An example of why the UN so often fails, dismally, to live up to the promise of its founding ideals. What exactly is my problem with the UN? Its tendency not toward cultural relativism but moral equivalency and the blind eye to EVIL that such a decayed sensibility encourages. Case in point:

NYTimes article from today 10/17/04:

Accused of Killings, He Still Gets Back Pay
By JANE PERLEZ

United Nations employee charged by a war crimes investigator with killing some of his colleagues during the Rwanda genocide in 1994 has been awarded 13 months' back pay by a United Nations panel on the ground that he was unfairly dismissed.

The award, by the United Nations Administrative Tribunal, was made on Sept. 30 after another United Nations board recommended that the employee, Callixte Mbarushimana, be paid for six months. Dissatisfied with the first judgment, Mr. Mbarushimana appealed to the tribunal for higher compensation, and won.

The decision has incensed other United Nations officials who worked in Rwanda during and after the genocide and has embarrassed senior officials at headquarters.

Mr. Mbarushimana, who now lives in France, was accused in an indictment of directing or taking part in the killing of 32 people, including United Nations colleagues, during the orgy of killing in Rwanda 10 years ago.

He was never prosecuted, even though the indictment included eye-witness accounts. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda dropped the indictment, apparently on the ground that Mr. Mbarushimana was not one of the leaders of the genocide. He has consistently denied any involvement in the genocide.

Mr. Mbarushimana continued to hold two jobs with the United Nations after the Rwanda killings but was finally dismissed in 2001. Neither of the awards has been paid to him, a United Nations spokesman said.

The investigator, Tony Greig, who collected the evidence against Mr. Mbarushimana, said in an interview that he wanted to shame the United Nations into reopening the case. "The court must revisit the decision not to file the indictment," said Mr. Greig, a criminal defense lawyer now based in New Zealand.

He said he planned to make a formal submission to the war crimes tribunal requesting a reopening of the case.

"The issue of the murder of U.N. colleagues is of such gravity that it is difficult to accept that an individual against whom such allegations have been made would be indirectly exonerated through an administrative procedure," a draft of Mr. Greig's submission says.

[And as for the murder of other Rwandan citizens, Mr. Greig?]

In his submission, Mr. Greig says there was "direct evidence" that Mr. Mbarushimana led and ordered the killings of "about 10 adults, women and children" of the Umutoniwase family. The head of the family, Augustin Ntashamaje, was a driver with the United Nations World Food Program.

The submission also says there was "similarly strong evidence" that Mr. Mbarushimana directed the killing of the Rugema family. One of the sons was a driver for the United Nations, Mr. Greig said.

There was also evidence presented that Mr. Mbarushimana manned road blocks at which people were killed.

About 800,000Rwandans, mostly of the Tutsi minority, were wiped out in killings orchestrated by the Hutu-led government from April to June 1994.

William Orme, a spokesman for the United Nations Development Program, the division for which Mr. Mbarushimana worked, said options were being explored to "most effectively support efforts to prosecute him."

"There is a consensus that obviously this case was mishandled,'' Mr. Orme said. "Everybody's focus is to bring this case to justice."

But the thicket of rules and divisions of responsibilities at the United Nations are making it difficult to find a way to reopen the case, United Nations officials said.

According to an opinion of the International Court of Justice in 1954, for example, the United Nations secretariat does not have the right to appeal or turn down the ruling by the administrative tribunal that awarded Mr. Mbarushimana the back pay, said a United Nations spokesman, Stephane Dujarric.

The legal department at the United Nations was examining the possibility that Secretary General Kofi Annan or the United Nations Development Program might sponsor a review of the case at the war crimes tribunal, Mr. Dujarric said.

Another option could be to use a resolution adopted by the Security Council last year after the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad that said those who organized attacks against United Nations officials could be charged with war crimes, another United Nations spokesman said.

Reached in France by telephone yesterday, Mr. Mbarushimana said he was pleased the administrative tribunal "recognized that the U.N. committed a grave error in suspending me in this illegal way."

But, he said, the tribunal should be "punished" because it had had not awarded him enough. "I have no recourse to any appeal," he said. He was angered, he said, that United Nations spokesmen had said "things in public to the press which reflected badly on my reputation and can't be repaired." Now a refugee in France, he was looking for work, he said.