Why, thank you Mr Annan!
What bedevils Iraq is that it has no sense of national political consciousness. Regardless of where the fault for this lies — the map makers, the tyrants, the tribes, the sects, the jihadists — it is a fact. The nation is divided along ethnic, regional and sectarian lines and it needs time to develop a sense of self, but time is running out. What to do? Get Kofi Annan to keep talking. He just might get the Iraqis to pull together.
Take his latest comment. Says he to the BBC's Lyse Doucet: "If I were an average Iraqi, obviously I would make the same comparison, that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying: 'Am I going to see my child again?'"
Iraq's national security adviser Mouwaffaq al-Rubaie responded by saying: "I'm shocked and stunned by what Kofi Annan alluded to, that the condition was better under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein." But why should he be so shocked? Annan presided over the oil-for-food-scam and back then a coterie of UN gangsters "had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying" because the cash was being stashed in Swiss banks. Nice! OK, there was "a dictator who was brutal" but, hey, the UN is filled with them and after a while one gets used to having them around.
It was Oscar Wilde who said, "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness," and any organization that has taken a bystander stance on genocide in Rwanda then and in Darfur now does appear to be careless. A more careful Kofi Annan would have thought twice about expressing nostalgia for Saddam & Sons, but he's leaving office after 10 years on 31 December so he doesn't have to worry about what he says.
Comments
Well, if I remember correctly, Mr. Average Iraqi Mom or Dad did have to worry about not ever seeing their children again back in what Kofi doubtless thinks of as the Good Old Days. There were special prisons for kids with "troublesome" parents - and in a dictatorship, you don't have to do much to be considered troublesome.
Perhaps the kids who ended up in jail were the lucky ones, compared to the girls who unfortunately attracted the attention of the utterly vile Hussein sons, Qusay and Uday. The fate of those young women was to be raped and utterly humiliated. Qusay and Uday enjoyed forcing women to run races in the nude. The Hussein boys and their buddies bet on them like they were horses, and the winner's "prize" frequently was to be gang-raped by all the men in attendance. Some of these women were then murdered and fed to dogs.
An gruesome subject, but one I feel the need to remind my anti-war friends of from time to time. Kofi is very far from being the only one in the West who suffers from short-term memory loss.
I understand why Annan's memory is a bit selective, though. How else can he sleep at night?
Posted by: Donna | December 5, 2006 2:36 AM
Kofi has always had a selective memory, such as when he had the gall to blame the US for not stopping the Rwandan genocide, even though it was the French who supplied the Hutus with their weapons, and despite the fact that Kofi played a central role in rejecting pre-emptive action and intervention in the area that was then under his own jurisdiction.
Posted by: Patrick | December 5, 2006 3:08 PM