UN Liar

UN TO "INVESTIGATE SELF" OVER MURDEROUS BAGHDAD BOMBING--More Mush From the Wimps!

2003-12-19T11:51:00.000+01:00

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WHAT UN TRIBUNALS (CRIMINAL & ADMINISTRATIVE) ARE NOW & WILL CONTINUE TO BE--STAR CHAMBERS

2003-12-17T09:09:00.000+01:00

Star Chamber . . . A court or group that engages in secret, harsh, or arbitrary procedure \1/
— American Heritage Dictionary of the EnglishLanguage, 4th ed.
. . . [The King's] courts did sometimes make "short shrift" of lawyers whose greatest crime was to dare to defend unpopular causes.
— Cohen v. Hurley, 366 U.S. 117, 139 (1961) (dissent), overruled in Spevack v. Klein,

The above and following excerpts come from an article written by a Massachusetts attorney named Barbara Johnson who is facing bar discipline as a result of her exercise of her first amendment rights to free speech--see the entire article at http://www.falseallegations.com/drano102-bbo-star-chamber-92503-forum.htm.

However, her recitations about the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers and the Mass Trial Court are even more applicable to the UN and ILO Tribunals--no witnesses, deliberations in secret, no juries, no rights to appeal--sure, Prince Kofi wants war criminals tried according to "international standards", but in UN parlance, that means a veritable Star Chamber, unaccountable to anyone by Prince Kofi and his merry band of FOK's (Friends of Kofi).

Read (and weep if you are an international civil servant, or an international war criminal subject to UN jurisdiction) the following:

The Court of the Star Chamber

The Star Chamber was established after an act in 1341. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), vol. XXV, p. 795. Over time, the composition and jurisdiction of the court became uncer- tain, but “[i]n practice its jurisdiction was almost unlimited.” Id., citing William Hudson, "Treatise of the Court of the Star Chamber," in vol. ii. of Collectanea Juridica. Certainly its jurisdiction had superseded that of the ordinary courts of law in cases where the ordinary courts were too weak to act. Encyc. Brit. 11th ed., vol. XXV, p. 795.
By 1529, exercising jurisdiction in that court was a president, chancellor, treas- urer, bishop, two chief justices and two alternate justices. Id.
Although the court had been initially a court of appeal, Henry VIII, Chancellor Wolsey, and Archbishop of Canterbury Cranmer had encouraged plaintiffs to bring their cases directly to the Star Chamber, bypassing the lower courts entirely.
After the act of 1487, “the Star Cham- ber became the great engine of the royal tyranny” [id.] and within 25 years, under the leadership of Wolsey and Cranmer,\5/ it not only performed the very necessary and valuable work in punishing powerful offenders who could not be reached by the ordinary courts of law [id.], it also became a political weapon for bringing actions against opponents to suppress opposition to royal policies of Henry VIII.
Originally open to the public, the Court of Star Chamber sessions came both to be held in secret and to represent the misuse and abuse of power by the king and his circle. “Its procedure was not according to the common law.” Id. There were no witnesses (it could proceed on rumor alone), no juries, no right of appeal, and punishment was swift, flexible, and severe to any enemy of the crown. (“It could apply torture; it could inflict any penalty but death.” Id.)
Between 1628 and 1640, the Court of Star Chamber became a substitute for Parliament and in the 1630s banned all "news books." Charles I made extensive use of the Court of Star Chamber to persecute dissenters, including Puritans who fled to New England. Star Chamber proceedings were used to gain not only arbitrary convictions, but also arbitrary acquittals for guilty parties whom the crown wished to protect. The abuses of the Star Chamber by Charles I were one of the rallying cries for those who eventually executed him in 1649.
In sum, because it “characteristically departed from common-law traditions . . . and . . . specialized in trying ‘political’ offenses, the Star Chamber has for centuries symbolized the disregard of basic individual rights.” Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806, 821 (1975).

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KOFI MILQUETOAST--Further Evidence UN Shouldn't Even Be in Charge of Trash Collection, Let Alone International Criminal Courts

2003-12-16T09:06:00.000+01:00

There was our action hero, Prince Milquetoast Annan, spouting platitudes and other inane blather about the capture of Saddam. Then someone from the generally spineless assembled media asks him about Saddam and the International Criminal Court, to which Prince Milquetoast replied, "You're being provocative".

