In Joseph Conrad’s small yet dense novel set at the turn of the last century, Heart of Darkness, the up-river journey of Marlow, the story’s narrator, takes him to a place in the interior of Africa and a man, Kurtz, where power and greed represent the evil face of his time.
Our contemporary Marlow needs to sail up the river Hudson and dock by the New York headquarters of the United Nations to discover another sort of modern-day heart of darkness.
Here, Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary general presides over a world body—built over the smouldering ruins of World War II—dedicated to the purpose, as its Charter declares, to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, establish worldwide conditions for justice and respect for international law, promote social progress and freedom, practice tolerance among peoples and nations, and unite together for international peace and security.
Our contemporary Marlow at the UN, however, will discover legions of Kurtzes representing scoundrel governments from around the world.
It is as if the good Lord, desiring to establish His kingdom on earth, were to find the satanic prince and his cohorts from the underworld having taken upon themselves His noble aim.
Any good the UN does—now increasingly open to question with disclosures mounting on the oil-for-food (or fraud) program in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—is offset by its criminal ineptness and shady practices subverting its principal task of maintaining the ideals of the organization in the face of human propensity to do evil.
A French judge, Philippe Courroye, earlier this month ordered the arrest of Jean-Bernard Merimee for his alleged role in the UN-Iraq oil-for-food caper.
Merimee, 68, was France’s representative to the UN from 1991-1995, and from 1999-2002 served Annan as a special adviser. He was awarded by Saddam Hussein, as documents unearthed in U.S.-liberated Baghdad disclose, 11 million barrels of oil between December 2001 and March 2003.
Besides Merimee, five other individuals are under judicial investigation by judge Courroye. Among them are Serge Boidevaix, former secretary general of the republic’s foreign ministry, and Bernard Guillet, an adviser to former French interior minister Charles Pasqua.
Pasqua was questioned by investigators as well.
French officials deny any of this influenced the republic’s decision in opposing the war to liberate Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny.
Such denials probably have as much plausiblilty as Annan’s denial he was aware of his son Kojo’s influence-peddling, or that of his senior officials and advisers implicated in the oil-for-food scandal.
Moreover, there is Darfur, where a genocide perpetrated by a criminal regime in Sudan has unfolded in a continent that witnessed genocide in Rwanda under the watch of Annan and his predecessor, Boutros-Ghali.
There are reports from several UN missions in Africa and the Balkans of sexual exploitation, cases of child rape and neglect of human rights abuses, and legal actions are yet to be brought against perpetrators.
But the oil-for-food scandal has revealed how deep and ugly is the cynicism inside the UN.
This was not merely laundering money from any dictator, it was colluding with a regime that brutalized and murdered its own people, and bribed UN officials plus representatives of the key members of the Security Council responsible to monitor the regime and preserve the sanctity of its Charter.
Serious people must ask whether the world’s poor and oppressed would not be better served by a Coalition of Democracies, without the UN as an assembly of thugs, terrorists and human rights abusers pretending to help bring progress for them.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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