Music
Colgan: It’s a day of national celebrations in Sudan. On the streets of Khartoum, people dance to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the military coup that brought their government to power.
The atmosphere is festive – after all, there’s plenty to eat and drink here in the capital.
Man: Pure natural water, so delicious. We love it.
Colgan: More than 1000 kilometres west, in Sudan’s Darfur states, it’s a very different scene – disease and starvation threaten to kill tens of thousands of men, women and children.
Camped in subhuman conditions, they’ve fled a wave of ethnic violence by Arab militia.As many as 30,000 people have been murdered. Survivors say their government is guilty of aiding the killers.
Given a hero’s welcome by the refugees, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has waded into the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.Annan: I was deeply moved mby the many accounts of immense suffering that I heard from the displaced persons in Darfur. My message on behalf of the United Nations to the government and other parties to the conflict is therefore clear – the violence must stop.
Colgan: Haunted by the genocide in Rwanda a decade ago, Kofi Annan has sworn it will not happen again. But stopping it, will test his resolve and the strength of a deeply fractured United Nations.Egeland: It’s a moment of truth for the solidarity of the international community.
Colgan: While the world was riveted on Iraq and its first days of democracy, the man charged with pursuing global peace was here, shuttling across Africa.
Colgan: As a leader without a state, without an army, or enough money – how do you describe the pressure you bring to bear on other world leaders?Annan: I think it’s the institution I work for and what I stand for, representing the conscience of the international community of sorts.
Colgan: This mission is to address enormous issues in five nations – AIDS civil war, famine and the plight of the one million displaced Sudanese.Kofi Annan admits frustration at the world’s focus on Iraq and the US led war on terrorism.
Annan: It’s extremely difficult. First of all, the war in Iraq has really distorted the international agenda. Before then, we were all so focused and we were fighting hunger, we were fighting HIV – we wanted resources and quite a lot of resources have gone into Iraq and there’s very little left for other issues.
Colgan: He arrives in Khartoum on a borrowed aircraft, he has no plane of his own.
The welcome is publicly warm, but tough words soon follow in meetings with the Sudanese Government.
Kofi Annan wants two things – to disarm the militia and to allow aid workers full access to the victims of the violence.
Annan: You all know why I’m here and the reason that brought me here, and I think we all have a responsibility to act urgently to try to deal with the situation in Darfur.
Colgan: He’s given the Sudanese 24 to 48 hours to respond, raising the threat of UN sanctions.
In a rare show of co-operation, US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Sudan at the same time, throwing his weight behind the UN demands for the Sudanese to disarm the militias.
Colgan: Good morning, how did you think things went yesterday?
Annan: I think it’s going well, it’s going well.
Colgan: On our way to the camps the next day, he’s upbeat.
Annan: I’ll have a long discussion with the President tomorrow and I think that should go well, too.
Traub: We’re accustomed to a certain idea of leadership, which is a kind of Alpha male, take charge form of leadership. And so I think you look at him and at first blush you think, well he’s the opposite of a leader, he has none of those commanding qualities.
Colgan: New York journalist James Traub is shadowing the UN leader for 18 months, being given unprecedented access to write a biography of Annan and the UN.
Traub: Yet there is no question, as we’ve seen here in Africa -- because of again a combination of who he is and the institution he works for – he has a kind of moral authority which other African leaders have no choice but to take into account.
They do crave his seal of approval and I think they fear his criticism.
Annan: I want to see the situation for myself, talk to my people there and assess what their needs are.
Music
Colgan: The journey reveals the dry, inhospitable desert that is the backdrop to this crisis.
Music
Colgan: Water and land – these are the precious resources that have sparked conflict here for decades between Arab nomads, herding their animals, and African farmers wanting the land for crops.
We learn the camp we’d planned to see has literally disappeared overnight. Conditions were so poor that rather than let the UN and media see the worst, government troops bundled people out in trucks in the middle of the night.
This camp is called Zam Zam and it’s crammed with fifteen thousand people.They started arriving when the worst of the atrocities erupted in February.
Their stories are chillingly repetitive. First, government planes bombed their villages they tell us, then the militia came.
Interpreter: It’s the government that destroyed villages and burned and killed us. First the planes came and bombed, and after that the army came in trucks, and then after them, came the Janjaweed and their horses and camels. They burned everything. They took, they killed all our men.
