Written by: Beck

As you may have noticed, the good people of Darfur have been fortunate enough not to attract the attention of the arrogant cowboy unilateralist Bush and have instead fallen under the care of the Polly Toynbee-Clare Short-approved multilateral compassion set. So, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan managed to persuade the UN to set up a committee to look into what's going on in Darfur. They've just reported back that it's not genocide.

That's great news, isn't it? For as yet another Annan-appointed UN committee boldly declared in December: "Genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated." So thank goodness this isn't genocide. Instead, it's just 70,000 corpses who all happen to be from the same ethnic group – which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, and Polly and Clare don't have to worry their pretty little heads about it.

That's the transnational establishment's alternative to Bush and Howard: appoint a committee that agrees on the need to do nothing. Thus, a few days ago, the UN Human Rights Commission announced the working group that will decide which complaints will be heard at their annual meeting in Geneva this spring: the five-nation panel comprises the Netherlands [fine --ed], Hungary [um, ok], Cuba [wait, what was that?], Saudi Arabia [beg pardon?] and Zimbabwe [!!!!!]. I wouldn't bet on them finding room on their crowded agenda for the question of human rights in Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe, would you? One of the mystifying aspects of UN worship is the assumption that this embryo world government is a "progressive" concept. It's not. Its squalid geographic voting blocs, which use regional solidarity to inflate the status of nickel'n'dime dictators, are merely a Third World gloss on the Congress of Vienna--a relic of an age when contact between states was confined to their governing elites. In an era of jet travel, internet and debit cards that work in any bank machine from Vancouver to Vilnius to Vanuatu, there are millions of global relationships far better for the long-term health of the planet than using American money to set up Eurowimp talking shops manned by African thugs--which is what the UN Human Rights Commission boils down to.

The Bush Administration is now said to be considering using Kofi's "shock" to effect a regime change of its own at the UN. But to whom and to what? I'd be in favour of destroying the UN--or, failing that, at least moving its headquarters to Rwanda, but either of those options would require a level of political will hard to muster in modern sentimental democracies