UN + EU = FUBAR

Kofi Annan's in Indonesia spouting off about the soon to be – he hopes – "new and improved" rebranded UN:

In all areas of its work, from human rights, to tackling poverty, hunger and conflict, the United Nations was not delivering, he said.

"The multilateral system is not delivering or its member states the results that it should," Annan told foreign ministers and officials from 100 African and Asian countries gathered in Jakarta.

The secretary general, who released last month a 63-page report proposing the most wide-ranging shake-up of the U.N. since its creation in 1945, is in the Indonesian capital for an Asia-Africa summit on Friday and Saturday.

"We seem to have lost consensus on basic principles about what constitutes a threat to peace and security, about when the use of force is legitimate and about who should authorize it," Annan said.

The UN isn't delivering? I wonder if anyone in the Sudan has noticed?

Apparently the UN isn't about to deliver in the Sudan because the Europeans are wimping out. Here's Lateline's Tony Jones to explain:

The European Union has withdrawn a resolution condemning Sudan at the UN Human Rights Commission. The EU had planned to attack the Sudanese government over the crisis in Darfur, but has now agreed to express deep concern for the ongoing human rights violations in the western Sudanese region. The diplomatic victory for Sudan's government comes amidst new charges the cease-fire in Darfur is a sham. The strongest allegations come from a former US marine who spent six months in Darfur as a cease-fire observer.

To paint a picture of the situation in Darfur, Toney Jones interviews former cease-fire monitor Brian Steidle:

TONY JONES: Can we start by getting you to tell us what your role was in Darfur, what you did during your six months there?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Well, I was there as a US representative to the African Union - an African Union monitor, monitoring the cease-fire in Darfur. I was there for six months. We were there, like I said, to monitor the cease-fire, yet we weren't able to stop any of the fighting. We were there to observe what was happening and then to make our reports and take our pictures.

TONY JONES: Can you describe for us some of the truly dreadful things that you saw there?

BRIAN STEIDLE: When we were there in Darfur, we would see things - villages up to 20,000 had been burnt down to the ground. We would see scores of women and children that had been killed, evidence of torture - people had their ears cut off, their eyes plucked out, men who had been castrated and left to bleed on the fields when they ran from the villages. That was an everyday occurrence.

TONY JONES: You also have written about walking through a field of bones. Could you tell us about that?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Yes, outside the village of Adwah there was a bone field. It was probably about 50m by 50m and you couldn't walk around without stepping on human bones. We don't really know how many people were killed there, but they apparently had been taken from one of the village by the Janjaweed and executed and left there to rot.

TONY JONES: In all these cases, are you talking about atrocities committed by the Janjaweed militia or the government itself?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Absolutely. That's what we saw the majority of the time and there were a few attacks that occurred by the rebels, but probably say 95 per cent of the attacks, maybe even more – 99 per cent - were from the government of Sudan. It was the government of Sudan working in conjunction with the Arab militias using their helicopter gun ships and their Antonovs to bomb and terrorise the people.

TONY JONES: So would you say the key role of a cease-fire monitor is effectively to stop the Sudanese government slaughtering its own people?

BRIAN STEIDLE: No, no, that's not their mission at all. They don't have a mandate to do that, nor is that their mission. They're there to simply report on the cease-fire.

TONY JONES: Let's get some more detail, if we can. Last December, you witnessed a joint government-militia attack on the village of Labado Can you tell us what happened there?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Yes. During that attack, we arrived when the helicopter gunships were still flying over and they were firing on the village. The village was burning. We arrived there and the government of Sudan had just recently attacked with around 3,000 troops and about 1,500 Janjaweed Arab militias that were with them.

TONY JONES: You're saying these helicopter gunships were actually strafing the village. What sort of damage was done? How many people were killed?

BRIAN STEIDLE: The village was a village of 20,000 people, and the entire village was on fire. Everything was burning. It took them more than a week to burn the entire village all the way down to the ground, but they did successfully do that.

TONY JONES: So the operation actually began with helicopter gunships coming in, strafing the village, and then they brought in the Janjaweed militia, is that right?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Yes, that's correct.

TONY JONES: Was this typical in your experience of the type of attack that you witnessed, the government working alongside the militia?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Yes, that's exactly what happened the majority of the times. The helicopter gunships would come in, strafe the village, the Antonovs would bomb and then the government and Janjaweed Arab militias would arrive and attack the village, killing scores of people and begin the burning process.

TONY JONES: Did you see the aftermath of that attack on the village of Labado?

BRIAN STEIDLE: Yes, it took us about three or four days to convince the government of Sudan to allow us to enter the village. But, yes, we saw it first-hand from the helicopters, as I mentioned before, and when we got on the ground - you know, the burned villages, the looting that was being performed right in front of us by the Arab militias and the government of Sudan.

TONY JONES: What exactly did you see the Janjaweed militia doing in that village?

BRIAN STEIDLE: They were looting and burning the village directly in front of us. They were taking stuff out of the huts and then setting the huts on fire.

Read the rest of the interview. There's no way the UN is going to intervene, there's no money to be made.

Here's Brian Steidle's conclusion to an earlier article he wrote for The Independent:

The women and children are the ones who take the brunt in a conflict like this. Hopefully we'll be able to visit some of the camps for displaced people in Chad and Kenya. I can never go back to Sudan.

Steidle went to Sudan and can't bear to go back. The UN refuses to go there in the first place. Useless. Fucking useless.