Colgan: Killing Christians and fellow Muslims, they’ve struck with speed and ferocity, leaving behind death and destruction.
Village man: No horses, no camels, no cattle, no sheep -- everything is no.
Egeland: The people we saw have lost everything. They told us – one family told us that the family members were actually shot to pieces by armed gunmen accompanied by armed helicopters. They also said their livestock has gone, their wells have been destroyed, the irrigation system had been destroyed and their village was scorched.
Colgan: Jan Egeland says 137 camps have now sprung up across Darfur – and the stories are the same everywhere.
Egeland: All the refugees believe their government was involved and I don’t think the rebels
have helicopter gunships, so that’s one of the indications that government may have been involved.
Colgan: Amnesty International reports horrifying first hand accounts of torture, and of the abduction and rape of women and children.
Jan Egeland says humanitarian workers sounded the alarm earlier this year, but the UN Security Council was too slow to act.
Egeland: We were reporting to the Security Council
early in the year and with too little response really from the Security Council, from the world media and from member states. We felt really alone, the humanitarians, for a long period of time.
Colgan: Do you believe that if the UN and international community had acted sooner, lives could have been saved?
Egeland: Yes, I think so. I think we should learn from this. When I asked first to brief the Security Council, there was not so much interest.Colgan: Why do you think it was slow to act?Egeland: Because there are too many competing demands for the attention of the Security Council.
Colgan: Kofi Annan’s task here is to gather information to report to the UN Security Council. What it does, is up to its 15 members. Sometimes, divisions between members mean it does too little or nothing.
Man: There are children...very much in need of food.
Colgan: Annan’s style is to bring all to the negotiating process. He’s inclusive of everyone – asking why women have not been brought in to this circle of chiefs.
Annan: What did they say? Interpreter: No way! Annan: No way?
Colgan: His critics say he talks too much and acts too rarely.Gardiner: Mr Annan I think, needs to
categorically state this is genocide taking place in Sudan at the moment. He has to call for international intervention there. I don’t believe a policy of appeasement towards the regime in Khartoum is going to change the situation at all.
Colgan: A world away, in the shadow of the US Capitol building, sit some of the UN’s harshest critics, in the Heritage Foundation -- an influential conservative think tank.The Foundation is helping the US Congress investigate the UN over claims that 10 billion dollars of oil money was corruptly siphoned out of Iraq during the seven years of the UN Oil for Food program.
Gardiner: I think the UN has declining moral authority on the world stage. The UN has been heavily hit by the Oil For Food scandal which raises very serious questions regarding ethics within the United Nations The allegations are I think, of such a serious nature that they could potentially bring about the downfall of Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General.
Colgan: No one is suggesting the Secretary General profited from any corruption, but his opponents accuse him of turning a blind eye while corruption took place.
Gardiner: This I think, is a major scandal, probably the biggest scandal in the history of the United Nations.
Music
Colgan: The Oil for Food scandal has the potential to devastate the UN while it’s still in deep recovery after the divisions of the Iraq war.The United States -- host nation and single biggest contributor of funds – is embittered by the Security Council’s refusal to back its plans for war.For now, there’s an uneasy truce with all members agreeing to help rebuild Iraq -- but the unity is fragile.
Annan: The council did not vote for a war. The US did not convince the majority of the council. The US convinced the UK to come along, but in the end we paid a price. We paid a price in the sense that those who were against the war were disappointed the UN could not stop the war. Those who were for the war were upset that the UN did not support it. So we were knocked from both ends.
Colgan: No win situation? Annan: No win situation.
Colgan: Did you feel particularly frustrated by that or helpless? Annan: I felt frustrated that it had to come to war. I was deeply touched by the fact that in the end we were not able to find a way out of solving the Iraq problem short of war.
Colgan: Yet as always, he remains optimistic.
Annan: We were damaged but I don’t think it’s permanent damage. I think we will come back. There were statements the UN is irrelevant and I think we’re not hearing that any more.
Colgan: There may not be future rifts – if the US refuses to go to the Security Council.
Gardiner: Conventional wisdom now in Washington is that the United Nations should not have a veto power over US foreign policy. I think that the United States would be willing to work with the UN where the UN shows a willingness to stand up and be counted in the war against international terrorism. However, where the UN stands in the way of the US national interests, I think increasingly, US policymakers are going to bypass the United Nations.
