Two miserable questions

Last September in this column I expressed my anger " to see how poorly protected our colleagues were" in Iraq. "While dozens of heavily armed soldiers are killed every week, our colleagues seemed strangely fragile amid such chaos." My anger only grew when I read the recently published Ahtisaari report.

When I saw written down in black and white that the security system in Baghdad was totally inadequate, including the management of this system, and that information was even available on the possibility of such an attack, I was really furious.

Beyond the question of who the culprits are, which hopefully the inquiry requested by the Secretary-General will answer, two other questions kept coming up.

The first is why did we have to wait for such a massacre to realise that the UN security system does not function properly? Even though, as mentioned in the report, adequate security measures would not have prevented the attack from taking place, it would have minimized the vulnerability of UN staff and reduced the number of casualties.

My second question is what is the point of all these institutions and departments which keep on looking for dysfunctions in the UN system except to count whether there are the right number of sheets in the reams of photocopy paper? It might be time to do some cleaning up there too.

I am afraid to say that we all know the answers to these two miserable questions. They can be summed up in three well- known words: bureaucracy, incompetence and negligence.

One last word: thank you to our Secretary-General for having circulated the Ahtisaari Report, which in other times would have been shelved and consigned to the history books.

Editor-in-Chief, Jean Michel Jakobowicz