UN passively abets African genocide.

On April 7, declaring that "the international community cannot stand idle" in the face of state-sponsored mass murder, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposed an "action plan to prevent genocide, involving the whole United Nations system." Invoking the memory of the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, Annan promised to keep "all our peacekeeping forces under constant review, particularly with the threat of genocide in mind, and be ready to reinforce them promptly when the need arises."

That need is hardly hypothetical, as totalitarian regimes in Africa systematically slaughter--through armed assault, and politically induced famine--thousands of innocent people. In Sudan, militias deployed by the Islamist regime have "overseen and directly participated in massacres, summary execution of civilians, burning of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land" inhabited by tribal minorities, reported Human Rights Watch on May 7. In Zimbabwe, widespread violence by armed thugs loyal to Marxist tyrant Robert Mugabe has combined with state seizure of farms to create conditions for a tragedy of Rwandan proportions.

The UN's self-appointed global human rights guardians "will never be able to say they didn't know these atrocities were actually going on," observed Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff on May 24. A detailed report on Sudan submitted on May 7 by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Bertran Ramcharan earned not so much as a "mumbling word" of condemnation from Annan. Three days earlier, Sudan had been re-elected to a seat on the UN's Human Rights Commission.

"It's 'Never Again' again," summarized Hentoff. While it is neither possible nor desirable for the UN to assume the role of protecting individual rights world-wide, the world body does a splendid job of conferring respectability--and political immunity--on the world's most murderous regimes.