Friday, March 12, 2004

Deadly black box turns up at the UN

The UN has launched an inquiry into how a flight data recorder thought to contain vital evidence on the plane crash that sparked the Rwandan genocide was filed away and left untouched for more than 10 years.

The UNN secretary general, Kofi Annan, announced the move in response to claims in a French newspaper that the UN had obstructed the investigation into the 1994 downing of the plane over Rwanda by not opening the "black box".

The crash - in which the then-president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprian Ntayamirawere were killed - set off a chain of violent ethnic clashes in Rwanda, culminating in the slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis by Hutu soldiers and militias.

The recorder finally "turned up" again yesterday, according to a UN statement, in a locked filing cabinet in the organisation's air safety unit in New York.

Check out how this all happened here.

If the UN had been sent a black box from Rwanda at the time of this disaster, and even if that black box were in "pristine condition" - which they claim is why they didn't check it out, believing it couldn't have come from the crash - considering the fact that they did not receive any other black box that might have come from the downed plane, wouldn't it be at the very least expedient to see what was contained in the "pristine" box?

This smells fishier than Pier 37 on San Francisco Bay.

An independent report on the UN role in the genocide, commissioned by Mr Annan, concluded in 1999 that the organisation and its member states lacked the political will and resources to prevent or stop the genocide.

The US, in particular, blunted any efforts to get the security council more deeply involved in the Rwanda crisis in 1994. Mr Annan and then-US president Bill Clinton both apologised to Rwandans in the late 1990s for the failure of will that allowed the genocide to continue unchecked.


Ooops. Sorry.

That should be enough.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

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