Commentary and Newsletters

Anne Bayefsky

The Residue of Kofi Annan

Friday, December 15, 2006

The only immediate question to be asked after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan vented his spleen upon leaving office is: Do Americans, and the Bush administration, finally get it? After all, this White House was directly responsible for keeping Kofi Annan in office after the gigantic Oil-for-Food scandal could easily have taken him down. It was similarly responsible for allowing Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - the other high-ranking U.N. official fighting vociferously against sanctions on Iran - a third term. What will it take for this administration to recognize the U.N. has become the enemy of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law? And every minute wasted there pretending the Security Council is serious about stopping the gravest threat to humankind today - an Iranian nuclear weapon - takes us a step closer to the permanent destruction of our way of life.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kofi Annan, 3 September 2006
It didn't take much for Kofi Annan to come clean - and with the huge infusion of cash expected soon from George Soros into Annan's new institute, he is just warming up. "No nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others," said Annan. Is that what America is all about? The apologists for demagogues and despots are fond of crying "international democracy," when anybody with a calculator can figure out that leaves real democracies in the minority. For Kofi Annan, one of the greatest fakes of our age, it's all about "giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong." No mention of the tyrants and murderers ensuring the poor and the weak squirming beneath them are forever human pawns in this feigned interest in their welfare, or the genocidal demagogues also seeking "some influence" in the name of development by way of their friends at the U.N.

For the likes of Kofi Annan, "The [Security] council is not a stage for acting out national interests. It is the management committee of our fledgling global security system." What rot. The U.N. was supposed to be about the victory of human dignity over fear and want. If only those countries firmly rooted in the supremacy of freedom and the rule of law could see such "national interests" realized through the Security Council! As it is, the so-called "global security system" is not only "fledgling," it's a one-way ticket to nuclear war.

Kofi Annan will forever be remembered as the secretary-general who presided over the biggest and most insidious hijacking of the global agenda which has ever occurred. With the defeat of Communism, there was a chance that the U.N. could come to be not the tool for developed to triumph over developing, - but the instrument that permitted democratization and the protection of human rights to step out from behind the shadows as the sine qua non of progress in our time. Instead, over a decade with Kofi Annan at the helm, the U.N. has become an instrument of terror. A place which has no definition of terrorism because the terrorists and their allies run it, while democracies pay the bill.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezollah terrorist leader, and Kofi Annan, 20 June 2000
No one "reform" orchestrated by Kofi Annan makes the legacy of his reign of terror clearer than his new Human Rights Council. Eleanor Roosevelt - the first chair of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the U.N.'s central human-rights agency - would have been the first to walk out the front door and never look back. The Commission, recently headed by Libya, was terminated this year to make room for the Council. In only six months of operation it has had an equal number of "special" sessions on Israel alone as "regular" sessions on all the rest of the world combined. It has spent more time during its regular sessions on Israel than the other 191 U.N. states put together. It has adopted seven resolutions denouncing Israel, given one mild nod in the direction of Sudan - and nothing on the billions denied any semblance of dignity in China, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else. And now that the takeover of the Council by the Organization of the Islamic Conference is complete, it is clear it will never specifically condemn these human-rights violators. On Friday, December 8, 2006 the Council decided to hold another Durban Racism Conference in 2009; Durban was the hate-filled global meeting that ended only two days before 9/11.

So the question remains: Do we get it yet? Do we understand that Kofi Annan was given a decade to assemble a weapon pointed at our head? Will the $5.3 billion the American taxpayer sends the U.N. annually finally be channeled to a new institution of democracies, by democracies, and for democracies? Or will Kofi Annan (and his cohort Ahmadinejad who Annan has urged us "not to isolate") literally have the last laugh?

This article originally appeared in the National Review Online.