Boutros-Ghali: I hope that they will not bypass the Security Council, because if they will bypass it for a third time, this will destroy completely the credibility of the United Nations.
Colgan: No one knows better what it’s like to battle the United States and lose.Boutros Boutros-Ghali is Kofi Annan’s predecessor – as UN Secretary General, his long running disputes with the US saw it veto his bid for a second term in office.
The US has fought for democracy in Iraq but, he accuses, rejects it in the UN Security Council.
Boutros-Ghali: What is the use of talking about democracy within member’s states. The importance is not only democracy within a member state, what is more important is democracy among member states.
Music
Colgan: He believes events in Iraq have proved no country, even the superpower that is the United States, can afford to go it alone.
Boutros-Ghali: I believe that sooner or later they will discover they need the United Nations, that they need
a multilateral approach, so the day they will discover this through different occasion, through different situations, through different accidents, then they will return to the United Nations.
Music
Colgan: As the storm rages about its future, the UN’s aid workers race against time to help the Sudanese refugees – 200,000 of them have fled here into neighbouring Chad. The UN has less than half the money it needs to keep these people alive till the end of the year.
Safia Hussein is 30 years old. She has precious little grain left to feed herself and her seven children.She ran from her border village months ago -- her husband is missing, presumed dead.
Mr Brahimi: The airplanes came and they bombed the village, several bombs dropped and then later on the army, a lot of people on horseback, they came and they were attacking us and they killed some of our people and they torched our homes.
Colgan: We’re told women with a sick child were forced to abandon them in the desert to save their remaining children.
The Sudanese government says all the refugees should go home, promising to protect them. Safia shows her disbelief.
Mr Brahimi: This is nonsense -- they can’t. If they can do that, why didn’t they protect us in the beginning? They are the ones killing us.
Colgan: The Sudanese government denies attacking civilians. It says it’s fighting rebels who are loyal to the African farmers and who’ve been attacking government troops. There’s fighting too between rebels and Janjaweed.The internal warfare is complex, but the UN is certain the Sudanese government can, and must, stop the violence.
When he arrives, Kofi Annan is greeted as a rescuer. He will bring shelter, he will protect us, they say.But Kofi Annan is only as strong as the resolve of the UN’s own member states.He can threaten, cajole and negotiate all he wants, but in the end, it’s the UN that must act as one body. Egeland: This is a very bitter
conflict, a very, very difficult situation and the stakes are very high. We understand in our guts how high the stakes are for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who are defenceless and rely on us, the international community and we need the help of our member states to be able to do all of this.
Colgan: When Kofi Annan leaves Sudan, he has a commitment from the Sudanese government to disarm the militia and to lift all barriers to humanitarian aid.
Annan: Well I think that, first of all they made the agreement publicly, so the whole world knows what they said they will do.
Colgan: By the time he has spoken with the leaders of nations across Africa, it is clear what issues are not on the agenda.
Annan: Iraq didn’t come up, terrorism didn’t come up, weapons of mass destruction didn’t come up and I met lots of leaders. So it shows what’s on their mind.
Colgan: Does it worry you that Iraq and terrorism seem to have hijacked the agenda of UN, particularly with the US and the war in Iraq? Annan: No, I think the question of terrorism is of concern to everybody and we need to deal with it, but Iraq if effect has sucked out all the oxygen and it has distorted the international agenda. It has taken up so much resources that we don’t have adequate resources for other developmental issues. I think you better sit down before I’m accused of killing the journalists (laughs and walks away).
Colgan: Even before the ink has dried on the Sudan agreement, Kofi Annan is embroiled in another diplomatic rescue, racing through the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, to reignite stalled talks on war torn Somalia.
This is what he does – playing the honest broker between parties who would otherwise refuse to share a table.
Annan: Your task is urgent
Colgan: It is here in Africa, where his moral authority counts most;where poverty and civil war, hunger and AIDS tear apart societies, leaving them ripe as havens for crime and terrorism.Yet that moral authority is being increasingly undermined at a time when there is no other body to take the place of the UN and its chief peace-maker.