He then had the temerity to state that so long as the trial of Saddam met the "minimum international standards of human rights and humanitarian law", he would be okay with it.

Hypocritical bastard! The UN doesn't even apply minimum international standards of human rights or humanitarian law either to its own staff or to those that it seriously injures in the course of its allegedly good works (vide, the girl refugees in Guinea and Nepal who were forced to trade sex for UN refugee aid,, and the 22 hapless souls that died in the Baghdad bombing in August on account of Prince Kofi's incompetence and political correctness)--how he can he impose such standards?! Oops, I forgot--Prince Milquetoast's operating principle, like most unaccountable bureaucracies, is "do as I say, not as I do". Oh well, sorry about that Iraqis.

Actually, I'd rather face the Iraqi's if I were Saddam than a UN kangaroo international court--look at what is happening to poor Slobo Milosevic in the Hague--a travesty of justice!

UN SEcurity for Staff "DYSFUNCTIONAL"

2003-10-24T11:44:00.000+02:00

In an allegedly independent report comissioned by the UN to review the failings that led to the Baghadad bombing of 19 August 2003, killling 22 staff, the authors have confirmed the conclusions drawn by your faithful correspondent in a previous posting (entitled "DeMello's Needless Death One Among Many", posted Tuesday 30 September 2003--http://www.unliar.blogspot.com/2003_09_28_unliar_archive.html).

Perhaps it is time for all UN staff injured on the job and the survivors of those staff that did not survive to bring a class action against the UN seeking compensation for its failure to protect them--then and only then will the UN and other international organisations take the necessary steps to ensure staff safety around the globe. Without accountability of UN managers, there will only be arrogance and impunity--act now!!

Executive summary of Baghdad Report
On 19 August 2003, the United Nations headquarters in the Canal Hotel in Baghdad suffered a devastating bomb attack. The detonation resulted in the death of 22 United Nations staff and visitors, and over 150 persons were injured. The United Nations carried out an internal investigation in the field. On 22 September 2003, Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan appointed an Independent Panel on the Safety and Security of UN Personnel in Iraq. The Panel was asked to examine all relevant facts about the situation before the 19 August attack, the circumstances of the attack itself and the actions taken by different parties in the immediate aftermath. The Panel was also asked to identify key lessons on security arrangements and to make recommendations on measures that would assist in preventing or mitigating future incidents in Iraq or other high-risk missions. (See annex I of this report, “Terms of Reference of the Independent Panel on the Safety and Security of United Nations Personnel in Iraq”)
The Panel interviewed a large number of UN staff, in particular security staff, in New York, Amman, Baghdad and Geneva, as well as representatives of the Coalition Forces, the Coalition Provisional Authority and non-governmental organizations operating in Iraq. It visited the site of the attack and collected information on ongoing investigations by the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi police.
The report of the Panel assesses the adequacy of arrangements for and fulfilment of responsibility within the United Nations both at Headquarters and in the field and by the Coalition forces for the safety and security of United Nations personnel in Iraq. The report explores some of the policy issues and dilemmas associated with the security of UN personnel and provides practical recommendations for improving UN security management and arrangements, with a view to preventing as much as possible such tragedies and limiting their impact on UN staff.
In the view of the Panel, the UN security management system failed in its mission to provide adequate security to UN staff in Iraq. The failure of UN management and staff to comply with standard security regulations and directives left the UN open and vulnerable to the type of attack that was perpetrated on 19 August 2003. In particular, the UN security system failed adequately to analyse and utilize information made available to the system on threats against UN staff and premises. The security awareness within the country team did not match the hostile environment. The observance and implementation of security regulations and procedures were sloppy and non-compliance with security rules commonplace. Adequate security arrangements may not have been able to prevent the attack against the Canal Hotel perimeter, but would certainly have minimized the vulnerability of the staff and premises and reduced the number of casualties caused by the attack.
The main conclusion of the Panel is that the current security management system is dysfunctional. It provides little guarantee of security to UN staff in Iraq or other high-risk environments and needs to be reformed. The challenge of security of UN staff in crisis zones in the current world requires the highest level of professionalism and expertise from the security management. The current system is not able to provide this expertise. The new system should have a clear chain of command, an audit trail, extensive information management
_______________________________________________________
Report of the Independent Panel on the Safety and Security of the UN Personnel in Iraq 20 October 2003
http://www.un.org/News/dh/iraq/safety-security-un-personnel-iraq.pdf

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The UN Is Systemically Corrupt--Replace it Now!!

