Mark Steyn:
'Where are the Kiplings of today to rouse public opinion?" my anguished colleagues on the Leader page asked yesterday apropos Sudan. "Do we humanitarians care less about Darfur than our imperialist ancestors would have done?" The answer to that second one is: yes. John Mann, the Presbyterian minister of Pollak in Glasgow, fancies himself as a fine humanitarian, but, as his interview with Scotland on Sunday made plain, his priorities lie elsewhere.
For the umpteenth time, he denounced the "unnecessary, unjust war" in Iraq and said that, if he were Tony Blair, "I don't know how I could live with myself".
If I'd ipso facto supported the continuation in office of a psychopathic dictator, I don't know how I could live with myself. But each to his own.
...
Darling Rupert denounced Bush's Aids plan for Africa as "extremely frightening" because of its "judgmental attitude" toward sex. Kofi Annan was also critical of Bush's initiative, mainly because all those billions of dollars are being spent directly by America in Africa, rather than being sluiced through the UN.
Now that the Oil-for-Fraud programme has come to an end, many UN bureaucrats are at a loose end and would have been only too happy to bring their experience and efficiency to bear on Bush's pathetically pitifully footling judgmental $15 billion. Once the UN's administration fee had been deducted, there could easily have been enough left over to buy 20 thousand bucks' worth of condoms, no doubt from a rubber factory co-owned by the husband of an old mistress of Jacques Chirac's.
...
Today, British charities are launching a campaign to save Darfur, which they describe as the "world's worst humanitarian crisis". If we were serious about the plight of Sudan, we'd stop using that dully evasive word "humanitarian". It's fine for a hurricane or a drought, but not a genocide.
The death and dislocation in Sudan is a political crisis every step up the chain - from the blood-drenched militia to their patrons in Khartoum to their buddies in the African Union to the schemers and cynics at the UN. It's "multilateralism" that magnifies some nickel 'n' dime murder gangs into a global player.
In W. F. Deedes's account yesterday, I was struck by this line: "Aid agencies have found it difficult to get visas." That sentence encapsulates everything that is wrong with the transnational approach. The UN confers on its most dysfunctional members a surreal, post-modern sovereignty: a state that claims it can't do anything about groups committing genocide across huge tracts of its territory nevertheless expects the world to respect its immigration paperwork as inviolable.
Comments
Post a Comment