Reporter: Jill Colgan
Camera: David Martin
Editor: Woody Landay
Colgan: It’s a day of national celebrations in Sudan. On the streets of Khartoum, people dance to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the military coup that brought their government to power.
The atmosphere is festive – after all, there’s plenty to eat and drink here in the capital.
Man: Pure natural water, so delicious. We love it.
Colgan: More than 1000 kilometres west, in Sudan’s Darfur states, it’s a very different scene – disease and starvation threaten to kill tens of thousands of men, women and children.
Camped in subhuman conditions, they’ve fled a wave of ethnic violence by Arab militia.As many as 30,000 people have been murdered. Survivors say their government is guilty of aiding the killers.
Given a hero’s welcome by the refugees, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has waded into the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.Annan: I was deeply moved mby the many accounts of immense suffering that I heard from the displaced persons in Darfur. My message on behalf of the United Nations to the government and other parties to the conflict is therefore clear – the violence must stop.
Colgan: Haunted by the genocide in Rwanda a decade ago, Kofi Annan has sworn it will not happen again. But stopping it, will test his resolve and the strength of a deeply fractured United Nations.Egeland: It’s a moment of truth for the solidarity of the international community.
Colgan: While the world was riveted on Iraq and its first days of democracy, the man charged with pursuing global peace was here, shuttling across Africa.
Colgan: As a leader without a state, without an army, or enough money – how do you describe the pressure you bring to bear on other world leaders?Annan: I think it’s the institution I work for and what I stand for, representing the conscience of the international community of sorts.
Colgan: This mission is to address enormous issues in five nations – AIDS civil war, famine and the plight of the one million displaced Sudanese.Kofi Annan admits frustration at the world’s focus on Iraq and the US led war on terrorism.
Annan: It’s extremely difficult. First of all, the war in Iraq has really distorted the international agenda. Before then, we were all so focused and we were fighting hunger, we were fighting HIV – we wanted resources and quite a lot of resources have gone into Iraq and there’s very little left for other issues.
Colgan: He arrives in Khartoum on a borrowed aircraft, he has no plane of his own.
The welcome is publicly warm, but tough words soon follow in meetings with the Sudanese Government.
Kofi Annan wants two things – to disarm the militia and to allow aid workers full access to the victims of the violence.
Annan: You all know why I’m here and the reason that brought me here, and I think we all have a responsibility to act urgently to try to deal with the situation in Darfur.
Colgan: He’s given the Sudanese 24 to 48 hours to respond, raising the threat of UN sanctions.
In a rare show of co-operation, US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Sudan at the same time, throwing his weight behind the UN demands for the Sudanese to disarm the militias.
Colgan: Good morning, how did you think things went yesterday?
Annan: I think it’s going well, it’s going well.
Colgan: On our way to the camps the next day, he’s upbeat.
Annan: I’ll have a long discussion with the President tomorrow and I think that should go well, too.
Traub: We’re accustomed to a certain idea of leadership, which is a kind of Alpha male, take charge form of leadership. And so I think you look at him and at first blush you think, well he’s the opposite of a leader, he has none of those commanding qualities.
Colgan: New York journalist James Traub is shadowing the UN leader for 18 months, being given unprecedented access to write a biography of Annan and the UN.
Traub: Yet there is no question, as we’ve seen here in Africa -- because of again a combination of who he is and the institution he works for – he has a kind of moral authority which other African leaders have no choice but to take into account.
They do crave his seal of approval and I think they fear his criticism.
Annan: I want to see the situation for myself, talk to my people there and assess what their needs are.
Music
Colgan: The journey reveals the dry, inhospitable desert that is the backdrop to this crisis.
Music
Colgan: Water and land – these are the precious resources that have sparked conflict here for decades between Arab nomads, herding their animals, and African farmers wanting the land for crops.
We learn the camp we’d planned to see has literally disappeared overnight. Conditions were so poor that rather than let the UN and media see the worst, government troops bundled people out in trucks in the middle of the night.
This camp is called Zam Zam and it’s crammed with fifteen thousand people.They started arriving when the worst of the atrocities erupted in February.
Their stories are chillingly repetitive. First, government planes bombed their villages they tell us, then the militia came.
Interpreter: It’s the government that destroyed villages and burned and killed us. First the planes came and bombed, and after that the army came in trucks, and then after them, came the Janjaweed and their horses and camels. They burned everything. They took, they killed all our men.
