The recommendations of the just released Iraq Study Group report are a sober reminder of the limitations of current strategies for stabilizing Iraq and pursuing peace in the region.
With a new Secretary General comes new opportunities for the United States to strengthen its commitment to the United Nations. The next UNF Insights column outlines some of the openings that this transitional period presents and argues that American foreign policy would be best served by seizing this new multilateralist moment. Click here for the PDF.
"The United Nations plans to become more deeply involved in efforts to end the Lord's Resistance Army's reign of terror in northern Uganda, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Monday.
The LRA, which says it wants to rule Uganda according to the biblical Ten Commandments, has become notorious for massacring civilians, mutilating survivors and abducting thousands of children as fighters, porters and sex slaves.
About 100,000 people have been killed and nearly 2 million more driven from their homes and into camps in 20 years of brutal war waged by the group in northern Uganda, the U.N. Security Council said two weeks ago." More
"President Bush has accepted the resignation of U.N. Ambassador John Bolton when his recess appointment expires." LINK
"Marking the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for stepped-up measures to end the practice and to address the entrenched poverty which leaves people vulnerable to enslavement. "Contemporary forms of slavery - from bonded labour to human trafficking - are flourishing as a result of discrimination, social exclusion, and vulnerability exacerbated by poverty," the Secretary-General said in a message on the observance." More
In the New Republic online, Peter Beinart has written a not-to-be missed essay touting the successful nation building strategies the United Nations has been quietly developing without much fanfare here in the United States.
"Mr. Annan said it is crucial that the Council preserves and strengthens what he called its "crown jewel" - the system of Special Procedures, or rapporteurs, independent experts and working groups tasked with examining a specific area of human rights.
"It has long since been recognized in theory, and increasingly also in practice, that the rule of law cannot be left to the discretion of governments, no matter how democratically elected they may be." The Secretary-General said the area most in need of innovation is the organization of the universal periodic review, a peer review mechanism. More