Nothing makes me sicker than hypocrisy. Wait, there is one thing that makes me sicker. Hypocrisy that results in the death of innocents.

We are all painfully aware of the oil-for-food fiasco. UN bureaucrats enriching themselves by stealing money intended to buy food and medicine for the people of Iraq. And now we know that UN “peacekeepers” in the Congo have been using the impoverished children of that desperate land as their sexual playthings.

I have been a long time critic of the UN on many levels. It is a worthless institution. I could live with that I suppose, but its tendency to destroy that which it is sent to protect is unforgivable. The scope of the corruption and hypocrisy is made all too clear in this article from the Guardian. It was written by a former UN employee and pulls open the curtains on the evil in blue helmets.

Here’s a glimpse:

The children’s installation is introduced by the words: ‘They should still be with us.’ A nearby display asks whether they could be. It honours the actions of ordinary people of courage. People like Yahaya, a 60-year-old Muslim who saved Beatha, who narrates her story: ‘The killer was chasing me down an alley. I was going to die any second. I banged on the door of the yard. It opened almost immediately. He [Yahaya] took me by the hand and stood in his doorway and told the killer to leave. He said the Koran says if you save one life it is like saving the whole world. He did not know it is a Jewish text as well.’ Next to these tributes is another installation – a reproduction of the infamous fax by the UN Force Commander, General Romeo Dallaire, imploring the then head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, for authority to defend Rwandan civilians – many of whom had taken refuge in UN compounds under implicit and sometimes explicit promises of protection.

Here, too, is Annan’s faxed response – ordering Dallaire to defend only the UN’s image of impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next, it details the withdrawal of UN troops, even while blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate.

The museum’s silent juxtaposition of personal courage versus Annan’s passive capitulation to evil is an effective reminder of what is at stake in the debate over Annan’s future: when the UN fails, innocent people die. Under Annan, the UN has failed and people have died.

His own legions have raped and pillaged. In two present scandals, over the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and sex-for-food in Congo, Annan was personally aware of malfeasance among his staff, but again responded with passivity.

Well, ok you say. Rwanda, that was bad. And yeah, the corruption in the oil-for-food deal is unacceptable. And the Congo, that was surely an aberration. So, three examples where the UN could have done better. Is that all you got?

I wish.

One very personal example: when I worked in Liberia in the mid-Nineties a new chief administrative officer was dispatched to Monrovia by the UN to replace the previous CAO, who was removed (then reassigned elsewhere) for taking a 15 per cent kickback on UN procurement contracts. In the name of cleaning up the old corruption, the new CAO tapped our phones, paid locals to spy for him and threatened to send home anyone who opposed him, all to facilitate his own quest for a 15 per cent kickback on everything we purchased.

The worst part was watching him try to coerce as many of his young ‘local staff’ to sleep with him as possible. A UN salary is enough money to support an entire extended family in a country such as Liberia, so these vulnerable women were in a tortuously compromised position by their boss’s unwanted advances.

I was the human rights lawyer and these girls would come to my office in tears asking for help. I wrote memo after memo of complaint to my chain of command, but no one did anything. I even confronted the CAO personally. To no effect. When I visited the UN human resources office in New York to complain personally, they laughed at my naive outrage: ‘It happens all the time in the field,’ they said. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

In the meantime, a quarter of a million Liberians died, and warring factions committed war crimes. And the UN did – nothing. Just as it was simultaneously doing nothing, more infamously, in Rwanda and Bosnia.

So, I have to ask…where is the outrage? Who amongst us could not be outraged? Who would not be demanding Kofi’s resignation? Who will speak in favor of maintaining the status quo at the UN?

Oh, its our “peace loving” friends on the left. Who’d a thunk it?

The second searing irony for me is that the American neoconservative right has occupied the moral high ground in critique of Annan, outflanking the left, which sits on indefensible territory in his support. But if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, then what is? If anyone’s values have been betrayed, it is those of us on the left who believe most deeply in the organisation’s ideals. I am mystified by the reluctance of the left both in the US and the UK (the Guardian ‘s coverage, for example) to criticise Annan’s leadership. The bodies burn today in Darfur – and the women are raped – amid the sound of silence from Annan. How many genocides, the prevention of which is the UN’s very raison d’être, will we endure before the left is moved to criticise Annan? Shouldn’t we be hearing the left screaming bloody murder about the UN’s failure to protect vulnerable Africans? Has it lost its compass so badly that it purports to excuse the rape of Congolese women by UN peacekeepers under Annan’s watch? Is stealing money intended for widows and orphans in Iraq merely a forgivable bureaucratic snafu?

I am co-author of a book critical of Annan’s peacekeeping legacy, Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone . My co-author, Dr Andrew Thomson, penned a line that drove the UN leadership to fire him. Lamenting UN negligence in failing Bosnian Muslims whom it had promised to protect in its ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica – where 8,000 men were slaughtered – Thomson wrote: ‘If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.’

Tell me again about liberal values. What exactly do these people stand for? Have they no shame? Is their hatred of America so great that they can not find time to criticize the evil that is personified in the UN?

Tell me later. Right now I need a bath.

Cross posted at The Wide Awakes