terça-feira, julho 27, 2004
Sudão e a ONU
Artigo de Mark Steyn no Daily Telegraph.
The UN system is broken beyond repair. In May, even as its proxies were getting stuck into their ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan was elected to a three-year term on the UN Human Rights Commission. This isn't an aberration: Zimbabwe is also a member. The very structure of the organisation, under which countries vote in regional blocs, encourages such affronts to decency.
The Sudanese representative, by the way, immediately professed himself concerned by human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
The UN, as the Canadian columnist George Jonas put it, enables dictators to punch above their weight. All that Elfatih Mohammed Ahmed Erwa, the Sudanese government's man in New York, has to do is string things out long enough to bog down the US call for sanctions in the Gauloise-filled rooms. "Let's not be hasty," Erwa told the Los Angeles Times. And, fortunately, not being hasty is something the UN is happy to do in its own leisurely way until everyone is in the mass grave and the point is moot.
Today, British charities are launching a campaign to save Darfur, which they describe as the "world's worst humanitarian crisis". If we were serious about the plight of Sudan, we'd stop using that dully evasive word "humanitarian". It's fine for a hurricane or a drought, but not a genocide.
The death and dislocation in Sudan is a political crisis every step up the chain - from the blood-drenched militia to their patrons in Khartoum to their buddies in the African Union to the schemers and cynics at the UN. It's "multilateralism" that magnifies some nickel 'n' dime murder gangs into a global player.
In W. F. Deedes's account yesterday, I was struck by this line: "Aid agencies have found it difficult to get visas." That sentence encapsulates everything that is wrong with the transnational approach. The UN confers on its most dysfunctional members a surreal, post-modern sovereignty: a state that claims it can't do anything about groups committing genocide across huge tracts of its territory nevertheless expects the world to respect its immigration paperwork as inviolable.
Why should the West's ability to help Darfur be dependent on the visa section of the Sudanese embassy? The world would be a better place if the UN, or the democratic members thereof, declared that thug states forfeit the automatic deference to sovereignty. Since that won't happen, it would be preferable if free nations had a forum of their own in which decisions could be reached before every peasant has been hacked to death. The Coalition of the Willing has a nice ring to it.
One day, historians will wonder why the most militarily advanced nations could do nothing to halt men with machetes and a few rusting rifles.
posted by Miguel Noronha 11:49 da manhã
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