Kofi's Choice
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
Kofi's Choice The U.N. secretary general gets entangled in l'Affaire Sommaruga. BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER KOFI ANNAN has a problem. In his eagerness to nail Israel for the "Jenin massacre," the U.N....
...Sommaruga confronted her in a private meeting shortly thereafter...
...I checked the statement that Baker made to the Jerusalem Post...
...Now that it has come back to haunt Sommaruga and Annan, they Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Healy was so astonished by this statement that she asked the ICRC to tell her when Sri Lanka had asked to use the swastika...
...Baker, he says, "was present during this conversation...
...secretary general named an investigating committee of three, including one Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC...
...in essence, if Israel's humanitarian organization, Magen David Adom, was allowed to use the red shield of David as its symbol, what was to stop someone from using the swastika...
...Nice touch...
...The very idea of comparing the Star of David to the swastika is grotesque...
...Palestinian Jews had been using the red Star of David for years even before the state of Israel came into existence...
...He does a beautiful East River straddle, offering his own compromise ver-sion—"a conversation Mr...
...His witness is one Alan Baker, an Israeli diplomat...
...But surely they can do a better job...
...Baker said it was a discussion of pre-Nazi Indian religious symbols...
...Baker, for example, says: "When we were talking about adding additional emblems in the Red Cross movement, Sommaruga remembered . . . the old historic Indian symbol of the swastika...
...Sadly, his statement was made without context...
...I first cited this incident in a column two years ago ("Red Cross Snub," Washington Post, March 24, 2000...
...This was unfortunate for Annan, despite the fact that the committee was disbanded within days (a combination of Israel's insistence on conditions of fairness and emerging evidence that the entire massacre story was a fiction...
...Clever...
...In any case, you don't just front up to the ICRC window and ask for admission of your symbol...
...You have to show that the symbol has already been in humanitarian use...
...I verified this with Bernadine Healy, who was...
...The result is a train wreck...
...This is a howler...
...So which is it, gentlemen...
...It is precisely because it is telling that assorted public relations artists for him and for Annan are now running around trying to paper things over...
...have gone into high damage control...
...They would do better to meet in committee and coordinate their stories before spinning tales about swastikas —in context, of course...
...Sommaru-ga had with Bernadine Healy . . . in 1999, when he asked her rhetorically whether she would be ready to accept a red swastika, which had been requested by an Asian country...
...Only after I expressed my astonishment did he invoke an example of a country that might wish to use such a symbol (Sri Lanka...
...First, Baker was never at the meeting...
...On the same page of the Washington Post that carries Mortimer's letter, there appears a letter from Sommaruga claiming that what he said to Dr...
...Third, the "context" alleged by Mortimer, Baker, and a previous defense of Sommaruga by Urs Boegli, ICRC head of media services (letter to the Washington Post, April 2, 2000), is pure invention...
...Asian...
...Second, it is obvious that Baker was not at the meeting because his account contradicts the account given by the very person he is trying to defend—Cornelio Sommaruga...
...Mortimer...
...As Dr...
...Edward Mortimer, Annan's director of communications, claims (Washington Post, April 29) that this statement was taken out of context...
...This contradiction caused a problem for Annan's flack, Mr...
...When we were talking about adding additional emblems in the Red Cross movement, Sommaruga remembered that the old historic Indian symbol of the swastika, before it was used by the Nazis, was proposed as a humanitarian red cross symbol...
...In choosing Sommaruga, out of an entire universe of people who could have brought probity and impartiality to the investigation, Annan chose a man with a past...
...Healy was: "Would you be ready to accept the swastika as requested by Sri Lanka...
...Sommaruga's statement was...
...Nonsense...
...Som-maruga says he was talking about Sri Lanka, a country that did not even come into existence until Nazism had been dead for three years, and did not change its name from Ceylon to Sri Lanka until 1972...
...In fact, the only country to use the swastika in its Red Cross emblem was Nazi Germany...
...The defendants cannot seem to get their stories straight...
...The fact that Sommaruga blurted this out in a non-public setting is telling...
...Bernadine Healy, then head of the American Red Cross, had made a passionate speech questioning the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for having denied entry to Israel for 50 years...
...Healy wrote the Washington Post (April 5, 2000), "Mr...
...Her notes confirm her recollection, as does the colleague who was in the room with her during the meeting...
...It reads: "I know the context because I was there...
...She was told vaguely that perhaps it had occurred sometime in the 1950s, but no documentation was produced...
...The incident occurred in November 1999 in Geneva...
...So what does he do when Sommaruga says postwar Sri Lanka and Baker says prewar India...
...Its (internal) humanitarian emblem was the black eagle with the swastika over its heart, and its talons clutching the Red Cross below...
...Eyes bulging and furious, Sommaruga said to her, "If we're going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika...
...Mortimer then quotes the Jerusalem Post quoting Baker, calling any casting of aspersions on Som-maruga "a vile manipulation of something said in a different context...
...Did Sri Lankan ambulances sport the swastika...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 34
