The Geneva Option by Adam LeBor Page B

realized, but she kept control over her emotions. “Why would I do that?” she asked, her voice calm and reasonable.
    Hussein said, “Because, as you say, you are disgusted by this deal. By leaking it to the New York Times , you put the arrangement in jeopardy.”
    â€œHakizimani should be in prison. Instead he is booked into a suite at the Millennium UN Plaza.” The Plaza, a five-star palace of luxury, was a block away from the UN complex on First Avenue and was the favored billet of VIPs, diplomats, and visiting officials. It even had its own tennis court.
    Hussein nodded. “Indeed he is. The price of peace and saving future lives means that sometimes, bad men go free. You have personally ensured that bad men went free in Iraq, Gaza, Darfur . . . shall I go on? But always for the greater good. As indeed is the case here. Why are you so vexed about Hakizimani?”
    Hussein’s reply hit home, angering her. The words were out before Yael could stop them. “Because you let Rwanda happen!” But even as she spoke, she admitted to herself that she was just trying to provoke him. Hussein’s complicity had very little to do with the real reason for her obsession with the Rwandan warlord.
    Hussein stiffened and his eyes glittered with anger. Rwanda, genocide, and the DPKO’s actions—or lack thereof—during the slaughter were currently the most sensitive topics on the 38th floor. At first, Hussein had dismissed his own peacekeepers’ increasingly frantic reports of the mounting slaughter in the spring of 1994. When the evidence, in the form of piles of mutilated corpses, was broadcast on CNN and the BBC, the DPKO refused repeated requests by the Canadian UN battalion in Kigali to intervene and open fire on the Genocidaires—even after the massacre at the Belgian Mission School. Hussein later blamed the P5 for prevaricating and preventing him from authorizing effective action against the Genocidaires. That autumn he was awarded the Légion d’honneur by France for services to world peace.
    The principle of nonintervention was firmly established. The UN’s neutrality was now more important than the lives of those it was supposedly protecting. The following July Dutch peacekeepers had handed over almost eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys to the Bosnian Serb army after the fall of Srebrenica. The UN commander even forced almost two hundred terrified civilians out of the UN base where they had taken refuge, into the waiting arms of the Bosnian Serbs to be slaughtered. All this time Hussein was on holiday in the Seychelles, as a guest of its president. By the time he returned to New York more than eight thousand prisoners were dead.
    But backed by the P5, Hussein rode out the storm and refused the calls for his resignation. He continued his slow and steady advance, never confronting, but always bending and flowing with the wishes of the great powers. Hussein’s commitment to the ideals of the UN was unshakable, he explained to visiting officials, and was he himself not proof of the possibilities of coexistence between different religions and cultures?
    Hussein was a survivor and had not risen to the SG’s position by being provoked. His eyes were cold, but his voice was calm. “This is the United Nations, Yael. It is a diplomatic arena, neutral and impartial. It is not a private army on call for the world’s humanitarians. Nobody ‘let anything happen’ in Rwanda. It was a terrible confluence of events. Personalizing it does not help anyone, least of all those trying to understand how this house may learn from the tragedy. The DPKO was completely exonerated in the UN’s own commission of inquiry. Once again your predilection for emotional outbursts shows your lack of professional judgment.”
    Yael looked away and read the message scrawled on the photograph of Hussein and Lucy Tremlett. The SG had his arm around her shoulder