Africans just don't rate on the UN scale

Genocide and the threat of nuclear annihilation were the dark themes of the departing century. They again loom into focus with the dawn of a new century.

Last October the US Senate rejected the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Next July it seems probable that it will decide to contravene the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, negotiated with the old Soviet Union as far back as 1971. The US seems determined to build itself a nuclear shield in clear violation of that treaty and in the sure knowledge that by doing so it will trigger a nuclear arms race across the world, starting with China.

We, as allies of the US, have conspired in this emergent wantonness by colluding in its clear violations of international law in the bombing of Yugoslavia, in surrendering the UN Security Council to its whims, notably over Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Cuba. And we, as allies, have been complicit with the US in breaking the most solemn guarantees to humanity on the most heinous crimes against humanity. And that complicity persists.

A week ago the UN Security Council was briefed by the assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Mr Hedi Annabi. He warned that a genocide of an ethnic group may be about to take place in central Africa. Mr Annabi, no doubt with the approval of the Security Council, was reported not to have called for intervention by the UN, or by member-states, to prevent the threatened genocide, as required by the 1948 Convention on Genocide.

Instead, he called on the parties to the conflict in that part of Africa to abide by the terms of a recently negotiated peace agreement.

The target of the possible genocide is an ethnic group that was the target of another genocide just five years ago; the gravest crime against humanity since the second World War when 800,000 of them were murdered in the space of three months. These are the Tutsi people, who were the victims of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and who are now the target of another genocide plan in the eastern province of south Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The people who are believed to be planning this genocide include the same organisations largely responsible for the massacre of 1994, the Hutu Interahamwe and the former Rwanda Armed Forces, this time supported by a Congolese terrorist organisation, the Mai Mai, and, it is suspected, the forces of the government of the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mr Laurent Kabila.

Right beside south Kivu, across Lake Tanganyika, a slow-burning genocide is taking place in Burundi, where in the last few weeks some 300,000 Hutu men, women and children have been locked in detention camps outside the capital, Bujumbura, for their own protection. When this happened in the 1970s, 200,000 of them were massacred by the Tutsi army.

The briefing by Mr Annabi came exactly a week after the publication of the report of an independent inquiry into the actions of the UN during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. That report found: "The failure of the United Nations to prevent, and subsequently, to stop the genocide in Rwanda was a failure of the United Nations system as a whole. There was a persistent lack of political will by member-states to act or to act with enough assertiveness."

The report found that the UN personnel in Rwanda in 1993 were given high-level confidential information that a genocide was being planned. The UN commander in Rwanda repeatedly asked for the deployment of an adequate number of properly equipped UN troops with a mandate to enable them to stop mass communal killings.

These requests were repeatedly ignored, when not specifically refused. Even when the genocide started and the world was made aware of it through television, the Security Council carefully avoided characterising what was happening as genocide so as to avoid the clear obligation under the 1948 Convention on Genocide to intervene and stop it happening.

In the event, it was not the US but two of its allies that behaved most despicably. At the outset of the genocide, after the murder of 12 of its troops, the Belgian government insisted on the withdrawal of the Belgian contingent from the meagre UN force in Rwanda, instead of demanding the augmentation of the force. This collapsed whatever meagre capacity the UN had.

France, having armed and trained those who perpetrated the genocide, secured the safe passage out of Rwanda of many of these same people.

And once again, just five years after complicity in the worst crime against humanity since the Holocaust, and within a week of this complicity having been laid bare before it at the Security Council, the Security Council again resorts to more blandishments.

An eight-nation war took place in the Congo for almost a year from August 1998 without the world taking any notice. A peace agreement was signed in Lusaka, Zambia, last July that required a very modest input by the UN: the deployment of 500 monitors to supervise the ceasefire.

Now, five months after the signing of the peace agreement, there are only about 30 monitors in the Congo and most of those are holed up at the Kinshasa Intercontinental Hotel, unable to monitor anything other than the splendid swimming pool.

Contrast this indifference to the response of what is known as the international community to Kosovo earlier this year and to what is happening in Iraq. On Friday, March 19th, last, Bill Clinton said: "Make no mistake, if we and our allies do not have the will to act [against Yugoslavia over Kosovo] there will be more massacres. In dealing with aggressors, hesitation is a licence to kill." How does that sentiment fit with the indifference to genocide in central Africa?

Mr Clinton himself gave a clue to the rationale for the double standard. He said: "This is a conflict [the Kosovo conflict] with no natural boundaries. It threatens our national interests."

What happens in central Africa clearly threatens no national interest, as perceived by the US or Europeans, and thus the emphatic legal obligation to intervene to prevent genocide can be blithely ignored.

But then Africans matter even less than the Jews did.