Koffi Annan for British Knight: Vote No

Former U.N. Secretary General Koffi Annan a British Knight?

“Few international figures are less deserving of an honorary knighthood,” writes Nile Gardiner in the National Review Online.

Why? Because Annan’s tenure as the head the UN and his role as undersecretary general for Peacekeeping Operations “were a monumental failure, and he left behind an institution whose standing could barely be lower and a legacy that is a testament to appeasement, mismanagement, corruption, and anti-Americanism.”

Continuing to quote:

It took Annan and the U.N. several years to even acknowledge that the mass slaughter of more than 200,000 villagers by Sudanese-backed Janjaweed militias in Darfur was an act of genocide. He remained silent over the forced starvation of millions of Zimbabweans by the Mugabe regime, barely said a word about human rights in Burma and North Korea, and never stood up to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel. The U.N. Human Rights Commission was a complete farce, populated with many of the world’s worst human rights violators, from Libya to Cuba. Even Annan himself eventually acknowledged that the Commission was broken, and its successor, the new Human Rights Council, is just as bad if not worse.

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As Secretary General Annan oversaw a huge scandal involving United Nations peacekeepers in the Congo as well as in southern Sudan, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Guinea, Liberia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, and Cambodia. In the Congo alone, U.N. personnel were accused of hundreds of crimes, including the rape and forced prostitution of women and young girls across the war-torn country. The victims were defenseless refugees who had already been brutalized and terrorized by years of war and who looked to the U.N. for safety and protection.