Mark Malloch-Brown--displays ignorance to world

Independent:

The Iraq war has shattered the cause of humanitarian intervention endorsed by Tony Blair and directly led to the targeting of relief workers in conflict zones where they are no longer considered to be neutral, according to a former senior UN official.

In a speech in London tonight, Sir Mark Malloch-Brown will say: "The brutal truth is politics is making it harder and harder to serve victims' needs by reaching them with assistance or bearing witness to their suffering and thereby staying the hand of those who would harm them."

Mr Blair's belief in the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, or the use of force to advance moral causes, led to Nato's air war with Serbia to halt the ethnic cleansing of Kosovars, and later to British military intervention in Sierra Leone. The doctrine was also used to rally international support for the invasion of Afghanistan.

Sir Mark, the former UN deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan, however, points out that the Sudanese President, General Omar al-Bashir, has been able to use the Iraq invasion as the prime reason to delay acceptance of a UN force in Darfur. "Tony Blair and George Bush have repeatedly called for the right kind of action in Darfur only to be rebuffed as the architects of Iraq. Bashir has tried to make them his best weapon.

"It is not their loss of credibility that concerns me today, but rather that of humanitarian workers. The trouble is the two are linked," he goes on. "I have watched the work I used to do get steadily more dangerous as it is seen as serving Western interests rather than universal values."

While at the UN, he says, he would see the maps of Darfur showing ever-widening yellow circles that mark no-go areas for humanitarian workers. "Iraq is the immediate cause for this. And 9/11 the preceding trigger - but both come at the end of a process that has knocked humanitarian work off the straight and narrow of non-political impartial help ... bringing help to the needy."

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This guy is not a good observer of events involving humanitarian assistance. From the man made famine in Somalia over 10 years before the invasion of Iraq and the genocide in Darfur and elsewhere in the Sudan that also predates the invasion of Iraq he has learned nothing about the forces that are driving those events that have absolutely nothing to do with Iraq.

The reason events led to the Black Hawk down episode in Somalia is that by providing humanitarian assistance the UN and we were interfering with one sides strategy of denying logistics to the other. For them the assistance to their adversary was an act of war. Similar events occurred regularly in Taliban Afghanistan where a famine was also used for genocide on the cheap. It is happening now in Darfur as well as attacks by government allies who are impatient for the results of the famine to take effect. The reason Sudan is resisting UN intervention is because it will interfere with their strategy to destroy the natives of Darfur. Projecting that reluctance on the west and its assistance to the oppressed in places like Iraq shows a profound ignorance of the motives of the Sudan regime which is as odious as any on the earth. The UN is better off without such poor judgment.