2003-10-24T07:07:00.000+02:00

INDICATIONS OF SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION
WITHIN INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS

Two American experts in public administration, Caiden & Caiden, performed a detailed study on corrupt public systems. In it they identified attributes that were found to be present in the corrupt organisations they researched. All of these attributes, described below, are easily identifiable within the UN and other international organisations, which should be sufficient reason for the creation of an alternative organisation to the UN, perhaps the Union of Democratic Nations--admitted members would have to be both true democracies, and committed to the rule of law.

1. The agency professes a code of conduct that is contradicted by internal practices.

2. Internal procedures encourage, aid and abet and hide violations of the agency code.
3. Non-violators of the code are penalized in that they lose the benefits enjoyed by the violators.
4. Violators are protected and when exposed are treated leniently.
5. Non-violators suffocate in the venal atmosphere, find no relief and are not heeded when they raise their concerns.
6. Prospective whistleblowers are intimidated and terrorized into silence.
7. Courageous whistleblowers are not protected from retaliation.
8. Violators become so accustomed to their practices and to the protection afforded to them that when they are exposed they complain that they have been unfairly treated and singled out.
9. Collective guilt finds expression in rationalization for the corrupt practices and there is little serious intention of ending them.
10. Those formally responsible for investigating corruption rarely act and when forced to do so, excuse the incidents as isolated rare occurrences.
11. Following exposure the agency makes gestures towards reform and for a time gives the impression of cleansing itself but once the publicity is over reverts to old practices

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WHO Will Police the Peacekeepers

2003-10-09T14:18:00.000+02:00

WHO WILL POLICE THE CAREGIVERS?

With the public revelation last year that some UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) staff, NGO workers, and International Peacekeeping personnel had been trading refugee aid and food for sex with young women and girl refugees in Guinea and Liberia, West Africa , the immediate revulsion one experiences upon learning of such abuse eventually gives way to a simple question: What can be done to punish these abusers and to see that their abominations stop? The subsequent press reports that similar abuse was happening in UN--run refugee camps in Kenya and Nepal simply reinforces the pressing need for an adequate response to this question.

Unfortunately, the legal status of international organisations such as UNHCR and some international NGO’s renders the answer far more elusive than one might initially suspect. Under an extensive regime of headquarters’
agreements, national legislation, and international treaties
including the 1946 UN Convention on Privileges and
Immunities, organisations such as UNHCR and their staff
enjoy immunity from suit (criminal or civil) in national courts for acts performed in the course of their official duties. And under the terms of the UN Convention on Privileges and Immunities, it is the Secretary-General of the UN who is empowered to make the determination as to whether or not the impugned actions fall within the protected sphere of “official duties”.

Although no one can seriously argue that the abuse that took place in West Africa fell within the official duties of humanitarian organisations, as far as the author is aware, nearly a year after the joint report was first released, not one of the alleged abusers nor any of the supervisory officials responsible for running the West African camps has been held to account, either before a national court,
or in an internal disciplinary proceeding (the latter of which would appear to be the only
viable means of redress under the present system of functional immunity afforded to
international organisations).

Had UNHCR moved forcefully and swiftly against the alleged perpetrators and negligent managers revealed in the joint report ,
perhaps there would be no need to examine the
system of immunity under which most of the
international organisations and some international
NGOs operate. Sadly, it did not in the case of West
Africa; instead, after being brow-beaten by various
Ambassadors from donor countries at a closed-door briefing held in Geneva in March 2002 as a result of its initial anemic response to the shocking allegations, it eventually enlisted the UN’s internal Office of Inspection and Oversight (OIOS), to further investigate the claims set out in the foregoing joint report.

Although OIOS ultimately concluded that the majority of the allegations of abuse contained in the joint report were not confirmed, it appears that OIOS investigated at most 12 cases, providing comments on just 4 of the 67 specific cases highlighted in the said report. Curiously, OIOS itself turned up another 43 new cases of alleged abuse in the West African camps, reducing these to 10 “provable” cases. How OIOS could reasonably conclude on the basis of the foregoing that the allegations of widespread abuse were not confirmed is hard to fathom.

