Of all the strange things happening in the world today, one of the strangest was the election this week of Libya–yes, Moammar Gadhafi’s bizarre and berserk revolutionary desert kingdom–to the chairmanship of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.
Given Libya’s record on human rights, one has to wonder who comes next? Today, Gadhafi–tomorrow, Saddam Hussein? Or Slobodan Milosevic, released from The Hague to head the world organization? Or perhaps we can bring Uganda’s Idi Amin out of mothballs, from his place of exile in Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. tried to block the appointment by insisting on a vote within the commission, which would have made it the first time since the 1946 formation of the body that the chairmanship had not gone from chairman to heir apparent.
But the U.S. badly lost that prospective vote, which would have been specifically against Gadhafi and his policies. In fact, 33 countries voted for Libya, while the U.S. was backed only by Canada and Guatemala, and 17 countries abstained, including seven members of the European Union who apparently did not want to offend African nations.
Two elements of this saga particularly engrossed me: 1) few of the articles about the new chairmanship detail what horrors Gadhafi has wrought, particularly in West Africa, and 2) there is a way that such travesties of international justice and common sense can be fought, if the United States were to embrace it.
Take the first point. The articles dealing with the new Libyan chairmanship almost all mentioned Gadhafi’s terrorist past. They all mentioned his support of the Irish Republican Army and his apparent responsibility for the 1988 bombing of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 people died. They mentioned that he had been a cash camel for many African states and for the new African Union.
But the most horrendous of Gadhafi’s “accomplishments” were not mentioned in a single article, at least among the many that I saw. His “great revolutionary accomplishment” can be seen in the savage and murderous takeover of virtually all of Western Africa–Sierra Leone, Liberia, potentially Guinea and, today, even the once-exemplary Ivory Coast. Few realize that the murderous leaders of these countries all were trained and inspired in some of Gadhafi’s early revolutionary camps.
When the modest but workable formerly British colonial state of Sierra Leone on the west horn of Africa began to fall to ancient, ruthless savagery in 1991, I wondered, “Why? What happened? Where did these crazy boys, stoned on drugs, often wearing women’s wigs and designer sunglasses, and often forced to kill their parents in order to disembody themselves from society, actually come from?”
We knew that a wild-eyed, hirsute leader and former army corporal named Foday Sankoh had formed the Revolutionary United Front that year. With the mad obedience of his young rebels, he began his campaign of chopping off limbs of the poor people of the country. (This was probably done to drive people out of the diamond mining areas, which Sankoh lusted after.)
But there was another rebel leader like Sankoh, right next door in Liberia. His name was Charles Taylor, and he was an rapacious, American-educated warlord and mass-murderer as brutal as Sankoh. His revolution came earlier, in 1989, and laid down the pattern.
When I first read about these guys, I made some revealing discoveries. What made Sankoh and Taylor brothers under the skin was that both had attended the same school, a Libyan secret-service camp known as al-Mathabh al-Thauriya al-Alamiya, or the World Revolutionary Headquarters. It was in Gadhafi’s salad days of the ’70s and ’80s a kind of finishing university for guerrillas from all over Africa. From there, they moved out to their own countries.
Today, Foday Sankoh, who is nearly mad, is in prison in the country he destroyed; Charles Taylor is still in power in a ravaged Liberia; and guerrillas inspired by the two of them and egged on by divisions between Muslims and Christians, whose hatreds these men fanned, are tearing the once prosperous and idyllic Ivory Coast apart.
Now take the second point. One of the major problems at the UN, exemplified by this human rights chairmanship, is that it has a system of regional blocs, with members rarely overruling a region’s nominee for a top post. It is a system of horse-trading, not bad in general political terms except that in the UN, it often ends up bringing a Gadhafi, who was the choice of the African bloc because of his financial largesse, to positions of absurd public importance.
In fact, studies of voting patterns in the commission show that from 1995 to 2000, most of the world’s most repressive states, including Belarus, North Korea, Laos, Syria, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Libya and Cuba, all avoided any censure at all. In fact, a recent bipartisan task force of the Council on Foreign Relations and Freedom House found that the United States is “routinely outmatched and outsmarted in the UN by a small but skillful group of repressive regimes.”
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But it does not have to be that way. The task force calls for a new American strategy toward the UN, in effect “building a democratic coalition of UN members, to better advance American interests and values with three key goals in mind: building support for democracy and democratic principles throughout the world, advancing human rights and fighting terrorism.”
You may be thinking, “Yes, but isn’t that what the United States has been doing in the UN anyway?” The simple answer is no. To the contrary, the U.S. not only has not engaged actively in changing the UN, but has continued to treat the UN as at worst the enemy, and at best a tool to get what Washington wants.
Despite the presence at the UN of a superb American diplomat, Ambassador John Negroponte, there is still no real effort to transform the world body through the formation of an active and engaged democratic bloc.
But it could be done. Moammar and the mummery of the Human Rights Commission do not need to insult all our humanity.
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