Colgan: Killing Christians and fellow Muslims, they’ve struck with speed and ferocity, leaving behind death and destruction.
Village man: No horses, no camels, no cattle, no sheep -- everything is no.
Egeland: The people we saw have lost everything. They told us – one family told us that the family members were actually shot to pieces by armed gunmen accompanied by armed helicopters. They also said their livestock has gone, their wells have been destroyed, the irrigation system had been destroyed and their village was scorched.
Colgan: Jan Egeland says 137 camps have now sprung up across Darfur – and the stories are the same everywhere.
Egeland: All the refugees believe their government was involved and I don’t think the rebels
have helicopter gunships, so that’s one of the indications that government may have been involved.
Colgan: Amnesty International reports horrifying first hand accounts of torture, and of the abduction and rape of women and children.
Jan Egeland says humanitarian workers sounded the alarm earlier this year, but the UN Security Council was too slow to act.
Egeland: We were reporting to the Security Council
early in the year and with too little response really from the Security Council, from the world media and from member states. We felt really alone, the humanitarians, for a long period of time.
Colgan: Do you believe that if the UN and international community had acted sooner, lives could have been saved?
Egeland: Yes, I think so. I think we should learn from this. When I asked first to brief the Security Council, there was not so much interest.Colgan: Why do you think it was slow to act?Egeland: Because there are too many competing demands for the attention of the Security Council.
Colgan: Kofi Annan’s task here is to gather information to report to the UN Security Council. What it does, is up to its 15 members. Sometimes, divisions between members mean it does too little or nothing.
Man: There are children...very much in need of food.
Colgan: Annan’s style is to bring all to the negotiating process. He’s inclusive of everyone – asking why women have not been brought in to this circle of chiefs.
Annan: What did they say? Interpreter: No way! Annan: No way?
Colgan: His critics say he talks too much and acts too rarely.Gardiner: Mr Annan I think, needs to
categorically state this is genocide taking place in Sudan at the moment. He has to call for international intervention there. I don’t believe a policy of appeasement towards the regime in Khartoum is going to change the situation at all.
Colgan: A world away, in the shadow of the US Capitol building, sit some of the UN’s harshest critics, in the Heritage Foundation -- an influential conservative think tank.The Foundation is helping the US Congress investigate the UN over claims that 10 billion dollars of oil money was corruptly siphoned out of Iraq during the seven years of the UN Oil for Food program.
Gardiner: I think the UN has declining moral authority on the world stage. The UN has been heavily hit by the Oil For Food scandal which raises very serious questions regarding ethics within the United Nations The allegations are I think, of such a serious nature that they could potentially bring about the downfall of Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General.
Colgan: No one is suggesting the Secretary General profited from any corruption, but his opponents accuse him of turning a blind eye while corruption took place.
Gardiner: This I think, is a major scandal, probably the biggest scandal in the history of the United Nations.
Music
Colgan: The Oil for Food scandal has the potential to devastate the UN while it’s still in deep recovery after the divisions of the Iraq war.The United States -- host nation and single biggest contributor of funds – is embittered by the Security Council’s refusal to back its plans for war.For now, there’s an uneasy truce with all members agreeing to help rebuild Iraq -- but the unity is fragile.
Annan: The council did not vote for a war. The US did not convince the majority of the council. The US convinced the UK to come along, but in the end we paid a price. We paid a price in the sense that those who were against the war were disappointed the UN could not stop the war. Those who were for the war were upset that the UN did not support it. So we were knocked from both ends.
Colgan: No win situation? Annan: No win situation.
Colgan: Did you feel particularly frustrated by that or helpless? Annan: I felt frustrated that it had to come to war. I was deeply touched by the fact that in the end we were not able to find a way out of solving the Iraq problem short of war.
Colgan: Yet as always, he remains optimistic.
Annan: We were damaged but I don’t think it’s permanent damage. I think we will come back. There were statements the UN is irrelevant and I think we’re not hearing that any more.
Colgan: There may not be future rifts – if the US refuses to go to the Security Council.
Gardiner: Conventional wisdom now in Washington is that the United Nations should not have a veto power over US foreign policy. I think that the United States would be willing to work with the UN where the UN shows a willingness to stand up and be counted in the war against international terrorism. However, where the UN stands in the way of the US national interests, I think increasingly, US policymakers are going to bypass the United Nations.
