UN Impotent bumbling fools ? or maybe everything is just running to plan?

UN's utopian vision masks real horror
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12413208%255E32522,00.html

JANET ALBRECHTSEN
March 02, 2005
WHILE Hollywood is going gaga over the latest batch of Academy Award-winning films, a less glamorous film should be playing to the cosmopolitan audience found at the UN headquarters in New York.

Hotel Rwanda tells the real-life story of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda where Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu and manager of a luxury hotel in Kigali, sheltered about 1200 Rwandans. As the massacres continue, Rusesabagina tells his wife not to worry.
"They are preparing an intervention force," he says. But as history records, "they" - meaning us in the West - never did intervene. In three short months, Hutu death squads killed more than 800,000 Tutsis.
If genocide means anything, there it was, on show for the world. UN commander Romeo Dallaire tried to warn the West. But the US, under president Bill Clinton, and the UN, with Kofi Annan as head of peacekeeping operations, refused to call it genocide so they could avoid intervening. Since then the apologies have been profuse. "Rwanda's tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency," writes Clinton in his 957-page tome, My Life. He devoted two paragraphs to that greatest of regrets.
Fast forward to 2005. Earlier this month, the UN Security Council received a UN report that said the systematic killing of people in Darfur by the Arab leaders in Khartoum does not amount to genocide. With the death toll at 70,000 and rising, and another 2 million displaced people, the UN is behind the curve again, playing word games while massacres continue. The UN report concluded that the atrocities in Sudan were instead "crimes against humanity".
Does it matter what we call these crimes? As The Wall Street Journal pointed out recently, it does. As always, with UN machinations, there is a method to its madness. That no genocide here finding gave the UN a licence to do nothing, something the UN is getting mighty good at these days.
The 1948 genocide convention, a response to the extermination of 6 million Jews, requires that signatories "prevent and punish genocide" whenever it occurs. In other words, it calls for action. And genocide is widely defined to include killing or seriously harming people, "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".
Yet on the government-sanctioned, scorched-earth policy against Darfuris, the UN will not utter the G-word lest that requires the A-word. That way, the UN and its ardent supporters can be within the letter of international law as they sit idly by doing nothing to stop the slaughter of black African farmers by the Janjaweed, the government-backed militia.
US President George W. Bush says this slaughter of black Muslims is genocide. Aid agencies at the pointy end of this terror agree. But the UN knows better. In his dulcet tones, Annan told the Security Council the UN report on Darfur was a "chilling read" and "concrete measures" are needed to halt the violence. Unfortunately, he says that the "the best means" to stop the slaughter is to send in the lawyers. That's right - unleash the new International Criminal Court.
Now, I thought the traditional order went like this: stop the crime, nab the guilty parties, then prosecute them. Or, even better, prevent the crime. But that means troops on the ground. The US has offered to send in 10,000 soldiers, surely a more concrete measure than a team of lawyers. Which brings us back to the ICC.
The US refuses to sign up to the ICC, arguing it will become, like everything else associated with the UN, a political beast. And given the present strain of anti-Americanism and the fact US soldiers are usually called on to do the hard work, the US fears its soldiers will end up in the dock more often than the killers roaming free in western Sudan.
US suggestions for a specific war crimes tribunal in Tanzania to deal with Darfur have fallen on deaf ears. Hoping to declare checkmate, the UN is intent on forcing the US to change its mind on the ICC or be slated as opposing prosecutions of the butchers in western Sudan. In other words, condemning innocent Sudanese to death in order to score political points against the US.
And so it has come to this. The stench of rotting carcasses emanating from UN headquarters. Not just from an out-of-date charter that fails to address modern crises. Or a warped UN system that appeases and rewards oppressors: Sudan continues to sit on the UN Commission on Human Rights. Or the UN tendency to celebrate tyranny. When Yasser Arafat died, the UN flag flew at half mast. It is not just about monumental mismanagement and fraud unfolding in the UN oil-for-food scandal. Or even ineffective, inert leadership.
No. The root cause, to use UN speak, of the UN's demise is the inherently flawed, utopian vision that if you line up the flags of nations along First Avenue in New York, an "international community" with common interests would emerge. In the real world, countries act according to self-interest. That is why China and Russia blocked US moves for UN Security Council sanctions against Sudan. China is Sudan's largest oil investor and Russia supplies arms to Sudan.
If the world cannot agree to intervene in the catastrophe engulfing Darfur, then it is time to take down the flags and acknowledge there is no such thing as an international community. If multilaterialism has a future, it is not on the grand, unworkable scale of the UN. Its future will be with like-minded countries coming together to act when genuine humanitarian intervention is needed. Genocide or no genocide, let's hope they do so in Sudan.