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Annan lambastes world's failure to halt Darfur tragedy

Fri Dec 8, 2:17 PM ET

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - Outgoing UN chief Kofi Annan lashed out at the world's collective failure to halt the bloodshed in Sudan's Darfur region, in a speech here to mark Human Rights Day.

Noting that a year ago, world leaders at their UN summit had endorsed the concept of "responsibility to protect" civilians threatened with genocide, war crimes or ethnic cleansing, he said: "to judge by what is happening in Darfur, our performance has not improved much since the disasters of Bosnia and Rwanda."

"How can an international community which claims to uphold human rights allow this horror to continue?" he said, referring to Darfur, where the UN cited "disturbing reports" of mass rapes and other gross violations of human rights. "There is more than enough blame to go around."

The secretary general spoke at an event sponsored by Human Rights Watch ahead of Human Rights Day which falls on Sunday.

The UN Secretary General, who is to relinquish his post at the end of the month, said that during his 10 years in office he had tried to make human rights "central to all the UN's work."

"But I'm not sure how far I have succeeded, or how much nearer we are to bringing the reality of the UN in line with my vision of human rights as its third 'pillar,' on a par with development and peace and security," he told his audience.

He specifically highlighted the Darfur tragedy and slammed "the shameful passivity of most governments."

"Some governments have tried to win support in the global South (developing world) by caricaturing responsibility to protect, as a conspiracy by imperialist powers to take back the hard-won national sovereignty of formerly colonized people. This is utterly false," Annan said.

This was a clear reference to Khartoum's refusal to accept the deployment of 20,000 peacekeepers to take over from the ill-equipped African Union mission currently in operation in Darfur.

The Darfur conflict, which has been raging for more than three years, has claimed 200,000 lives and left some two million people displaced.

Annan also called for "an anti-terrorism strategy that does not merely pay lip-service to the defense of human rights, but is built on it."

And in a dig at the United States, he said "states cannot fulfil that obligation by themselves violating human rights in the process."

"To do so means abandoning the moral high ground and playing into the hands of the terrorists," Annan said.

"That is why secret prisons have no place in our struggle against terrorism, and why all places where terrorism suspects are detained must be accessible to the International Committee of the Red Cross."

Annan lambastes world's failure to halt Darfur tragedy (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061208/wl_africa_afp/unrightssudandarfur)