We now have yet another example of why the UN ought to hold public confirmation hearings for top appointments. Of course, given some of the creepier regimes holding UN seats, there’s no guarantee that a public confirmation process would result in higher quality UN top staff (witness how even in the U.S., our tortured confirmation process bounced the best ambassador we’ve sent to the UN in decades — John Bolton). But it would at least provide a tad more information than the hush-hush process with which the new UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, like his predecessors, is now stocking the UN’s top ranks. Take, for instance, his decision announced Friday to appoint as his deputy the foreign minister of Tanzania, a woman named Asha-Rose Migiro.
Pressed at the UN noon briefing for details on Migiro’s qualifications to manage the secretariat of the UN’s sprawling $20-billion-per-year system –with its rich history of waste, fraud and abuse — the spokeswoman cited Migiro’s recent experience chairing a regional conference for the Great Lakes region of Africa.
Maybe that’s all it takes. The U.S. Mission — minus Bolton — has been enthusing about Migiro’s appointment. But there are some mysteries to all this that could stand a lot more explaining. Here are two:
1) The Tanzania connection. Last year, when Ban, a South Korean, was campaigning for the job of UN Secretary-General, Seoul became unusually generous in its largesse to a number of countries, including Tanzania — which happened at the time to hold one of the ten rotating seats on the UN Security Council — and thus had an influential voice in the choice of Ban. In an article published Sept. 29, 2006 and headlined “Millions of dollars and a piano may put Korean in UN’s top job,” the Times of London reported that South Korea last year pledged $18 million in aid to Tanzania, or about four times what it had given in the space of a dozen years from 1991 to 2003. South Korean officials protested that the aid increase was already in the pipeline before Ban’s candidacy, and that there was no link between the two. But it would behoove Ban to explain a lot more about why, of all the candidates in all the world, he tapped Tanzania’s Migiro.
2) The Iranian connection. The item linked here comes courtesy of the Iranian press, via Russia, so let’s not take it at face value. But if Migiro wants to correct the impression this story creates, that she’s fool enough to believe the ayatollahs are all about atoms for peace, and endorse them in their nuclear quest, now would be the time. Maybe while she’s at it, she can tell us more about that reference in the last sentence to the activities of “Iran’s Construction Jihad Bureau in Tanzania.”
Well, we now have some data on the half-life of integrity in the UN’s top office: Less than a week.
When the UN’s new secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, reported for work last Tuesday, he delivered a moment of sterling decency. Asked for his thoughts on the execution of Saddam Hussein, he did not start with a hypocritical Kofi-ism about the UN’s aversion to the death penalty. Instead, he began by making the vital point that Saddam had committed “heinous crimes and unspeakable atrocities.” But by Saturday, Ban was settling neatly into the UN mindset, urging a stay of execution for two of Saddam’s high-ranking co-defendants, both sentenced to death by Iraq’s High Tribunal.
The UN press release delivering Ban’s new line cites the views of UN “human rights” commissioner, Louise Arbour, who has been scolding that international law “only allows the imposition of the death penalty as an exceptional measure within rigorous legal constraints.” Apparently, by UN lights, there was nothing exceptional about the terror, torture and mass murder inflicted for decades by Saddam’s regime.
But if Ban is now so eager to toe the Arbour line, how about making the most of it. Let’s start the clock on how long it takes before he uses his UN bully pulpit to demand stays of execution for people condemned to death by another UN member state — North Korea. There, with no due process whatsoever, it is government policy to execute people, in some cases in public, not for such atrocities as mass murder, but for such acts as trying to defect, or for such heroic deeds as trying to help others escape Kim Jong Il’s murderous totalitarian state. If the UN’s new Secretary-General Ban and the vocal Louise Arbour are really so concerned about the death penalty, then the fate of condemned Baathist killers in Iraq should be the least of it. When do we start hearing, loud and clear and often, from the UN’s top floor, calls from Ban and his aides for North Korea to stop executing people whose only offense was to seek freedom?
The hand-wringing over Saddam Hussein’s execution makes me wonder if we’re better off never catching Osama bin Laden. More, in my column today for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Sending UN peacekeepers two years ago to “rebuild” southern Sudan hasn’t brought peace, but according to the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph, it has allegedly brought what is becoming one of the signature activities of UN forces in Africa: peacekeeper rape… of children. According to the Telegraph, UNICEF has been sitting on an internal report of such abuses, and the Telegraph itself has gathered accounts of more than 20 alleged victims, and suggests there may have been hundreds of such cases. Here’s the story, headlined: “UN Staff Accused of Raping Children in Sudan.”
This follows reports over the past three years of UN peacekeeper rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Liberia, in Burundi, in Haiti — pick your country, and you can safely assume the UN has either denied it, refused to comment, or insisted that there is a zero tolerance policy for such abuse. Will someone please explain why on earth the new UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, should for one millisecond entertain the idea of keeping on staff Kofi Annan’s head of peacekeeping these past six years, Jean-Marie Guehenno?
Or (scroll down under the link to Guehenno, for more on these two) why there should be a demand for the further services of Guehenno’s two top aides? These would be a former chief operating officer of Ted Turner’s UN Foundation, who joined Guehenno’s staff as Assistant-Secretary-General in 2003, Jane Holl Lute; and Assistant Secretary-General Hedi Annabi — who was working as director of UN peacekeeping in Africa back when Kofi Annan, then head of peacekeeping himself, in 1994, was in all his neutral rectitude waiting out the Rwandan genocide. One could go on and on, from the massacre at Srebenica; to, more recently, the UN peacekeepers who sat in their UNIFIL bases for six years in southern Lebanon while under their noses Hezbollah trucked in weapons, built bunkers, kidnapped Israeli soldiers and last summer launched a war; to the corruption scandals of recent times surrounding a raft of peacekeeping procurement operations for such stuff as fuel and rations. Note to Ban: Before the UN does any more peacekeeping, how about some housecleaning?
… as I’ve summed up for today’s New York Daily News, is cleaning up Kofi’s mess.
The good news is that when Ban arrived at the UN this morning, he had the audacity to give a sane response to a press question about whether Saddam Hussein should have been executed. Instead of answering with a Kofi-like jab at the U.S., Ban began — and right he was — by reminding his audience that “Saddam Hussein was responsible for committing heinous crimes and unspeakable atrocities against the Iraqi people.” Ban went on to say that “The issue of capital punishment is for each and every member state to decide.” Only then did he slide into the moral goo of UN platitudes about the international community and its law of rule, or rule of law, or whatever it is the UN has been upholding in the Middle East all these years.
The bad news is that Ban has already begun handing out new berths to some of Kofi’s old crew, and more of the same is expected. With Ambassador Bolton gone, and the changeover in Congress, there is effectively no more oversight of the UN. With a set-up like that, unless Ban turns out to be Rudy Giuliani in disguise, expect years of sustainable UN sleaze.
