The poisoned olive branch

On paper, Adam LeBor boasts excellent credentials for writing about what is at best the spine- chilling failure of the United Nations to prevent modern genocide and at worst its active complicity with evil. He reported on the Yugoslav wars for both the Times and the Independent, his empathy with the victims of slaughter leaps off virtually every page and the man has certainly done his research. No one could accuse LeBor of underselling himself. In his own words, ‘This is intended to be much more than a historical study… by recounting at length the reasons for, and results of, the catastrophe at Srebrenica, I hope to provide a detailed template for understanding why the United Nations has not stopped genocide in Darfur.’ Moreover, insisting that the pattern of UN complicity can be broken, he pledges to examine proposals for doing so. How does he discharge his own brief? The picture is mixed indeed.

From Madeleine Albright to Douglas Hurd, from David Owen to David Hannay, from John Prendergast to Mukesh Kapila, LeBor has interviewed an impressive array of international players closely involved in the theatres he describes. He is right to observe that, by effectively helping the Serbs to administer the siege of Sarajevo, the United Nations soon became part of the problem in Bosnia, rather than its solution. He is right to excoriate the UN Secretariat for its misguided obsession with the need for neutrality between warring parties, as if there were a moral equivalence between the arsonist and his victims. He is right to lament not only the failure of the United Nations to hold senior Secretariat officials to account for their mistakes and evasions but instead to promote them. He is right to back the former UN official who complains of the organisation’s taboo on ‘getting emotional’ and its lack of ‘guided outrage’ in the face of the most egregious human rights abuses.