Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2000, pages 22, 113

United Nations Report

As UNMOVIC Replaces UNSCOM, Iraq Sanctions Could Be Lifted Within a Year

By Ian Williams

Diplomacy often looks like trench warfare, Great War-style, with lots of effort, lots of huffing and puffing, and then suddenly something happens. The Big Push falls apart, or suddenly there is a quiet readjustment of lines.

There has been a lot of that at the U.N. lately. On Dec. 17, eight months of hard negotiations culminated in a vote in the Security Council on what to do about Iraqi weapons programs and sanctions. The British, the main architects of the resolution, counted themselves happy that three permanent members, China, France and Russia, and one other, Malaysia, only abstained in the 11-0 vote. The text was parsed in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Seattle, London, Washington and New York. It was qualified and modified by heads of state, foreign ministers, ambassadors and civil servants. Like a horse designed by a committee, the resolution came out with more humps than a Bactrian camel.

And the one capital that was not consulted directly is the one at which it was aimed—Baghdad. Since the weapons inspectors were driven out of Iraq at the end of 1998, Iraq has been flouting Security Council decisions with relative impunity. But unlike Israel, the other Middle Eastern state that flouts such decisions, Iraq, or at least its citizens, have had to pay a price because of the sanctions.

However the new resolution does offer "light at the end of the tunnel"—an end to sanctions—if Saddam Hussain is clever enough or cares about his people enough to seize the opportunity. Unfortunately the immediate reaction from Baghdad was that it would refuse to go beyond the previous $5.6 billion limit of sales under the oil-for-food deal even though the new resolution removes the ceiling. Indeed, it is because the new resolution lifted the ceiling that Iraq refused to accept it.

The Iraqis, or rather their somewhat more sophisticated friends, the Chinese, Russians and French, have actually achieved several breakthroughs. Richard Butler, the much reviled (by Iraq and friends) head of UNSCOM, the old inspection commission, has gone and his team is being replaced by a new U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, UNMOVIC.

The Iraqis do have some reason for being cautious.

Economic sanctions will be progressively suspended in return for cooperation with the new UNMOVIC and could well be over within a year. This is a big climbdown from previous American positions which made lifting sanctions dependent on whether Saddam Hussain was still in power. American diplomats have pledged to the Russians and others that the words in the resolution are not code-quibbles but were meant sincerely. Washington is more worried about a rearming Iraq than it is about the maintenance of sanctions, which are an increasing political and humanitarian embarrassment.

However, the Iraqis do have some reason for being cautious. The U.S. administration, and consequently the media, have not fully ventilated the nature of the U.S. U-turnlet. It hardly plays in an election year where every candidate is vying to prove himself and herself to be the only true friend of Israel, and hence enemy of Iraq.

That silence reinforces Iraqi suspicions about the sincerity of the White House, if that is not oxymoronic.

To make Iraqis even more suspicious, the British have the ending of sanctions as a major policy target, but they cannot shout that too widely, because their leverage with Washington depends on a public image of equal hawkishness. That was what enabled London to broker the compromise on Libya.

Meanwhile the Russians, French and Chinese all were warned by Iraq that if they supported the resolution, they would get none of the large oil development contracts being waved in front of them. Under equally heavy pressure from Washington and London to support it, all abstained rather than voting for or vetoing the resolution, even though the French in particular had been trying to pull the Russians toward signing. The three wanted sanctions lifted as soon as Iraq had agreed to admit the inspectors, but the majority of members, harking back to erratic Iraqi behavior, including outright lies to the inspectors, in the past, were not prepared to take such a leap of faith.

And of course there was the hinted link between Russian cooperation in getting the Iraq resolution through, and the decibel level of Washington's concern about what was happening in Chechnya. However sordid or sublime the motives of the abstainers, their lack of support could make it even more difficult to win Baghdad's cooperation.

Once again, if Iraq declines to accept the latest U.S.-U.K. face-saving effort to back out of the sanctions, the ordinary Iraqis will bear the brunt of their unelected leader's fine principles of national sovereignty, which, one should remember, he has never overscrupulously applied to his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait.

Resistance to a Big Push

The other diplomatic big push did not get so far. On taking office, Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy committed himself to stopping the "anti-Israeli" resolutions at the U.N., for which the ministry put particular blame on Palestine's U.N. envoy, Nasser El-Kidwa. Also, backed by the American Jewish Committee and strongly supported by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, Levy was to gain Israel a place in the "West European and other" Group at the U.N., since it could not join the Asian group.

On the resolutions, El Kidwa, a modestly undemonstrative diplomat, had reason to be prancing in the ring holding his gloved hands up high. In the first weeks of December, Palestine won all the resolutions by a knockout. Out of the 188 members of the world body, Israel could count only on the U.S. vote most times, and then either Micronesia or the Marshall Islands, both totally dependent on U.S. aid, and an abstention from Uzbekistan, which would probably like to be similarly dependent on U.S. aid.

On the issue of Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem, however, even the U.S. deserted Israel, abstaining rather than casting a supportive vote to Israel's lonely stand. Of course this strikes at the heart of Israel's diplomatic posture, that the repetition of points of international law somehow derogates from the peace process, or is "not in the spirit of Oslo."

Of course, actual Israeli breaches of international law with expanding settlements pose no threat to the peace process at all. But the last thing the Israelis want to be reminded of during the final status negotiations is that in international law they are thieves in the position of trying to retain most of their loot in return for letting their victims have a quick dip in the swag bag.

As El Kidwa summed it up, "It is amazing that Israel is prepared to tell the whole of the international community that they are wrong and Israel is right." As for admission of Israel to the West European and Other Group of states at the U.N., the issue was not resolved.

The ads from the American Jewish Committee point out that because it is not in a regional group, Israel cannot be elected to the Security Council. Fingers were pointed at the Spanish, Irish and Portuguese, and various motives imputed to each of them for their refusal. Some of their diplomats privately suggest that Israel has a very bad record of disrespect for U.N. decisions, and so neither deserves special favors from the Europeans, nor is it likely to win a contested election to the Council.

Another Resolution Resister

But then it has to be said that Morocco has built up quite a reputation as a recidivist resolution resister over Western Sahara. A mere nine years behind schedule, the U.N. mission, MINURSO, completed its registration of voters. Almost 80,000 Moroccan tribespeople rushed to file appeals against their exclusion, which is more people than lived in the territory when Spain left it to its fate. Polisario, and most Security Council members, could see that this was yet another attempt to procrastinate the independence referendum into the far future.

And yet Morocco has friends on the Council, and others felt the new king should be cut some slack until he shows which way he is going. The Dec. 14 resolution which extended Minurso's mandate until February was amended to remove any overt criticisms of Morocco.

It also mentioned the secretary-general's estimate of a two-year delay for the vote, from 2000 to 2002. That was precisely what the hard-line Moroccan Interior Minister Driss Basir was predicting on his tour of Western Sahara just before he was sacked by King Muhammad VI. It would appear that Western Sahara was not the cause of Basir's dismissal.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and the author of The U.N. for Beginners, available through the AET Book Club.