Boutros-Ghali: I hope that they will not bypass the Security Council, because if they will bypass it for a third time, this will destroy completely the credibility of the United Nations.
Colgan: No one knows better what it’s like to battle the United States and lose.Boutros Boutros-Ghali is Kofi Annan’s predecessor – as UN Secretary General, his long running disputes with the US saw it veto his bid for a second term in office.
The US has fought for democracy in Iraq but, he accuses, rejects it in the UN Security Council.
Boutros-Ghali: What is the use of talking about democracy within member’s states. The importance is not only democracy within a member state, what is more important is democracy among member states.
Music
Colgan: He believes events in Iraq have proved no country, even the superpower that is the United States, can afford to go it alone.
Boutros-Ghali: I believe that sooner or later they will discover they need the United Nations, that they need
a multilateral approach, so the day they will discover this through different occasion, through different situations, through different accidents, then they will return to the United Nations.
Music
Colgan: As the storm rages about its future, the UN’s aid workers race against time to help the Sudanese refugees – 200,000 of them have fled here into neighbouring Chad. The UN has less than half the money it needs to keep these people alive till the end of the year.
Safia Hussein is 30 years old. She has precious little grain left to feed herself and her seven children.She ran from her border village months ago -- her husband is missing, presumed dead.
Mr Brahimi: The airplanes came and they bombed the village, several bombs dropped and then later on the army, a lot of people on horseback, they came and they were attacking us and they killed some of our people and they torched our homes.
Colgan: We’re told women with a sick child were forced to abandon them in the desert to save their remaining children.
The Sudanese government says all the refugees should go home, promising to protect them. Safia shows her disbelief.
Mr Brahimi: This is nonsense -- they can’t. If they can do that, why didn’t they protect us in the beginning? They are the ones killing us.
Colgan: The Sudanese government denies attacking civilians. It says it’s fighting rebels who are loyal to the African farmers and who’ve been attacking government troops. There’s fighting too between rebels and Janjaweed.The internal warfare is complex, but the UN is certain the Sudanese government can, and must, stop the violence.
When he arrives, Kofi Annan is greeted as a rescuer. He will bring shelter, he will protect us, they say.But Kofi Annan is only as strong as the resolve of the UN’s own member states.He can threaten, cajole and negotiate all he wants, but in the end, it’s the UN that must act as one body. Egeland: This is a very bitter
conflict, a very, very difficult situation and the stakes are very high. We understand in our guts how high the stakes are for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who are defenceless and rely on us, the international community and we need the help of our member states to be able to do all of this.
Colgan: When Kofi Annan leaves Sudan, he has a commitment from the Sudanese government to disarm the militia and to lift all barriers to humanitarian aid.
Annan: Well I think that, first of all they made the agreement publicly, so the whole world knows what they said they will do.
Colgan: By the time he has spoken with the leaders of nations across Africa, it is clear what issues are not on the agenda.
Annan: Iraq didn’t come up, terrorism didn’t come up, weapons of mass destruction didn’t come up and I met lots of leaders. So it shows what’s on their mind.
Colgan: Does it worry you that Iraq and terrorism seem to have hijacked the agenda of UN, particularly with the US and the war in Iraq? Annan: No, I think the question of terrorism is of concern to everybody and we need to deal with it, but Iraq if effect has sucked out all the oxygen and it has distorted the international agenda. It has taken up so much resources that we don’t have adequate resources for other developmental issues. I think you better sit down before I’m accused of killing the journalists (laughs and walks away).
Colgan: Even before the ink has dried on the Sudan agreement, Kofi Annan is embroiled in another diplomatic rescue, racing through the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, to reignite stalled talks on war torn Somalia.
This is what he does – playing the honest broker between parties who would otherwise refuse to share a table.
Annan: Your task is urgent
Colgan: It is here in Africa, where his moral authority counts most;where poverty and civil war, hunger and AIDS tear apart societies, leaving them ripe as havens for crime and terrorism.Yet that moral authority is being increasingly undermined at a time when there is no other body to take the place of the UN and its chief peace-maker.
Reporter: Jill Colgan
Camera: David Martin
Editor: Woody Landay