By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, April 16 -- When the UN Security Council was re-opened Tuesday evening with fanfare, the talk was lofty, the views were grand.
Then Inner City Press asked about the UN bringing cholera to Haiti, by implication about Sri Lanka, and UN Peacekeeping's Herve Ladsous failing to act on mass rapes by its partners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Video here.
To have to be a downer is not fun. But Tuesday evening there was no other way. In the renovated Security Council chamber, a propaganda film was shown, how the Security Council was saving lives.
There was no mention of pulling peacekeepers out during the Rwanda genocide, or offering false promises in the Balkan wars.
There was no mention of pulling peacekeepers out during the Rwanda genocide, or offering false promises in the Balkan wars.
So when the evening moved north to the Delegates' Lounge, the question was required, and Inner City Press asked it. How could the Security Council send peacekeepers to Haiti, then do nothing when people got cholera from it, and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon tersely dismissed their claims?
While UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous, the fourth Frenchman in a row to hold that post, did nothing for four months about 126 rapes in Minova in the Congo, and openly refused to answer questions about them just outside the Council, how could the Council do nothing?
The moderator Richard Roth added an issue he seemed to know Inner City Press had wanted to: Sri Lanka. How could the Security Council do nothing as 40,000 civilians were killed? And now celebrate itself, as the world's “Most Important Room”?
Norway's foreign minister Espen Barth Eide, a sharp individual when it comes to Palestine, on this question blathered that “there are more and more actions to help,” there are “less conflicts now than 10 or 15 years ago.”
He admitted that the “Great Lakes are the biggest tragedy of humankind for many years” but said “it's not that we don't try.”
Really? In 1994, at the urging among others of Herve Ladsous representing France in the Council, the genocidaires were allowed to escape into Eastern Congo.
And now in 2013, ghoulishly, Ladsous is the head of UN Peacekeeping, covering up rapes by Congo's Army, ordering up drones and an intervention brigade. What does Espen Barth Eide say about that? As with the Security Council, there was no follow up.
Still it must be said, Norway ran the event quite nicely. Its Terje Roed Larsen recounted how he works both for the UN Secretariat and for IPI -- it's UNclear for which he traveled to Bahrain, and how opened an IPI office there -- and its excellent Permanent Representative Geir Pedersen was under-spoken throughout the evening, and genuine.
But the questions remain. Watch this site.
