October 1992, Page 41, 83

United Nations Report

History on Fast Forward

By Ian Williams

Like a juggler trying to keep up too many balls in the air, the United Nations is having difficulty coping. Clearly the U.S. State Department policy wonk who labeled the current era the "End of History" wasn't watching Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans or Central Asia, in all of which history seems to be alternately on fast forward or fast rewind. Bosnia, Cyprus, Iraq, Somalia, and the Western Sahara have all been on the U.N. Security Council's agenda this summer, when diplomats usually look forward to rest and recreation.

Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali started the season in fine form by challenging the Western assumption that the U.N. exists only as an instrument for exercising the power of the Cold War's victors. Beleaguered in the British press, the U.N.'s first Egyptian secretary-general suggested that Whitehall thought of him as a "Wog," the derisory colonial term for a "Worthy Oriental Gentleman." What prompted his complaint was his perception that the British, currently holding the European Community presidency, were taking the U.N. for granted in their search for a solution to the new Balkan war brewing in Bosnia.

Although his intemperate description of events around Sarajevo as a "rich man's war" sounded callous, in the context of international efforts to break the Serbian siege of the Bosnian capital, it had the salutary effect, after months of neglect, of focusing attention on Somalia, where thousands more were dying of starvation while gunmen prevented the landing of food and medicine.

At the end of August the Security Council agreed to send 3,500 troops to Somalia to safeguard relief supplies. Hitherto, Western parsimony had restricted security to 50 unarmed guards.

The conflict over Bosnia will, of course, take more time and effort to sort out. Western governments stand back appalled at the military and domestic political consequences of becoming embroiled. Hence their enthusiasm to load the problem on to the United Nations, where they will not be held responsible for failure.

It is one of history's ironies that there is great enthusiasm in Israel for involvement in the U.N. effort to settle the Bosnian problem because of the revelations about the Serbian internment camps. The Lebanese and Palestinian residents of the prisons and camps in south Lebanon and the Negev would doubtless welcome a similar burst of humanitarian concern.

The problem of U.N. involvement is that all too often it seeks to legitimize and freeze the situation from the time of intervention. So the arms embargo, that theoretically applies to all the parties, in practice restricts only the embattled Bosnians from obtaining the arms and ammunition they need to defend themselves from Serbian militias abundantly supplied by the neighboring republics of Serbia and Montenegro.

U.N. involvement all too often seeks to freeze the situation from the time of intervention.

In Cyprus, where Greek-Turkish cease-fire lines have been frozen for 20 years, there is growing exasperation both in the U.N. and the West at the expense of maintaining the buffer zone. Boutros-Ghali has produced a compromise solution which involves the Turks giving up a significant proportion of their territory, but which still leaves them holding proportionally more than their population alone would merit. Diplomats at the U.N., who would like to see the contending parties locked up together until they agree on a solution, are united in blaming the intransigence of Turkish Cypriot Leader Rauf Denktash. The Security Council has approved a report which hints that unless he bends by October, they will consider "alternative courses of action" for resolving the problem.

Similar, repeated hints of ultimata have done little to move the deadlocked parties in the Western Sahara. Put succinctly, the main question there is "who votes?" The original proposal was that only those enumerated in the Spanish Census of 1974 could vote. They would probably vote for independence. Under Moroccan pressure, at the end of 1991, however, former U.N. Secretary-General Perez De Cuellar agreed that new categories of people whose ancestors lived in the territory, but who themselves were not there in 1974, also could vote. Polisario independence movement leaders were not happy.

Additionally, Polisario objects to Morocco's plans to include the territory in its own forthcoming elections. Polisario has also suffered defections by some of its own leaders, who seem to have decided that, regardless of the merits of their case, they are unlikely to achieve independence.

The Security Council considered a letter approving the secretary-general's report, but met some resistance to a compromise formula asking the parties not to indulge in "provocative behavior." That is a diplomatic euphemism for the Moroccan election plan, and Polisario's friends wanted that spelled out explicitly. Morocco, however, is currently a member of the Security Council, and its representatives made it plain that it would not accept being singled out.

Yet Another Cease-Fire Line

On the Iraq/Kuwait border, yet another cease-fire line is due for realignment. The Security Council ordered the boundary drawn by its commission to be marked on the ground, and the postwar demilitarized zone of one kilometer on each side of the boundary to be realigned. It also told the commission to go ahead with demarcating the maritime boundary. This decision was made the same day that President George Bush announced the air exclusion zone over southern Iraq.

The resolution pointed out that this was not a new boundary, but simply the first time that an accurate line had been drawn in the sand. This is unlikely to impress the Iraqis, since even the Iraqi opposition has complained that this line in the sand gives more oil and naval facilities to Kuwait than shown in any previous map. One cannot help feeling that in addition to drawing lines on the desert, this resolution provides writing on the wall-announcing the casus belli of some future Gulf war.

The exclusion zone over southern Iraq announced by President Bush has little or nothing to do with the United Nations. If the project had been brought before the Security Council, there is some doubt whether it would have been approved. The coalition partners are justifying the zone by the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, a somewhat dubious concept in terms of international law. One of the precedents cited in international law texts is Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia to "protect" the Sudeten Germans, for example.

Humanitarian grounds for the "no fly" zone became clear on August 11, when the Western powers invited U.N. representative Max Vanderstoel to report to the Security Council on the persecution of the Shi'i in Iraq. His report was convincing, as it had been many months earlier when he first delivered it. But the delay, suspicion of electoral opportunism and, above all, consciousness of the fact that the doctrine of humanitarian intervention could be used to justify action against many developing countries, meant there was insufficient support to pass a resolution. Hence the decision by the three to go it alone.

It would doubtless have greatly helped their case if they had been prepared to show the same firmness in all current cases of human rights violations, as in Bosnia, Somalia, south Lebanon, and the Israeli-occupied territories. If some human rights violations are treated as more reprehensible than others, it is likely to breed cynicism about and resistance to the new world order.

Ian Williams is a British journalist based at the United Nations.

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