The secretary-generalship is need of guidance. And, thus, even as we warmly remember Annan, we must also be sure to promote the truth about his legacy, particularly the fact that it was stained by some of the costliest mistakes of the last fifty years.

First and foremost was Rwanda, where under Kofi Annan’s personal watch, the greatest genocide since the Holocaust was allowed to take place. Annan was, at the time, the commander of all UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda. In January 1994, the local UN commander in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, warned Annan directly and in writing that an inside source had informed him that Hutu militiamen were drawing up lists of all Tutsi inhabitants in Kigali, much in the way the Nazis had done with the Jews in Europe. “He suspects it is for their extermination,” Dallaire wrote in the cable, which explicitly mentioned that “[Hutu] personnel could kill up to a thousand Tutsis” in as little as “20 minutes.”



Dallaire asked only for permission to confiscate illegal weapons caches, which he very correctly assumed would be used in a genocide. He had the forces to do it, but Annan, in a letter under his name and signed by his personal deputy, forbade him from doing anything but pass on the information to the Rwandan government — which was run by those very men preparing then genocide.

Three months later, the killings would begin, and nearly a million Tutsis would be killed in a low-tech slaughter by Hutu militias. All throughout, Annan would do nothing to stem the killings — though he was the only man with the on-the-ground means to do it.

More ignominious than Annan’s failures in Rwanda was his refusal to take responsibility for them. Annan repeatedly hemmed and hawed when asked to accept accountability for his glaring failures. When asked by reporters about the cable from Dallaire and his incomprehensible inaction, he dismissed it as an “old story that is being rehashed,” adding that he had “no regrets.” When he finally did apologize, he obscured his own guilt behind the collective: “All of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it,” he said.



Unfortunately, Annan’s inability to combat evil was not limited to the tragedy of Rwanda.

The massacre at Srebrenica also took place on his watch, with his own UN peacekeepers present in the city at the time of the slaughter.

He also met personally with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, despite the latter’s genocide against the Kurds just a decade before, where he killed up to 180,000 innocent civilians, many of them with poison gas. Annan, at the time, claimed that he was meeting Saddam to prevent a conflict. But even if that justified the meeting, Annan didn’t have to sip orange juice and smoke cigars with the one of the world’s most evil leaders. Even more shocking were his attempts to flatter the tyrant as the “builder” who “built modern Iraq,” when in truth the entire edifice of Saddam’s Iraq was founded upon ethnic oppression and unprecedented brutality.

Ultimately, Kofi Annan made indifference to evil a hallmark of his executive tenure at the UN. And if such blindness to evil continues to be enshrined as a virtue, the moral authority of the UN is bound to continue along its path to decay.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

https://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2018/08/23/rabbi-shmuley-kofi-annans-legacy-is-his-blindness-to-rwandan-genocide/

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jerseyboy:
The secretary-generalship is need of guidance. And, thus, even as we warmly remember Annan, we must also be sure to promote the truth about his legacy, particularly the fact that it was stained by some of the costliest mistakes of the last fifty years.

First and foremost was Rwanda, where under Kofi Annan’s personal watch, the greatest genocide since the Holocaust was allowed to take place. Annan was, at the time, the commander of all UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda. In January 1994, the local UN commander in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, warned Annan directly and in writing that an inside source had informed him that Hutu militiamen were drawing up lists of all Tutsi inhabitants in Kigali, much in the way the Nazis had done with the Jews in Europe. “He suspects it is for their extermination,” Dallaire wrote in the cable, which explicitly mentioned that “[Hutu] personnel could kill up to a thousand Tutsis” in as little as “20 minutes.”



Dallaire asked only for permission to confiscate illegal weapons caches, which he very correctly assumed would be used in a genocide. He had the forces to do it, but Annan, in a letter under his name and signed by his personal deputy, forbade him from doing anything but pass on the information to the Rwandan government — which was run by those very men preparing then genocide.

Three months later, the killings would begin, and nearly a million Tutsis would be killed in a low-tech slaughter by Hutu militias. All throughout, Annan would do nothing to stem the killings — though he was the only man with the on-the-ground means to do it.

More ignominious than Annan’s failures in Rwanda was his refusal to take responsibility for them. Annan repeatedly hemmed and hawed when asked to accept accountability for his glaring failures. When asked by reporters about the cable from Dallaire and his incomprehensible inaction, he dismissed it as an “old story that is being rehashed,” adding that he had “no regrets.” When he finally did apologize, he obscured his own guilt behind the collective: “All of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it,” he said.



Unfortunately, Annan’s inability to combat evil was not limited to the tragedy of Rwanda.

The massacre at Srebrenica also took place on his watch, with his own UN peacekeepers present in the city at the time of the slaughter.

He also met personally with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, despite the latter’s genocide against the Kurds just a decade before, where he killed up to 180,000 innocent civilians, many of them with poison gas. Annan, at the time, claimed that he was meeting Saddam to prevent a conflict. But even if that justified the meeting, Annan didn’t have to sip orange juice and smoke cigars with the one of the world’s most evil leaders. Even more shocking were his attempts to flatter the tyrant as the “builder” who “built modern Iraq,” when in truth the entire edifice of Saddam’s Iraq was founded upon ethnic oppression and unprecedented brutality.

Ultimately, Kofi Annan made indifference to evil a hallmark of his executive tenure at the UN. And if such blindness to evil continues to be enshrined as a virtue, the moral authority of the UN is bound to continue along its path to decay.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

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