Kofi's Hour: The absurd Nobel Peace Prize.(Brief Article)

The Nobel Peace Prize is a little like the good-conduct prizes they used to award at my junior school: They went mainly to children who weren't much good at anything else, and weren't ruthless or imaginative enough to cause the teachers any trouble. The recipients, a bunch of teacher's pets and informers, were a sorry lot on the whole.

In the circumstances, therefore, it comes as no surprise that the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, should have been awarded this year's prize by the body in whose gift it lies, the Norwegian parliament, which is possibly the most politically correct legislative body in the world. The Norwegians haven't had a real leader since Quisling (a man also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work in Siberia in the 1920s).

Alas, the world hardly presents a spectacle of stability at the moment, to put it mildly, and some people might say that to award Mr. Annan the Peace Prize at such a moment is a little like the award of the Victoria Cross to Neville Chamberlain would have been on his return from Munich. Annan has been secretary general during a time of every kind of massacre, from the village variety to full-scale genocide-indeed, the only genuine such genocide since the end of the Second World War, namely that in Rwanda. It is a fair bet that the news of the award has not gone down well in Kigali, the capital of that unfortunate country, where between 500,000 and 800,000 people were massacred without so much as an interruption of the diplomatic round in New York. It is true that Annan has apologized for the United Nations' paralysis during the catastrophe, but in some cases it isn't really the thought that counts: It's the deed.

In a sense, though, it is pointless to hold poor Mr. Annan responsible for disaster in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and so forth. His job, as he puts it, is from hell. No one could do it and satisfy everyone. But the need, or even the desire, to satisfy everyone is what is so profoundly corrupting about the job. It is a job from hell only for a certain kind of person: a person, that is, with a degree of moral integrity, intellectual honesty, and self-respect. For the time-serving apparatchik, for the inveterate trimmer, for the sailor before the wind, and above all for the social climber with a lust for an eternal pension in Swiss francs, no billet in the world could be closer to paradise. Indeed, there could be no finer vantage point from which to be extremely important without actually doing anything. And since a man can hardly achieve a position such as that of secretary general without actively seeking it out, without having worked for the organization for many years, and without an acute awareness of the not altogether inspiring qualities necessary for advancement within its bureaucracy, the nature of his ambition must make him suspect in the eyes of all honest men.

Everyone has heard of the Homo sovieticus, the deformed human creature called forth by generations of life under Soviet rule; but few know of the existence of the Homo U.N.ensis.

U.N. man is every bit as deformed, mentally, as ...