Mazowiecki, Go Home

By resigning from the post of Special Human Rights Rapporteur in the former Yugoslavia, Tadeusz Mazowiecki gave up one of the most unpleasant jobs there is. In any case, one of the most excruciating jobs for a man of reputation and authority.

When human rights are in question, the United Nations (nor the "world power-wielders" within it) is not even theoretically as strong as when it reacts to breaches of international peace.

Fifty years ago, this organization was set up by world governments with the aim of protecting their states, themselves and only then their citizens. This was not so obvious before 1989, because each Security Council member brought its small clients to reason or protected them with its "veto". When the super powers agree, the Security Council reaches decisions of even the sharpest measures against states considered to be breaching peace. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia saw this for itself when sanctions were introduced against it, although its leaders, diplomats and TV viewers thought they had two reliable friends in the Council: Russia and China.

In order to shed objective light on the situation and have the full cooperation of the suspect government (which no one considers guilty until proven), UN bodies name an independent rapporteur or a group of them to draw up a report with the help of their associates and on the basis of information provided them by the governmental and other reliable sources. The report makes accountable only the rapporteur, who acts in his own capacity, not as a representative of his country. The Human Rights Commission, the Economic and Social Councils and the General Assembly are the ones who decide what they will do with it, i.e. whether they'll reach a decision. Nothing terrible can happen to the state, except that it may realize that the world does not believe its government is democratic, freedom-oriented and humane.

Rapporteurs have so far been known to become exhausted or ask to be replaced, but not one of them has turned in a resignation so striking and substantiated as Mazowiecki has.

He resigned because he could not fit in the UN's and other international organizations' parallel treatment of the states and para-states of the former Yugoslavia and their leaders. On the one hand, their crimes and acts of aggression are researched, while on the other, they are treated as reasonable, decent and human statesmen and negotiators. I don't believe Mazowiecki yielded to insults and harassment ("international swindler", etc.). He'd probably expected it knowing what his predecessors had been through, but he faced not one but at least three governments which do not like his work. When he wrote of the Serbian side's violations, his sad face was shown on Croatian TV as soon as he noted the brutal actions of the Croatian army in Western Slavonija, he suddenly appeared on RTV of Serbia.

There are people who believe a Polish Catholic and an intellectual at that should not have been named Rapporteur for the former Yugoslavia. It is true that our patriots think of the Vatican as their greatest enemy (until they negotiate with it themselves), that they completely forgot that Poles are Slavs and that they remembered the old truth that all intellectuals are dishonest. But no rapporteur would be welcome, be he Greek, or Russian or Chinese; be he a capitalist, a farmer or a proletarian. Over the years, people here have learned that there are no honest individuals, that no man may rise above his class and national prepossession, that everyone's first and last names may calmly be replaced by ethnic affiliation or social origin.

A new rapporteur is to be named now. If he does not leave us all alone, or if he does not take us at our word, he won't be any good either. He may be one of those "tame" rapporteurs, as the senior UN official Hugo Gobi had once been. Gobi was not allowed to enter Poland either, or meet with a member of the military government. He informed the UN of the "success" of his mission by moving words: "I had no possibility to visit Poland - so I could not establish whether the allegations of human rights violations are true". In dubio pro reo.