Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of. - Arthur Dent in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"

Over 150 Congolese refugees, mostly women and children, were slaughtered at a United Nations run refugee camp in the African nation of Burundi. The United Nations is furious, and demands justice. In typical United Nations fashion, a resolution was passed and a fact-finding mission was created.

The Security Council statement did not identify the perpetrators or the victims. Instead, the Council called on the top United Nations envoy in Burundi, in consultation with the United Nations representative in Congo, "to establish the facts and report on them to the Council as quickly as possible."

A United Nations statement issued in Burundi on Sunday expressed "outrage" at the massacre, noting that "most of the victims were women, children and babies who were shot dead and burned in their shelters."

It also noted that Burundians in the camp were not attacked.

The Security Council statement called on authorities in Burundi and Congo "to cooperate actively so that the perpetrators and those responsible for these crimes be brought to justice without delay."

One gets the impression the perpetrators of this crime are having a hearty laugh at the United Nations’ "outrage", condemnation "with the utmost firmness" and promises of cooperation with investigations by the governments of Burundi and Congo. The dead hand of the United Nations Security Council often reaches no further than Turtle Bay to enforce its myriad of self imposed unenforceable resolutions. The murderers understand this perfectly well, and attacked the U.N. run camp with the full knowledge it is unlikely they will be brought to justice by an organization both unwilling and unable to assert itself.

Protecting the Innocent?

The massacre in Burundi should come as no surprise, as two catastrophes with United Nations peacekeeping in the past decade will demonstrate. The genocide in Rwanda was the height of the United Nation’s failure. Inaction, lack of resolve and a complete abdication of its mission to keep the peace lead to U.N. failure in Rwanda, where over 500,000 were murdered as U.N. peacekeepers stood aside.

When the 100-day slaughter began, the U.N. had 2,519 peacekeepers in Rwanda. The most heavily armed U.N. contingent was a 450-member Belgian battalion, but Brussels withdrew days after Hutus killed 10 Belgian soldiers on April 7, 1994.

Other U.N. troops were busy "tanning at the pool" in neighboring Uganda and monitoring its border to ensure that weapons did not reach Kagame's rebels, who were fighting to end the slaughter, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said during the ceremony. U.N. troops at the time had been withdrawn from Rwanda and were staying at hotels in Uganda.

On April 21, as the killing raged, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution to reduce the U.N. force in Rwanda to a token 270 troops. On May 16, the Security Council passed another resolution to send some 5,500 troops, but they didn't begin to arrive until after the genocide had ended.

Rwanda was followed a year later by the massacre of Srebrenica, where the United Nations created a safe haven for Bosnian Muslims. Over 8,000 were killed when the U.N. again abdicated its responsibility to protect those in its care. Time Magazine documents the “Shameful U.N. performance” with precision, and explains how the U.N. denied the townspeople the right to defend themselves and may have even encouraged the slaughter of the town’s men and boys by assisting with the evacuation of the town’s women and children. The safety of U.N. peacekeepers was far more valuable than their charges.

The U.N. contingent's shameful performance there may actually have even facilitated it. U.N. forces had created a "safe haven" in the town, where they promised protection to refugees from the Serb offensive in northern Bosnia. But when the 600 lightly-armed Dutch peacekeepers came under attack from the Serb forces, they began to retreat. The Bosnian Muslim fighters who'd surrendered their weapons to the U.N. as a condition for entering the safe haven asked for them back, hoping that they could at least slow the Serb advance on a town jam-packed with refugees. Their request was denied. The U.N. command dithered over calling air strikes, and when a limited air strike occurred two days after the initial attack, the Serbs responded by threatening to kill 30 Dutch troops they'd captured. That was the end of the air strikes, and the U.N. now found itself cooperating with General Mladic by sending in buses to remove women and children from the area — the Serbs had begun assembling Muslim men aged 12 to 77 for interrogation, and the mass executions began the next day — the same day as the peacekeepers handed over some 5,000 Muslims who'd been sheltering at the Dutch base at Potocari, in exchange for the release of 14 peacekeeping troops. The Dutch left the following day, after negotiating their way out — and leaving behind their weapons as part of the deal.

A new safe haven?

Recently the United Nations created a “Plan of Action for Darfur”, and not surprisingly, there is very little action to the plan. The plan relies on working with the Sudanese government, which has been supporting the Janjaweed militias in their campaign of genocide against the ethnic Furs, to create safe havens.

A new agreement between the United Nations and Sudan requires the government to create safe areas in the crisis-ridden Darfur region within 30 days so civilians can search for food and water and work their land without fear of attack. The "Plan of Action for Darfur" would halt all military operations by government forces, militias, and rebel groups in these safe areas, which are likely to be set up in camps where thousands of Sudanese have taken refuge and around towns and villages which still have large populations.

The European Union refuses to call “widespread, silent and slow killing and village burning of a fairly large scale” for what it is, genocide, and admits it could not and would not take action even if it was.

"We are not in the situation of genocide there," Pieter Feith, an adviser to the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said in Brussels after returning from a fact-finding visit to Sudan. "But it is clear there is widespread, silent and slow killing and village burning of a fairly large scale. There are considerable doubts as to the willingness of Sudan's government to assume its duty to protect its civilian population against attacks." He said in the absence of willingness to send a significant military force, the EU and others had little choice but to cooperate with Khartoum.

Who will ensure the new safe havens in Darfur will not end up as the old, overrun? If the U.N. fails to protect these refugees, will they punish those who violated the U.N.’s agreements? Would the government of Sudan itself be held accountable if it is culpable? Those murdered in Burundi should expect no justice from the United Nations, just as the victims of Rwanda and Srebrenica received none. The United Nations does not have the will or capacity to mete out the protection or justice they often promise.