Kenya and UN wrong on tiff over peacekeeping boss

What you need to know:

  • UN peacekeeping missions in Rwanda, Darfur, Srebrenica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and several other places have been notorious in the past for not protecting civilians.
  • When more than 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda, neither Dallaire nor Annan were sacked or reprimanded.
  • When more than 8,000 Muslim men were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, neither the Dutch peacekeepers nor the UN took responsibility for the massacre.

It is highly disingenuous and hypocritical of both the United Nations Secretary-General and the Kenyan government to pretend to take the moral high ground regarding the sacking of the force commander of the UN Mission in South Sudan, Lieutenant-General Johnson Mogoa Kimani Ondieki, who has been accused of failing to protect foreign aid workers in Juba from being attacked by troops allied to the Sudanese government.

Mr Ban Ki-moon must surely know that this is not the first time that the UN has failed to protect civilians under its care.

UN peacekeeping missions in Rwanda, Darfur, Srebrenica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and several other places have been notorious in the past for not protecting civilians.

In fact, some peacekeeping missions have been explicitly instructed not to take action even when civilian lives are at risk.

For example, in late 1993, when Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, the commander of the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, began receiving reports that the Hutu-dominated government was accumulating weapons in various caches around Kigali, he requested permission to raid these caches, but was ordered not to so by the then head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, ostensibly because the raids would be construed as being “hostile to the Rwandan government”.

When more than 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda, neither Dallaire nor Annan were sacked or reprimanded.

Similarly, when more than 8,000 Muslim men were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, neither the Dutch peacekeepers who were sent there to protect them nor the UN took responsibility for the massacre.

ATROCITIES COMMITTED

The UN Secretary-General has also been rather lax about investigating reports about atrocities committed by government-supported forces in Darfur and about the role of the UN’s peacekeeping mission in western Sudan in covering up these crimes.

One UN whistleblower who lifted the lid on these atrocities says that the cover-up of such crimes is just the tip of the iceberg of human rights violations committed under the UN’s watch.

The UN also recently came under fire for covering up the sexual abuse of children by peacekeepers in the Central African Republic, and for suspending the whistleblower who exposed the abuse. In several countries, the presence of UN peacekeepers has actually made security and stability more precarious.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the presence of nearly 20,000 UN peacekeeping troops as part of the United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has failed to bring about peace or development in this resource-rich but blighted country.

The UN has even failed to prevent the kleptomaniacal government of Joseph Kabila from diverting billions of dollars from the state and the Congolese people.

So Mr Ban is hardly in a position to play the good cop in the case of South Sudan. But then nor is Kenya. Kenya’s involvement in peacekeeping missions has been marred by allegations of colluding with local people to rob countries of their natural resources.

Although Kenya vehemently denies these allegations, some reports have implicated Kenyan forces in involvement in the illegal charcoal trade in southern Somalia.

LITTLE RESPECT FOR INTERNATIONAL LAW

Kenya has in recent years also demonstrated that it has little respect for international law; its campaign to convince African countries to pull out of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has shown that it is willing to sacrifice the rule of law if doing so benefits those in power.

Kenya’s short-sighted approach to the ICC does not augur well for the country’s international standing.

The warm welcome that the Jubilee government recently accorded to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, an ICC indictee, is a reflection of Kenya’s willingness to ignore statutes to which it is a signatory.

Instead of asking African countries to withdraw from the ICC because it perceives the court to be racist, Kenya could have championed the cause of compelling the UN Security Council to refer other people who are not Africans to the ICC — people such as George Bush and Tony Blair, who are responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the illegal war they waged against Iraq, or the leaders of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, whose barbaric forms of torture and killing have shocked the world, and even President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, who are currently engaged in a war against their own people.

This would have augmented Kenya’s international reputation as a staunch defender of human rights both at home and abroad.