As UNHCR has chosen to sweep the matter under the rug rather than to hold
the responsible parties to account (its penultimate rationale for its inaction was that as so many individuals were responsible for the abuse, no one individual could be held responsible), it
leaves the international community at
large little choice but to question the very idea and efficacy of functional immunity.

The issues arising from functional immunity are problematic not only for third parties such as the refugees in West Africa injured by the intentional acts or negligence of humanitarian workers, but also for international civil servants themselves who often benefit from the immunity, but who, at the same time, are prevented by the same immunity from bringing an employment dispute to a national court. Instead, their claims of wrongful termination, sexual or psychological harassment, or for compensation for service-related illness or death must be redressed in the internal systems of administrative justice set up within the international organisations themselves. Unfortunately, these tribunals have proven to be quite deficient in their functioning, and have come under recent attack from numerous quarters for their failure to provide litigants minimum standards of due process required by most international human rights conventions.

Functional immunity of international organisations must also be examined in the context of its hierarchical superior, sovereign immunity. Indeed, functional immunity grew out of sovereign immunity, the idea being that as sovereign states in creating international organisations were in effect endowing such organisations with a part of their sovereign power, such organisations also needed some protection from judicial/state interference in their exercise of this delegated sovereign authority. Such views were particularly prevalent in the late 1940’s around the creation of the UN when conflicting geo-political forces that ultimately erupted into the Cold War were already affecting the management of such organisations. Thus was functional immunity implemented and accepted on a widespread scale as the world had never before experienced.

However, as Slobodan Milosevic can truly attest from his jail cell at The Hague, sovereign immunity today “ain’t what it used to be”! While the recent arrests of Milosevic and General Pinochet for acts committed while they were serving as heads of sovereign states has brightly underlined the rapid retreat of the heretofore absolute nature of sovereign immunity, functional immunity has suffered no such blow to date.

Nonetheless, given the rather arrogant and cavalier manner in which UNHCR has treated the victims of sexual abuse in West Africa, and in particular its abject failure to punish any of those responsible (either intentionally or through managerial negligence) for the continued base exploitation of female refugees in their own camps, one would imagine (indeed hope) that sooner rather than later a national or supranational court (such as the European Court of Human Rights) will decree the obvious—that functional immunity was never intended as a shield to be used by international organisations or their officials to avoid legal responsibility for illegal acts clearly outside the scope of their official duties.

(c) CUNMA, 2003. All rights reserved. Article originally published by Lawyers Without Borders in “Borderlines”, Spring/april 2003 edition, and may be reprinted with acknowledgement of and attribution to original publication.

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Ca plus change.....

2003-10-01T09:37:00.000+02:00

For those readers who think the UN is the perfect ideal for a world government and criminal court, I urge you to read one of several accounts by Shirley Hazzard, a woman who worked for the UN for ten years, and who was so traumatized by the experience, that she has written a number of shocking exposes on her own experiences.

I am presently reading "Countenance of Truth--Kurt Waldheim and the UN" (available used from Amazon quite cheaply) which deomnstrates, if anything, that the UN and it management has only gotten worse since Nazi storm trooper Waldheim was appointed as SG of the UN.

Moreover, it shows the concerted effort of a number of UN member states to ensure that whomever is ultimately installed as SG, the person is as ineffectual and incompetent as possible, and so hobbled by past indiscretions or professional failures, that he (UN SG's have only been and will probably continue to be only men--the UN is also a wildly misogynistic place to boot) is putty in the hands of his member state masters.

This has been the case with every SG from the beginning of the UN (although one could argue that Boutros Boutros-Galli was a partial exception--he refused to kow-tow to the Americans, which caused Madeline Not-so-bright to engineer his premature departure after serving only one term).

While Waldheim had the blood of a number of Nazi victims on his hands, his transgressions pale when compared to that of the current SG whose own gross negligence and/or incompetence played a major role in the brutal death of 800,000 Rwandans, and nearly 8000 Bosnians in Srbrenica..

Once again, the gnomes of foreign offices around the world have ensured, by picking yet another flawed and ineffectual man as SG, that the UN will never seriously come close to embodiing the ideals (right or wrong) for which it was created. Instead, as Hazzard repeatedly points out, it becomes a dumping ground for foreign ministers, FOK's and other incompetents who wreck their havoc on those least able to defend themselves.

