Replacing the Sick U.N. Representative
An Open Letter to Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, by Raymond K. Kent, Professor of History from University of California, Berkeley
Nyam-Nyam Serbs
Dear Mr. Secretary General,
There is no one on the planet earth who has borne a heavier cross as a victim of racism, individually and collectively, than men and women from Your own Continent of Africa.
The obvious incubator of the racist virus was the slave trade but its arrest (by about mid-Nineteenth century) did nothing to end the racist perceptions attached to Africans in Africa and in the New World.
Its manifestations have been many and varied. At one level, the great Zande people of Central Africa (just take a look at the Atlas of Zande material culture, prepared by Dr. Schweinfurth) were perceived as “cannibals” and called the “Nyam-Nyam.” Tied to this man-eating perception at another level, was an old newspaper advertisement. A captive white man is about to be cooked in a large pot somewhere in Africa and is begging for mercy. The local Chief turns to him and says “show me something I have not seen and I will let you out.” The white man produces a lighter with a certain well-known brand name and lights it up. The chief gave the order to let him out and said “I have used many lighters but never had one that worked on first try.”
Between these two examples stood the notion that Africans were sub-human, evil, lazy, guilty of brutal savagery in conflicts, while Africa was a place without history. We now have an eight-volume History of Africa under the UNESCO auspices. For Africans, assimilation into societies of the New World was a road full of racist thorns. Yet, it was their sweat and blood that contributed to the richness in many parts of it. (In Brazil, for example, they even modified the Portuguese language, cuisine and music; by historical admissions, a successful Portuguese colonization of Brazil would have been unworkable without Africans).
Replace Ahtisaari With Someone Who is Not Sick
Germany’s Third Reich was a modern promoter of racism while proclaiming the superiority of the Aryan Race yet –even after all the Nazi horrors – the Germans did not become guilty as a PEOPLE. This has permitted the Germans to escape the worst consequences, rebuild their society and become an important Democracy in Europe. Quintessentially, “United Nations” is an anti-racist edifice. One would have thought that its basic sinew consists of rejecting the notion that any PEOPLE can be deemed guilty as such because of misdeeds of its governors or egregious crimes committed by some of its members. It is the same sinew that holds the United States together as a single nation despite the myriad origins of its population.
Alas, just when one would have thought that a racist individual could not hold office in the U.N. or be named as its representative, the opposite has just happened. At a meeting in Vienna, the special U.N. envoy appointed to deal with the status of Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari of Finland has just revealed himself as a crass modern racist who assigns guilt to an entire people—the Serbs at Kosovo-- without shame or respect for his Office. Even worse, on grounds that can be dismantled by anyone who knows the details of the Yugoslav fratricide, in which all sides took part and some of which have been assisted heavily from abroad.
The minimal effort at the U.N. to react to the virus that keeps recurring, this time in an appointed U.N. representative, is to remove him and replace him with someone who is not sick. I trust that the General Secretary, who comes from Ghana, does not share such a racist view and will not tolerate it by silence or failure to act.
Respectfully,
Raymond K. Kent (Emeritus)
History Department,
University of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720
Cartoon by Ranko Guzina