MDadmin
Rather like a shell-shocked soldier just recovering use of his faculties, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was back in the news this week, but for the wrong reason. Facing the press in his New York redoubt, Kofi Annan, said he expected the UN “to play an important role” in an Anglo-American colonisediraq. Such a UN role in his words, “does bring legitimacy” to the internationally-condemned act of brigandage, by the United States and Britain in Iraq.
It is amazing that Kofi Annan, whose voice has been deafeningly silent, almost at par with the explosive charge of the bombs that have been dropping on poor Iraq, all of a sudden came back to life, to begin to canvas a role for the United Nations. It is a typical response of a puppet on a string.
Just before the commencement of the invasion of Iraq, Kofi Anan pulled out all UN staff from Iraq, including those responsible for humanitarian aid under the Food-for-oil programme, thereby deepening the suffering of the Iraqi poor, over 60 per cent of who have come to depend on the program for basic survival, in the context of the punishing 12-year, US-inspired international sanctions regime.
It was also revealed in the course of the diplomatic logjam over a second UN Resolution at the Security Council, that against the UN charter, operatives at the UN secretariat had begun to participate in secretive conclaves about a post-Saddam Iraq, again at the behest of the United States.
Kofi Annan as the Secretary-General of the United Nations has diplomatically refused to call a spade by its name ever since the commencement of the invasion of Iraq, preferring to hide behind sandbags of “Aesopian” diplomatic language. His dithering, and desire to retain his very well-paid job, has led to an excessive pandering to American desires in recent times. It is this background, amongst others, that has rendered the multilateral organisation flabby and impotent, on the verge of being kicked into irrelevance by the unfolding events of the unjust war in Iraq.
It is therefore unfortunate and utterly unacceptable for Annan to try to regain a place in the ruins of Iraq, through manipulating the UN into providing legitimacy for an obnoxious act of invasion, destruction of lives and property, and a colonial act that the Americans and the British are carrying out, against international legality. No, Kofi Annan, you cannot legitimise, illegitimacy; not even when you feel so obliged to the Americans.
We hasten to remind the UN scribe, that what the whole world has witnessed on ‘real time’ television, is the commencement of a new American doctrine of 21st century high tech warfare against countries determined to build an independent existence away from the suffocating claws of American imperialism, which is the sole super power, in the disturbed world of the beginning of the 21 century. This world, as we are all painfully aware, remains one based on an unjust international economic order, which guarantees lavish lifestyles for a minority of peoples in the advanced countries of the western world and exploitation and deep-seated poverty for a majority of people in third world countries.
The rightwing, reactionary administration in power in Washington is determined to preserve this world of injustices, because it benefits the class groups that they represent: The magnates of the oil industry and the American military industrial complex.
What Kofi Annan’s declaration translates to, is that he would provide a veneer of legality for this new face of American imperialist invasion of countries of the world, which commenced with the unacceptable and illegal invasion of Iraq.
Kofi Annan, you are alone and do not speak for humanity, when you called for a legitimising of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The fact that it is an African that has taken such a position as yours, saddens us deeply.
