which he'd be prepared to support a Bush intervention in Darfur: Who needs the Janjaweed when you're prepared to torture your own arguments the way Goldberg does? He gets to the penultimate paragraph and he's still saying stuff such as: "The question, of course, is whether the US seeks Security Council support to legitimise such airstrikes."
Well, no, that's not the question. If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you're not being serious. The good people of Darfur have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what's going on. Eventually, they reported back that it's not genocide.
Here is where the tendency towards inconsistency and results-orientation forsaking principles becomes rather clear. Read the whole story, please.
2 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue May 09, 01:57:00 PM:
It's hard now to think of the UN as an effective global peacemaker or as having the capacity and the will to bring stability to worn-torn areas, but in 1989 and early 1990 the UN had one, undiluted success in these roles. The area in question was southwest Africa, on its way to independance from apartheid South Africda after 29 years of bush war and as a regional proxy conflict of the Cold War superpowers.
The United Nations Transitional Assistance Group or UNTAG in Namibia mobilized forces that significantly enabled the transition to free, fair and relatively violence-free elections:
this, even with terrorism by unrepentant Afrikaner nationalists and the South African secret police, who bombed UN offices and assasinated a key human rights lawyer prior to elections.
Why was the UN a relatively effective presence in this situation and not other conflicts? Several essential conditions come to mind. Foremost of these was that notwithstanding the hardline holdouts mentioned above, all of the regional and global powers with a stake in the conflict had reasons to allow it to succeed. Communism was on the wane in eastern Europe and Moscow was losing its taste for subsidizing foreign conflicts. Even the Marxist leaning Southwest Africa People's Organization or SWAPO, the armed resistance to South African rule in Namibia, became pragmatic, pro business and private property nation-builders once hostilities ceased.
Even more significantly, free and fair elections in Namibia were a condition of Cuban withdrawal from neighboring Angola, a compromise brokered by the superpowers and regional combatants after South Africa lost the largest conventional battle ever fought in the sub-continent at the Angolan town of Cuito Canavale.
The UN had a limited duration mission in Namibia, overseeing the withdrawal of the forces of one nation-state from the territory of another, processing returnees and refugees, and supervising elections. UNTAG left after less than 2 years and today Namibia is among the more stable democracies in the region.
It was not perfect. There was a very tragic and somewhat suspicious clash between returning SWAPO combatants and South African army units on the first day of UNTAG's administration that left hundreds dead. AIDS, then of limited impact in isolated soutwest Africa, got a jump in Namibia through infected returnees and UN personnel as well as open transportation corridors and the resumption of free trade after sanctions were lifted.
Nevertheless, there was no other body with the qualifications or the will to provide the assistance that Namibia needed to transition to full nationhood and the UN managed to achieve that goal in this case.
By , at
Thu May 11, 09:31:00 AM:
History seems to repeat itself as "People are dying and nobody cares".
