Speaking on Belgian radio and to the Belgian senate last week, Mr. [Lakhdar] Brahimi [Secretary-General Annan's top adviser] compared Mr. Sharon to an assassin, urged Europeans to increase their pressure on Israel, and said that the world is too accepting of "cynical and ridiculous" Israeli positions on peace with the Palestinian Arabs, according to a report by Agence France-Presse that was translated from the French. . .Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, "urged that Secretary-General Annan fire his top adviser . . . for his anti-Israel tirades."
For the second time this month, a U.N. spokesman yesterday distanced Mr. Annan from Mr. Brahimi's words, saying Mr. Brahimi spoke "in his personal capacity." He added that Mr. Annan's views on the Middle East "are well known."
The U.N. issued a similar statement two weeks ago after Mr. Brahimi told an Arab audience that America professes to promote human rights in the Arab world while at the same time ignoring Israeli human rights violations.
Meanwhile, Pulitzer-deserving reporter Claudia Rosett has another devastating column in the Wall Street Journal "Forget reform. The U.N. needs regime change:"
Secretary-General Kofi Annan [has not] been particularly secretive about his views on the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, informing the world not so long ago that he deemed it "illegal"--a word he has not to my knowledge applied to any aspect of his own supervision of the Oil for Food program, from which Saddam Hussein, while forking over $1.4 billion for Mr. Annan's Secretariat to supervise the process, scammed billions meant for sick and hungry Iraqis. On that subject, Mr. Annan has been most stunningly discreet, refusing in his year-end press conference last week to discuss even his own role. Instead, with a degree of patience the Secretariat has not displayed toward its critics, Mr. Annan seems to be waiting for the U.N.-authorized inquiry, funded at his behest with $30 million in residual Oil for Food money (meant to aid Iraqi citizens, not U.N. investigations), and led by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, to inform the secretary-general, privately, and at stately speed, sometime next year, what his own role actually was. At that stage, Mr. Annan will decide what information he deems appropriate to share with the public.If liberals are so anxious the UN become a world government, why aren't they scrutinizing documents form the corrupt "Oil-for-Palaces" program as carefully as they did George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard records? At least if they focused on the U.N., they'd find something in 5 years. Calling Dan Rather!
To this scene in recent months we may add the reports of rape and child molestation committed by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa, allegations of sexual harassment involving the heads of both the U.N. refugee agency and the internal audit division, a revolt against "senior management" by the U.N. staff union, the findings of an internal U.N. integrity survey that a lot of U.N. employees fear retaliation if they speak out, and the statements of a few brave whistle-blowers, fighting for their jobs, to precisely that effect. Plus, if you like, there's the expanding saga of how the secretary-general until confronted by the press allegedly failed to notice that his son had allegedly been doing lucrative business deals with a major U.N. contractor under the Oil for Food program. All of which has been subject to the marvelously circular argument that the press should shut up until the U.N., in between firing off hush letters to its contractors and employing Mr. Annan's U.S.-taxpayer-funded staff to lambaste the U.N.'s critics, can carry out allegedly full and independent investigations of all these troublesome matters.
By now, the debate outside the U.N. walls has expanded from calls for Mr. Annan to resign over Oil for Food to arguments that he really ought to resign over U.N. toleration of genocide, in which he has played a sustained part--though it's hard to see why one argument should necessarily exclude the other. Meanwhile, for a sample of what's going on inside the U.N. walls (bear with me): According to a Dec. 13 U.N. staff union bulletin, expressing "outrage," though the staff committee requested an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and favoritism within the U.N.'s own internal audit department, "no formal investigation was ever conducted. . . . No one was interviewed or questioned about the alleged violations. Rather, the personnel records were checked in a manner similar to a desk audit."
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