Until Cote d’Ivoire, I had always thought the United Nations was a peace-broker

Les États membres de l'Assemblée générale des Nations unies ont élu jeudi l'Égypte et le Sénégal parmi les nouveaux cinq membres non permanents du Conseil de Sécurité

UN goes to war

Then you have Cote d’Ivoire. What a bloody mess, what shocking about turns! Until Cote d’Ivoire, I had always thought the United Nations was a peace-broker, was that sacred haven where all the world’s war-weary rush to for succour and comfort.

Until that day I saw – alongside equally shocked Ivorians – UN fighter helicopters lobbying missiles – yes missiles, not mercies – into residential compounds of Adbijan, in all that buttressed by, or buttressing Sarkozy’s French occupying colonial forces! So the UN can and does go to war? Who calls for a ceasefire when the UN goes to war? Who keeps the peace? Who makes the peace? It’s a brave new world indeed, literally!

Read all this against events in the Congo of the sixties, Lumumba’s Congo, Lumumba’s sixties. The pressure then was to keep the UN forces deployed there out of the conflict, which was re-christianed a civil war. The well-meaning Ghanaian continent was blocked and kept out, all to ensure Lumumba enjoyed the full care of his enemies, whether Congolese or Belgian. He died horribly, that son of Congo, so horribly that actors in that bloody episode – one CIA’s Devlin included – have vainly sought exorcism through moving confessionals we now have on our bookshelves.

In Cote d’Ivoire, the UN has gone to war. In Cote d’Ivoire, the UN has propped imperial interests. Indeed in ICote d’Ivoire, the UN has propped a side in a civil war, and then installed as president a man perceived to be an outsider by the governed. A new world order indeed!

All this is so, so, so vital to Zimbabwe at this moment in its life. We will go for elections shortly. The UNDP has been accosting Chinamasa to fund that election. It has not been invited to fund it, yet it is so solicitous. It wants to be a player, the same way the UN was a player in Cote d’Ivoire. An over-mandated player if you ask me.

When an electoral dispute arose, the UN responded, not as a world arbiter, but as a questioned and questionable electoral agent. It acted defensively; it acted partisan, which is why it emerged a foremost disputant, but one with powers to cleanse a preferred side in the civil war, indeed one with the capacity to kill in so holy a fashion that no one ever thinks of ICC.

As a matter of fact, while the UN was killing Ivorians, its other organ on human rights and humanitarian concerns, was in the other part of the country, busy convicting Ivorians for killing civilians. Baroness Amos was at the helm of this cleansing exercise. We remember her for her infamous role of Zimbabwe, that black girl parading Africa’s mayhem.

Source: newzimbabwe.com