Word: sierras
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...international body's Millennium Summit saw further eloquent critiques, particularly from African leaders, whose continent has recently seen the most dramatic failures of the blue-helmeted peacekeepers. They pointed to Rwanda, where the U.N. failed to act to stop the 1994 genocide, and to recent savagery in Sierra Leone, where some 500 hapless peacekeeping troops were taken hostage by a ragtag militia. Everyone from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to the major Western powers already agree on the need to dramatically overhaul the system. The question is whether they're willing or able to invest the political and material resources...
...They argue that even armed with a management degree from M.I.T., he is badly overmatched by the U.N.'s thick bureaucracy. But mostly they chew away at his idealistic, moral world view. The U.N. continues to have its problems--the embarrassment of having peacekeepers taken hostage in Sierra Leone, the contempt of the U.S. Congress. But these haven't diminished the high polish he has brought to the job. Annan, 62, is a miracle of our internationalized world: born in Ghana, educated in the U.S. and Europe, a career U.N. diplomat who became Secretary-General in 1997. As Secretary-General...
What Annan proposes is nothing less than a world filled with dignified people. A world where Sierra Leonean rebels would have enough innate dignity to not chop off the arms of infant girls. A planet where India and Pakistan would be dignified enough not to blow up each other, where the indignities of chemical weapons would be a thing of the past, where the world's rich would be, yes, dignified enough to worry about the millions of Africans who will die of AIDS in the next two decades. This is the kind of world Annan imagines...
...cold war brought murderous burdens that the U.N. has been unable to handle. U.N. troops are routinely asked to plunge into chaos--Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor. Annan isn't opposed to these missions. He has the courage to order the U.N. in wherever it is needed. But he has nightmares about trying to contain some of the world's most evil men with the resources of a local sheriff's department. He has tried that before: Rwanda, where 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered by rival Hutu tribesmen; Srebrenica, Bosnia, where 8,000 Muslims were killed...
...that the dictatorship is gone, new plagues - crime, unemployment, AIDS - are hurting the fledgling democracy. But next to the rest of the continent, Nigeria gleams today. Major wars are tearing at Angola, both Congos, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan, while conflicts simmer in Burundi, Chad, Djibouti, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. And the United States is eager to school Nigeria's military in the ways of peace-keeping, at least in part to reduce calls on the United States to send troops to keep the peace in conflict-stricken Sierra Leone and other ravaged nations that pockmark Africa. Last...