Quite an ideal (speaking of which, another great book by Hazzard about the UN is called "Losing the Ideal", pulbished in 1973!!)

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2003-09-30T20:21:00.000+02:00

DeMello’s Needless Death One Among Many--
Preventable Deaths & Injury of Civil Servants Continue Unabated

The violent murder of UN High Commissioner Sergio Viera de Mello in the terrorist bombing of UN Headquarters in Baghdad last August, along with 23 of his UN colleagues, while senseless, is made all the more tragic by the fact that it was completely unnecessary and avoidable.

Even more troubling however is the likelihood that the incompetent officials who could have and should have prevented such extreme loss of precious life will never be held accountable for their reckless and gross indifference towards the safety and security of their soon to be dead UN colleagues, either internally within the UN, or in a court of law. More likely, the responsible officials, and their equally culpable senior bosses, will continue along their merry way, committing the same oversights and omissions that caused the death of 24 of their peers, secure in the knowledge that they are effectively above the law on account of their functional immunity.

Although the Baghdad Operations Centre had been on a “Phase 4” security alert since it was reopened earlier this year in May (Phase 4 requires the UN Security Coordinator to recommend to the Secretary-General the relocation outside the country of all remaining internationally recruited staff members except those directly concerned with "emergency or humanitarian relief operations or security matters." All other internationally recruited staff who were previously considered essential to maintain program activities in the Phase 4 area would then normally be evacuated), unbelievably, at the time of the attack, more than 300 UN staff, many of whom were far from “essential”, were stationed in the Baghdad facility despite the Phase 4 rating. Adding insult to injury was the decision to allow de Mello to personally occupy a part of the compound particularly vulnerable to external attack, as well as the apparent affirmative choice on the part of the UN, presumably borne out of pure political correctness, to refuse an offer from the Coalition Authority to site the UN operations centre within its own secure facility.

While Secretary Annan has apparently admitted that the UN made a grave mistake in not requesting the reposting of Coalition forces around the UN site after their withdrawal in July, a mistake which undoubtedly contributed to the success of the attack, sources within the UN have also speculated that the Secretary General’s delay in instituting system-wide reform of staff security measures (on which measures the UN currently spends the grand sum of USD 2 per month, per staff member, and which reforms the various staff representative bodies throughout the UN system have repeatedly requested) resulted in the large loss of life.

Of course, Mr. Annan undoubtedly had more pressing matters at hand, such as his July “derecognition” of the UN Headquarters Staff Association (in flagrant violation of US National Labor Relations Board regulations, not to mention ILO Convention 87, Article 4 on the Freedom of Association, as well as parts of his cherished but hypocritical Global Compact). Perhaps if he had simply listened to the wide-spread security concerns of the staff representatives instead of illegally “derecognizing” them, some of his Baghdad subordinates, including his close friend de Mello, might still be alive today.

Nonetheless, for someone (self-admittedly) with the blood of 800,000 Rwandans and 8000 Bosnians on his hands, one could imagine that the Secretary-General has not lost much sleep over the “mere” 24 international civil servants to most recently pay the ultimate sacrifice for their commitment to humanitarianism.

Had the Baghdad disaster been a one-off occurrence, perhaps the UN and its security officials should be allowed some slack. Unfortunately, Baghdad was just the latest (and most deadly) in a long series of UN management failures and omissions that have left hundreds of international civil servants dead or severely injured.

A similarly heinous attack occurred in West Timor in September 2000 against three UNHCR staff members (ironically, Sergio Viera de Mello was the UN pro-consul in East Timor at the time). While a mob of paramilitaries slowly made its conspicuous way to a town where UNHCR had set up a sub-office, a senior UNHCR official suddenly became worried about the fate of several shiny new four-wheel drive vehicles parked there. He ordered the vehicles to be driven away from the sub-office and hidden so that the mob would not destroy them; unfortunately, his concern did not extend to the international civil servants who were told to remain behind to man their desks as the mob approached, now deprived of any viable means of escape.

Their fate was chillingly foreshadowed by one of the doomed officials in an e-mail to friend: "We are waiting for the enemy, we sit here like bait, unarmed, waiting for the wave… While waiting for the militia to do what they have to do, I will draft the agenda for the meeting tomorrow on Kapang. The aim of the meeting: to examine how we are going to continue this operation. I have to go now. I hear screaming outside."

