Chalk this one up in the "I'm not surprised" column:
U.N. investigators said on Tuesday the trial of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi flouted international standards and urged the country's military rulers to ensure it was open and fair.
In a strongly worded joint statement, the five human rights investigators noted a U.N. panel issued an advisory ruling a year ago that the Nobel laureate's continued house arrest was arbitrary.
Well, yes, but in another sense, it's not really arbitrary at all; it's just...continuous. Even before Burmese authorities found, in the form of the soaking body of a foolish American, the excuse to try her again, she was still under arbitrary and unjust house arrest. And even if, as James Downie suggests, the delay in the beginning of her trial does represent a half-hearted sop to the standards of international justice and public opinion, the outcome is no less in doubt. There seems to be little that is less constant in Burma over the past 19 years than the arbitrary detention of Aung San Suu Kyi.
(image from flickr user Gilberto Viciedo under a Creative Commons license)
So says S-G Ban, at least, in this press conference announcing Clinton's appointment as UN Special Envoy to Haiti. If Haitians feel good about President Clinton, then he feels pretty good about them, too -- he says that "this is the best chance the Haitians have ever had."
Clinton also had strong praiseworthy words for the UN peacekeepers in the country, who contributed, in his words, to an environment of "children walking without fear" in Cite Soleil, one of the worst slums in Haiti's capital city.
Challenges aplenty remain. Clinton's chief priority, at first at least, will be in getting donor countries to contribute the money they have pledged for Haiti's reconstruction. While money issues obviously loom large for this impoverished country, it's encouraging that Clinton's plans also include some ambitious long-term projects, chiefly the development of a robust alternative energy industry. All this on Clinton's plate and more, for a lucrative $1/year salary.
The UN announced yesterday that its top diplomat in Iraq, Staffan de Mistura, will be leaving his post to become the deputy executive director of the World Food Program. Congratulations are in order for Mr. de Mistura, who is by all accounts one of the best the UN has out there and who has presided over a critical period in Iraq's reconstruction.
Appointed to his post in September 2007, de Mistura had been a close friend and colleague to the original head of the UN mission in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed in the tragic August 2003 suicide bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad. De Mistura's tenure began just as the UN returned was returning full force to Iraq, revamping its mandate to include an ambitious agenda of promoting national reconciliation, supporting elections, and providing humanitarian assistance. As the surge got under way -- and got most of the credit -- in reducing violence in Iraq, it was de Mistura's small UN political mission that brought the credibility and expertise to actually achieve some of the important political goals in a very contentious climate.
Throughout it all, de Mistura and his colleagues have risked life and limb; Iraq is still one of the most dangerous places in the world to work in, and security for UN personnel there remains appallingly thin. His successor will have to address this issue, as well as many other persistent or looming political difficulties, chiefly the solution to the dispute over the oil-rich regions of Kirkuk. We can only hope the UN's new representative in Iraq will do as admirable a job as his predecessors, Sergio and Staffan.
Even when Georgia and Russia bothdisagree on something, there's one teeny tiny little difference: Russia has a UN Security Council veto. Moscow used the full force of this "nyet" yesterday, when it vetoed a resolution agreed upon by ten of the Council's 15 members that would have extended the UN's 135-person observer mission in the border region of Abkhazia.
At issue -- still -- was the rather mundane matter of the name of the mission, which has for 16 years been known as the UN Observer Mission in Georgia. Russia objects strenuously to this name's implication that Abkhazia is part of Georgia, which, of course, it is according to every country in the world except Russia and Nicaragua. Coupled with the resolution's entirely pro forma affirmation of Georgia's "territorial integrity," this dastardly affront was too much for Russia to bear.
This Russia Today video gives a good perspective of, well, the Russian side of things: it's quite simple, really; Georgia started a war last year and just can't deal with the "new republics in the region" that have emerged.
The full picture is, of course, much more complicated. And, as far as the UN Observer Mission in GeorgiaAbkhazia whatever you want to call the region is concerned, the debate should be utterly moot. The point is to have monitors there, to help with disarming and to ensure that there are no border violations or military escalation from either side.
