SCOTLAND

SCOTLAND
The Scotsman, Edinburgh, April 6: The violence in Iraq has been triggered by the imminence of the June deadline for returning sovereignty to the Iraqi people. What we are seeing is a sudden jockeying for position among the rival Shia groups. One group in particular is involved - the radical Jamaat al-Sadr al-Thani, known as the "Sadr group" after its leader, Muqtada Sadr, the son of a Shia cleric killed by the old Baathist regime. The leaders of the Sadr group remained inside Iraq during the Saddam era. They are trying to build support by opposing other Shia groups whose leaderships were in exile in Iran, chiefly Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior and popular Shia cleric in Iraq.
Free elections
If there is a lesson to be drawn from the current unrest, it is not to delay free elections. That would only give extremist factions such as the Sadr group the opportunity to create more mayhem in the hope of using the street to gain what they might not be able to through the ballot box.
However risky elections might be, letting the Iraqi people decide the relative merits of their own political parties is a surer way of isolating the radicals than relying overlong on coalition troops. A swift election is likely to give a mandate to al-Sistani and show the relative weakness of the Sadr group.
NEW ZEALAND
The Press, Christchurch, April 8: Yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of the worst episode of racially motivated killing since World War 2, the United Nations, which ignored the massacre when it occurred, sponsored a function in Geneva to discuss how to respond to such events in future. At that event, the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, proposed a plan of action to prevent them. Two weeks ago Annan, who was head of the UN peacekeeping department and one of the bureaucrats who failed to respond to increasingly frantic calls for help at the time, accepted institutional and personal blame for the slaughter.
Similar hand-wringing and breast-beating by others in positions of responsibility at the time have been recorded in countless newspaper articles. But although all agree that something must be done to make sure anything similar does not happen again a prospect Annan describes as "frighteningly real" the difficulties that prevented prompt, effective action then continue now.
The reluctance to intervene had various causes. America had just withdrawn in disarray from Somalia after its U.N.-sanctioned aid mission went terribly wrong. The Europeans either were compromised by previous commitments to the Hutus, such as the French, or else not interested. The Belgians, who had once ruled the country, did send a small force, but promptly withdrew it when a few of them were killed. All were disinclined to interfere in what could be described as the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.
Bureaucratic indecision
But the greatest failure was with the United Nations, whose bureaucrats were paralysed by indecision. It was an illustration of the hard fact that unless one or more of the large nations is prepared to act, usually the United States, with or without allies, the tendency is that nothing will be done. ... But the capacity of the U.N. to frame a doctrine that would enable outsiders to act decisively and swiftly in such crises.