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Good Riddance, Kofi Annan

Easily the worst Secretary General the UN has ever had, this December 31st Kofi Annan is finally, finally leaving the United Nations he tried so hard to destroy. Annan plumbed new depths of corruption, ineptitude and weakness from which it may never recover. He makes Kurt Waldheim look honorable by comparison.

Annan allowed, and perhaps even profited from, massive violations of the Oil For Food program that was supposed to deprive Saddam Hussein of the means to enrich or arm himself. The scope of the Oil For Food catastrophe makes it the largest financial scandal in all of human history:

According to an encyclopedia-length report into Oil-for-Food's manipulation, an inquiry led by former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, the massive scope of the multi-billion dollar financial fraud is dizzying: $1.8 billion in illicit kickbacks from companies collected by Saddam's Iraq; illegal financial kickbacks from 66 U.N. member states; illicit surcharges by 40 U.N. member states; illegal oil surcharges paid to 139 companies and "humanitarian kickbacks" involving 2,253 companies worldwide. The vast majority of kickbacks involved the disguised sale of humanitarian goods in which contractors paid inflated "transportation fees" and "after sales services charges."

Praise be to Allahpundit for this photo of Kofi and his staff.

You would think these charges alone would have consigned Annan to the dustbin of history, but he was just getting started. Annan's own son Kojo got stung in the investigation. Providing aid, comfort and support for tyrants was job number one at Kofi Annan's UN, and his enterprising son Kojo was also involved in the scandalous Harare airport project for Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe. Annan himself went to the mat for Saddam Hussein, opposing the Security Council resolutions against Saddam's Iraq, and stabbing the U.S. in the back by helping Saddam Hussein draft a letter purporting to allow full inspections and thus averting a new Security Council resolution. Saddam, naturally, failed to live up to the bargain. Annan waxed nostalgic for Saddam once he was removed from power, recently saying that life in Iraq is worse now than it was under Saddam. Annan had nothing to say about Russian brutalities in Chechnya, and dithered on Darfur until only last month, when he finally called for peacekeepers to be sent to Sudan. Annan has always had a blindspot when it comes to the murder of innocents - as head of peacekeeping under SecGen Boutrous-Boutrous Ghali, "Annan failed to sufficiently warn the UN of the growing threat that radical Hutus were posing in Rwanda. Shortly thereafter, in a month-long genocidal fury, more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered despite the presence of a small UN force. Then, a few months later, 7,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica, again in spite of the presence of UN peacekeepers."

In Kofi Annan's UN, the foxes have always been in charge of the henhouse. The Commission of Human Rights ludicrously appointed states such as Cuba, Sudan and Saudi Arabia to its membership. The supposed cure was to reform the organization into the Human Rights Council in 2006, which promptly sat Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Cuba as members.

Annan hypocritically dared to criticize United States human rights practices today in his farewell address at the Truman Presidential Museum and Library, even though he presides over an organization that committed widespread sexual atrocities: "The range of sexual abuse includes reported rapes of young Congolese girls by U.N. troops; an Internet pedophile ring run from Congo by Didier Bourguet, a senior U.N. official from France; a colonel from South Africa accused of molesting his teenage male translators; and estimates of hundreds of underage girls having babies fathered by U.N. soldiers who have been able to simply leave their children and their crimes behind." A draft report on the abuses stated that several member states engaged in witness tampering and hindered the UN's investigation in an attempt to cover up the scandal. These crimes did not just happen in Congo - in Haiti and Liberia "girls have told of regular encounters with soldiers where sex is demanded in return for food or money," according to the BBC.

Annan even turned a blind eye to sexual impropriety happening right under his roof, by completely ignoring sexual harrassment charges aimed at UN High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers.

Lubbers' organization, the UNHCR, had a nasty habit of actually feeding refugees into the jaws of totalitarian monsters:

The UNHCR keeps an office in Beijing, with a budget this year totaling $4.4 million, to which asylum seekers have no access. Four years ago, a family of North Korean refugees actually stormed the premises and gained asylum after threatening to eat rat poison from their pockets if forced back out onto the street. Since then, the UNHCR has allowed China's security agents to better defend the compound against further visits by the people the UNHCR is supposedly in China to protect.

The credibility and authority of the UN is now completely in tatters. While this was certainly a group effort, Kofi Annan set the tone and blundered repeatedly, usually by failing to do a thing when accusations of impropriety surfaced. Will he pay for the damage he has done to this once-hallowed organization? Unlikely, but I predict that we will learn even more about the malfeasance of Kofi Annan once he is gone - with the possibility that he will finally be called to account.

Update: Yeah, I didn't even get into Annan's shameful coddling of Hezbollah, but DANEgerus did so quite nicely in the comments -

...allowing cross border incursions...

...refusing to release video evidence of those incursions...

...refusing to implement UN resolution 1559 to disarm Hezbollah...

...allowing Hezbollah to stockpile arms in UNIFIL patrol areas...

...allowing Hezbollah to use civilians as human shields...

...allowing Hezbollah to use UN positions as shields...

...using equipment to clear roads for Hezbollah during the war...

...diverting UN night-vision equipment to Hezbollah...

...condeming Israel repeatedly, but not Hezbollah who started the war...

...condeming Israel repeatedly, but not Hezbollah who clearly commited war crimes...

...reporting Israeli deployments to Hezbollah...

...implenting a 'Cease-Fire' to save Hezbollah...

...again refusing to disarm Hezbollah per UN resolutions 1559 & 1701...

...now refusing to prevent Hezbollah rearming...

...UN assigns Hezbollah's terror supporting regime Syria to watch Hezbollah...

...Kofi 'asks' Iran to stop arming Hezbollah while promising not to stop Iran from arming Hezbollah...

...Kofi 'asks' Iran to stop developing nuclear weapons while promising to resist the UN taking action while Iran develops nuclear weapons...

Posted by Ken McCracken · 11 December 2006 10:34 PM

Comments

Posted by: zsa zsa at December 12, 2006 12:35 PM

Posted by: DANEgerus at December 12, 2006 02:39 PM

Posted by: zsa zsa at December 12, 2006 06:30 PM