LONDON- When Kofi Annan, the UN’s Ghanaian Secretary-General, visited Rwanda in May, 1998 he ended up being pilloried in an aggressive press conference for presiding over the UN’s “hands off” policy during the genocide, of the Tutsis by the Hutus four years previously. Journalists were quoting from Philip Gourevitch’s shocking then just-published, book, “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families”. In it he charged that the UN had ignored a cable from its local commander warning of the impending genocide. As William Shawcross tells it in his important new book on the UN, “Deliver Us From Evil”, “His voice almost cracking, Annan ended by saying that ‘too much was made of one cable and that if INFORMATION was indeed the only problem then peacekeeping would be much easier. We would not be having problems in Kosovo because everybody KNOWS. We would not have had...