Three international UNHCR staff were brutally macheted to death, and their bodies immolated with gasoline in front of their offices from which they had finally, but futilely attempted to flee on foot, UNHCR’s USD 60,000 trucks safely hidden from the rampaging mob. (At least staff members now know the monetary value the UN places on their lives—less than USD 60,000).

Apparently, although their survivors normally would have been entitled to collect on the Malicious Acts insurance that covers every UN system staff member with a contract of one year or more, sources have suggested that the insurance company refused to pay out on the polices on account of the gross negligence of the UNHCR management in contributing to the deaths of the three staff members. Presumably, the insurance amounts were paid directly out of UN funds to placate the survivors. If the malicious acts insurer balks again at paying out over the lost lives of the 24 Baghdad staff, the UN-funded placating will be a lot more expensive.

While no one would suggest that senior UN officials bear the same culpability as the actual perpetrators of the malicious attacks on staff, the law of most civilized countries imposes a duty upon employers to protect their employees from reasonably foreseeable harm or injury in the course of their work (which the employer knew or should have known was likely to injury the employee). Failure to sustain this duty often results in civil liability [and in some cases, where the employers’ disregard of the danger is gross or reckless, as in West Timor, criminal liability may attach]. The rationale behind such liability is to give employers (usually the party most able in the employer—employee relationship to take the necessary steps to avoid unnecessary harm to staff) a negative financial incentive to take all reasonable steps to avoid any such foreseeable harm lest they be sued (in some cases for significant monetary damages, or otherwise suffer increased workers’ compensation premiums).

Within international organizations, as a result of their functional immunity, which extends to their managers, this common-sense and effective incentive simply doesn’t exist. Managers well know that the survivors of their dead or maimed colleagues have no effective remedy against the malfeasance of those who knew or should have known of a threat against the safety of staff but who failed to take reasonable preventative measures. Consequently, one can confidently predict that yet more dedicated and committed international civil servants will continue to meet untimely death and injury from threats, such as those in Baghdad which were (or should have been) well known to senior UN management, and which could easily have been avoided.

Even worse, concrete numbers on the amount of international civil servants who are killed or injured in the line of duty or who die as a result of their employer’s negligence or misfeasance are hard to come by. An e-mail to the Office of the UN Security Coordinator (UNSECOORD) by this correspondent requesting such figures predictably went unacknowledged and unanswered.

In some of its publications, the UN seems to admit that through 2001, since January 1992, 200 civilian staff members had been killed; 179 fell victim to malicious acts and 21 to aircraft incidents. But there is no way to corroborate such figures, although anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that the numbers are much higher. Moreover, there is no way to know, even for some of the families of the victims, whether the deaths of their loved ones were unnecessary and avoidable as was the case in Baghdad.

All the written policies and rules and regulations in the world about staff security (the thousands of pages the UN already has on the subject didn’t do the Baghdad 24 much good) will not make an international civil servant one iota safer, nor will they force a security bureaucrat or manager to be more vigilant—the one thing that will accomplish these things is the lifting of the veil of functional immunity which presently distorts the common sense incentives and checks and balance which exist in the rest of the real world. Only when decision-makers in international organizations stand to suffer real, adverse consequences on account of their own avoidable negligence or malfeasance will field staff find real security.

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2002-03-04T15:17:00.000+01:00

The vote yesterday by the one of two remaining countries who have heretofore resisted the charms of UN membership (formerly neutral Switzerland, the lone holdout now being the Vatican) to throw in the towel and join the UN is a sad development. The Swiss will come to rue the day that they cast their national lot in with all those who continue to fund and support the UN without requiring an iota of accountability or responsibility. It is particularly disappointing coming so close to the revelation last week that UNHCR staff members (and workers from other aid providers and NGO's) have for a long time forcing young refugee girls and woman to trade sex for food and shelter in western Africa--where's the outrage?!?!?! Who will account--Kofi Annan, Ruud Lubbers, someone, anyone with some command responsibility? Not on your life. Kofi Annan was complicit in the massacre of some 800,000 Rwandans during the bloody genocide there in 1994 so why should anyone expect him to apologize for the UNHCR little "problem" in west Africa--and, as our leftist friends in the US were quick to remind us in 1998 concerning Slick Willie's similar little problems, "its only about sex"!