With OSCE monitors similarly booted from South Ossetia, and EU observers unable to enter either region, this leaves no objective eyes on the ground in the region. In this light, it's easy to understand Georgia's fears that Russia's strategic design is exactly to deprive the area of witnesses or a disincentive for war. Georgia has its own political objectives in invoking the proverbially aggressive Russian bear, but the fact is that the UN observer mission had no dog in this fight and should be allowed to continue doing its job, whatever one calls the place where they are doing it.
*I owe the title to IntLawGrrls, whose helpful post reminded me too to stop reading about Iran and focus a little to the north.
UPDATE: Chris Borgen at Opinio Juris has a smart look at Russia's "bilateralization" of the Abkhazia/South Ossetia issue.
At least 40 south Sudanese soldiers and civilians were killed when tribal fighters ambushed boats carrying U.N. food aid, the latest in a string of ethnic attacks threatening a fragile peace deal, officials said on Sunday.
Members of the Jikany Nuer group opened fire on 27 boats loaded with emergency rations destined for an area controlled by the rival Lou Nuer tribe on Friday, the U.N. World Food Programme said.
It's long been a rather obvious point among Sudan watchers that the country's fate is tied more along the North-South axis than to the more prominent (and no, not unrelated) Darfur issue. A referendum on southern independence is scheduled for 2011, and there seems little chance, at least in the current climate, that South Sudanese won't vote for separation. If another war is then in the offing, a strategy of the government is Khartoum would almost certainly be to arm certain tribes in the south, in an attempt to sow internal strife among their adversaries.
It's not a good sign, then, that the Sudanese government appears to have armed the group that carried out the raid on Sunday.
Quoting a Times of London article about sacks of food aid from the World Food Program disturbingly showing up for sale in a Mogadishu market, Ed Morrissey's unsurprising embrace of UN-bashing curiously omits the following from the very same article:
Many of the sacks for sale are marked: “A gift from the American people”, with the US government’s aid agency, USAID, providing $274 million last year in food and in humanitarian assistance for Somalia.
If food aid is not getting into the hands of those who need it, and is instead being re-sold for a profit -- whether the aid comes from the UN, the U.S. of A., or anywhere else -- that is a serious problem. It is also a problem that needs to be addressed in context; Somalia is the most difficult, dangerous, and complicated place for an aid worker to operate. Ensuring that every sack of food gets to the place it is supposed to go to is likely as impossible as accounting for every one of the ransom dollars that Somali pirates spend so recklessly. This is not an apology; it is a reality.
Morrissey's indictment of the entire UN aid program in Somalia is all the less defensible because, again, the very article that he cites concludes with the WFP's Somali director characterizing the re-selling of food aid as a "minor phenomenon." This may go against the scandal-mongering tenor of the rest of the piece, but the fact is that the WFP does a lot of humanitarian aid work in Somalia, and the sacks that cannot be accounted for likely make up a very small percentage of this work. The WFP, though, is investigating the problem.
Granted, we don't yet know exactly what happened in the Iranian election, but the question is almost certainly of how much, not whether, fraud occurred (see this great Juan Cole post for some analysis of the, er, irregularities). The vote certainly seems to fall into the "crude and patently contrived" category, which would give it the same qualities as the farce that eventually certified the reelection of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe last year. That Ahmadinejad's camp had to stoop to the level of a tinpot dictator is revealing, for it demonstrates that he -- and more significantly, the Ayatollah and clerics who abetted and hastily certified his stolen victory -- is far more interested in maintaining power than in advancing any of the goals for the Iranian people that he claims to support.
Of course, this should not be too surprising. It was very clear that Ahmadinejad very much wished to remain in power, and the cryptic threats he issued toward the end of the campaign, combined with already existing undemocratic processes and the voter intimidation and irregularities that occurred at the polls, made a free and fair election ultimately unlikely. Ayatollah Khamenei had seemed to have tipped his hand to the incumbent (a position that has practically guaranteed victory in Iranian electoral history), and the lingering animosity between the Supreme Leader and opposition candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, stemming from 1980's clashes when both were in government, may have had an outsized effect on the result.
