Andre Gunder Frank

On Kofi Annan and the Nobel Peace Prize

U.N. Secretary General Wins Nobel Peace Prize

The United Nations and Secretary General Kofi Annan jointly won the centenary Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for working for human rights and to defuse global conflicts. (news from 13 October 2001)

• Kofi Annan has done nothing of the kind. On the contrary, he as been a willing tool and has provided ''legitimation'' of agressive US international military and political policy & practise.
• He did nothing useful and has not even denounced much less done anything [even if he did make a visit there] about the decimation of Palestinian civilians by Israel with US backing, nor for the implementation of the over two decade old UN resolution 202 calling for the return of the Trans-Jordan lands to Palestine.
• He has done nothing to stop, nor even to eliminate the alleged UN cover for, the decade long embargo of Iraq, which has already killed over a million persons, over half of them children [about wich US Secretary of State Madelein Albright said ''It was worth it'' ]
• He did nothing at all to impede or stop the killing of millions in Africa.
• He did nothing useful to impede or stop the killing in East Timor.
• He did nothing useful to defuse the 3 year killing in Bosnia.
• He raised no concrete objection to the transfer from the UN to NATO of the responsibility for policy making and intervention praxis in Yugolsavia, thereby taking the UN out of the loop of international war/peace policy making.
• He then simply accepted the ''solution'' of the Bosnia crisis at Dayton, USA [significantly on a military base! why is the agreement not named after that military base instead of after the nearby civilian city?]
• He raised no objection - indeed consented - to the NATO war against Yugoslavia, which sidestepped and thereby violated about a dozen clauses and sections of the UN charter and most dangerously for the future sanctified the appeal to ''human rights'' in order to TRAMPLE ON HUMAN RIGHTS [the anti-Iraq war already did the same and violated 7 [only!] articles of the United Nations Charter. His predecessor UN General Secretary Perez de Cuellar said ''this is a US war not a UN one." But he did nothing to prevent or modify that, and he did not even resign in protest, which might at least have dramatized that fact for the world'] and of course Kofi Annan failed to do so as well when the UN was totally emascualted and 2 centuries of international law were simply destroyed in one day [or rather night].
• After the above end run around the UN, Annan then willingly let the UN be used as a fig leaf for the military occupation of Kosovo and then its adminstration by NATO under a UN flag.
• He did no more in or about the even more serious US war against Afghanstan, in which the US is using weapons and targeting people in total violation, of course again of the UN Charter [ the reference to its ''self defense section'' is both hypocritical and outside the remainder of the UN charter that defines and sets limits to what appeal to it can be used for-and this action is goes WAY beyond that] and the violation of all Geneva conventions against the targetting of facilites needed by civilians, and of the use of cluster bombs [useful only against people] that also violate the Geneva convention and even US law [the last time they were used against Yugoslavia, former US President Jimmy Carter went on TV and said they are illegal, because I [he] made them illegal].

  Analogously to the appeal to human rights in order to trample on them in the NATO WAR against Yugoslavia, the present US/UK WAR against Afghanistan is ''fighing terrorism'' by using and spreading terrorism. Apart from using culster bombs, the US military is flying B-52 bombers 8 thousand miles from the US to Afghanistan in order to drop its biggest block busters [designed to bust bunkers] and ''daisy cutters'' on people with the express [that is expressed by the Pentagon! ] intent '' to frighten and create panic and chaos'' among both troops and civilians. That is not terror? Moreover, the US government is also deliberately exposing its own population to increased and more widespread terror: A US Senator inteviewed on ABC TV was asked how the bombing of Afghanistan might impact on the United States. His answer: that his sources informed that a US attack of Afghanistan would result ''in a 100 % chance of another terrorist attack on the US" [a direct quotation!]. Then asked further by the interviewer whether that does not pose a serious problmen, the US Senator replied [another direct quotation] ''I am not troubled by that''!

• In a word, the Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan presided over the emasculation and in effect the destruction of the very United Nations, which was created after World War II TO PRESERVE THE PEACE in which its predecessor League of Nations miserably failed for which it wiped off the world map. This time, a world war like the others was not even necessary for the same to occur to the UN, with whose primary mission of keeping THE PEACE Secretary General Kofi Annan is charged. Yet he in person and the United States government -- no matter whether Republican or Democrat -whose instrument UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has been since Day One, were enough to emasculate the UN and its peace keeping mission. Furthermore, after Kofi Annan and the UN under his direction gave their de facto blessings to the illegal War against Afghanistan, Anan and the UN then become the willing instrument again to the agressors' military occupation of the country [as of Bosnia and Kosovo before] under the guise of a ''UN brokered and supervised peace" leading to a new ''government'' for Afghanistan under international and again UN patronage. That is as in Yugoslavia before, there is neither or need nor place for the UN in making and much less preventing the war, but the UN is approached and willingly serves as a fig-leaf to ''legitimize'' the results of the war.

  Thus, like - nay even more than - his predecessor Secretary General Perez de Cuellar, Kofi Annan has presided over the international geographical extension and military political deepening but also refinement of what in 1991 already I termed THIRD WORLD WAR in a double sense 1. Number III after number II, and 2. A war fought primarily in the Third World as an instrument of the remaining ''super power '' to establish a NEW WORLD ORDER as President Bush father aptly called it [appearantly forgetting his immediate predecessor to coin and use that same term, Adolf Hitler!] President Bush son is now trying to finish the job already started by his father through what [apparently a victim again of historical amensia] he also aptly termed A[nother] CRUSADE.

• In a travesty even greater than that of bestowing the Nobel Peace Prize on Henry Kissinger - the same one for whom Christopher Hitchins recently provided ample documentation in HARPERS magazine to demand his indictement for WAR CRIMES - we must now ask ourselves and answer how it is possible that the Nobel Prize for ''Peace'''is also bestowed on Mr. Annan and his UN for their willing and active collaboration in subverting and destroying the very ''PEACE'' that they were and still are charged to protect and preserve?

The answer is easy, because as BIG BROTHER so aptly put it in 1984, WAR IS PEACE!