Ironically, I picked this up today from Passion co-author Ingrid Jone's blog Sudan Watch: Blogger Glenn Reynolds, who has been very faithful to Sudan and has used his high traffic site to good ends for the cause, had an excellent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. It's subject is meaningful to many of us who have been part of the Passion extended family these long months--many of us have had our implicit faith in the UN shaken, and our trust in Kofi Annan shattered. [Excerpt below the fold]
UPDATE: Havel for Secretary General bumper stickers are now available on the web (thanks also to Ingrid for the link)!
Time for a Kofi Break By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS Things are going badly for Kofi Annan. The oil-for-food scandal has
revealed U.N. behavior regarding Saddam Hussein's Iraq that ranges from
criminally inept to outright corrupt. Rape and pedophilia by U.N.
peacekeepers haven't gotten the kind of attention they'd get if American
troops were involved, but the scandals have begun to take their toll. And
the U.N.'s ability to serve its crowning purpose -- the "never again"
treatment of genocide that was vowed after the Holocaust, and re-vowed
after Cambodia and Rwanda -- is looking less and less credible in the wake
of its response to ongoing genocide in Darfur. And finally, the U.N. has so
far played no significant role in defusing the Ukrainian crisis. Things have gotten bad enough that some are calling for Mr. Annan's
resignation, amid talk of former Czech President Vaclav Havel as successor.
("Havel for Secretary General" bumper stickers are on the Web.) But however
you assess Mr. Havel's chances of becoming secretary general, for Mr. Annan
the comparison is devastating. Mr. Havel, after all, is a hero on behalf of
freedom: A man who helped bring about the end of communist dominance in
Eastern Europe, despite imprisonment and the threat of death -- a man who
could write that "Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can't be
done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force." Mr.
Annan, by contrast, is a trimmer and temporizer who has stood up for
tyrants far more than he has stood up to them. If the comparison is damning to Kofi, it's even more damning to the U.N.
Mr. Havel once wrote Czech dictator Gustav Husak, "So far, you . . . have
chosen . . . the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances .
. . of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and
ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your
own power." One might say the same of the U.N. bureaucracy. [more]
November 29, 2004; Page A14
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