But to rig an election in a a way so, again, "patently contrived" as to rival Mr. Mugabe's? Iran's leaders are either supremely out-of-touch or chillingly desperate. They've certainly observed how various strongmen around the world -- Mugabe, Kenya's Mwai Kibaki, Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin -- have clung to power recently, and seem to have introduced a similarly reactionary strategy into Iran's bizarre "managed democracy."
In the Zimbabwe case, for instance, the United States could have refused to recognize Mugabe's government and pushed harder to ensure that Morgan Tsvangirai, who almost certainly won even the corrupt election that did occur, by a sizeable margin, was seated as president. There would have been pitfalls to doing so, of course, but with Iran, unlike Zimbabwe, national security concerns make an aggressive democracy promotion project entirely unfeasible and unwise. This is the frustrating thing about other countries' elections -- they are other countries'. The victims of electoral fraud are chiefly the Iranian people, and they very much know it. Reversing policy and refusing to talk to Iran's leaders -- even illegitimately elected ones -- will neither advance U.S. interests nor help Iranians' democratic desires.
Guest posting at Opinio Juris, climate expert Nigel Purvis answers a very tricky question -- indeed, what may prove to be the trickiest -- about U.S. efforts to slow climate change. Here's the problem in a nutshell:
U.S. domestic legislation must contribute to a genuine global solution but global arrangements must also fit or alter domestic political realities.
Every country, in fact, is going to have to align what is practically achievable in their domestic political systems to what is needed to stop global warming. It's just particularly tough in the United States, both because segments of our political system are so vehemently opposed to action on climate change and because our impact on the global environment has dwarfed that of any other country. Purvis' solution? It gets wonky, but the point is to synch up U.S. domestic and international legislation. Both are going to be tinkered, and the ultimate effectiveness of both will depend on future commitments and the rest of the world meeting its end of the bargain. An all-encompassing treaty, therefore -- which would also require a 2/3 vote in the Senate, rather than a simple majority in both houses -- would be more difficult to pass, less likely to match U.S. legislation, and possibly less effective.
It’s unrealistic to think Congress has the time and attention to take up domestic legislation and an international agreement separately (in whatever order). It is even more unrealistic to assume that an international treaty would be consistent with U.S. legislation and congressional wishes unless Congress has created in advance a process that helps ensure this alignment. In twenty years of climate diplomacy neither Congress nor the Senate has given the President of the World a clear blueprint for U.S. global leadership on climate change...America needs a well-defined plan for climate cooperation and that plan should have the force of law.
Wednesday night, the Bosnian television program "60 Minutes" broadcast videos of former Serb general Ratko Mladic, who has been indicted to join his former political leader, Radovan Karadzic, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the forme Yugoslavia in The Hague. Unlike Karadzic, whose elaborate disguise was finally found out last year, Mladic is widely believed to have been living in the open and with the collusion of Serb authorities for the past decade-plus. This allegation would seem to be supported by the videos, some of which the "60 Minutes" producer claims are less than two years old.
Serbia, though, denies that any of them could be "less than eight years old." At particular issue, among videos showing Mladic dancing, toasting at a wedding, and getting in a snowball fight, is one depicting him playing table tennis at an army barracks, which is one of the locations he is reputed to have been spending time in the past few years. This was confirmed a couple days ago, when one of Mladic's former bodyguards attested to have been protecting him at the barracks, under Serb government orders, between 1997 and 2002.
The court in The Hague says that it already has the videos that were shown on Bosnian television. And the broadcast does seem suspiciously timed; on Monday, EU foreign ministers are scheduled to discuss Serbia's cooperation with the Hague tribunal and the search for Mladic, which has been an important condition in Serbia's push for EU membership.
Could Bosnia be seeking to cast doubt on Serbia's commitment to finding Mladic, in hopes of undermining its EU bid? It's entirely possible. But it was also widey -- and reasonably -- suspected, even before his former bodyguard's recent testimony, that Mladic has spent a long time living under at least quasi-government protection. This Serb government is more committed to joining the EU than its predecessors, but it faces the same quandary, in that Mladic, unfortunately, remains a popular figure among segments of the Serb population. Mladic should be even easier to arrest than the heavily disguised Karadzic, though, so Serbia should make sure that he is not spending his days playing ping-pong in army barracks.
(image from flickr user leasing2008 under a Creative Commons license)