Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2002, page 36

United Nations Report

 

Latest U.S. Veto on Behalf of Israel Gives The Lie to Claim of Even-Handedness

By Ian Williams

As the hero of Sabra and Shatila rampages through the occupied territories to the cheers of most of Congress and the Bush administration, one could almost wish that the Taliban had put up a more prolonged resistance. Their sudden collapse has undermined the rational efforts by Secretary of State Colin Powell to persuade the rest of the world that the U.S. could be even-handed in struggles involving Arabs or Muslims.

That was demonstrated in the early hours of Dec. 15, with yet another American veto of a Security Council Resolution on the Middle East. The U.S. had kept the issue off the agenda for as long as it could, despite the increasing restiveness of the rest of the world. In the end the resolution, which condemned terrorism and called upon both sides to accept their responsibilities under existing agreements, was vetoed by the U.S. delegation because its purpose allegedly was “to isolate politically” one of the parties. Since the resolution condemned “all acts of extrajudiciary executions, excessive use of force and wide destruction of property” and looked to the establishment of a monitoring mechanism to help the parties, Washington’s envoy did have a point. Only the Israeli government, after all, is doing those things.

Allied with President George W. Bush’s statement to pro-Israel American Jewish leaders earlier in the week, one can only assume that the U.S. has decided that any chance of a united world front against terrorism is less important that pandering reactionary and bloodthirsty leaders in Israel and their cheerleaders in Washington. The Norwegians abstained because of a “lack of unanimity”—a novel diplomatic doctrine that evades comment on the substance. The British invoked problems with the language of the draft to excuse their secondary pandering the U.S. Israel lobby.

However, while one might get the impression from the U.S. press that the world condones Israeli brutality, it is heartening to know that most of the world’s nations are prepared to go on record as condemning Israel’s behavior. Of course, it is less heartening that they are not prepared to do much about it in the face of American intransigence. Nevertheless, it is at least some consolation to the Palestinians that most of the world condemns Ariel Sharon’s clumsy moves to a final solution of his obsessions about Yasser Arafat and the PLO.

In the last few weeks the world’s nations have indeed put their condemnation on record. Virtually all occasions, however, were ignored by most of the mainstream American media. Firstly, in Geneva on Dec. 5 the conference of 114 high contracting parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention, convened by Switzerland in the teeth of bitter opposition from the U.S. and Israel—which both, along with Australia, boycotted the event—decided unanimously that the Conventions did indeed apply to the occupied territories, that the Israelis were breaching them wholesale, and that it was the responsibility of the other contracting parties to stop them. In particular the statement declared Israeli settlements, and thus their extension, to be illegal, and called upon Israel to stop measures such as restrictions on movement and collective punishments.

The event will mark the culmination of a process begun in 1997, when the Palestinians began reasserting international law in the face of Israeli and U.S. attempts to ignore or distort it. Switzerland is the depository of the Convention, which is why it was faced with the task. Last year’s General Assembly, in a cautiously worded resolution shaped by European reluctance to confront the U.S., called upon the Swiss to consult with states about a conference. “It was not easy,” Valentin Zellweger, legal adviser to the Swiss mission to the U.N. in New York, told the Washington Report. “But I think we prefer to see ourselves as facilitators rather than conveners.”

Before the meeting the Swiss reported that the states they consulted “overwhelmingly” supported calling the session—and the draft declaration. Of the 189 parties, 86 replied, with 80 of them in favor of reconvening the meeting which had last sat in July 1999 but had then adjourned in the hopes of great results from the peace process.

While the Swiss obviously came under pressure from the U.S., however, this year the Europeans, shocked at developments in the territories, were much more forthcoming, “Things have changed, this year. They now accept that it can take place,” said Zellweger. “This is not a political document,” he emphasized. “We want it to be as neutral and technical as possible.”

That, of course, was not the way American Jewish organizations saw it.

One would have thought that at the height of the American coalition-building effort, a major international conference condemning Israel’s behavior toward Arabs would be big news. It seems to have been in everyone’s interest, however, to play it down. The Americans don’t want it to upset the coalition, and are torn between their previous statements on the illegality of the settlements and their current pandered-down version. The Europeans and others do not want to upset Washington and, of course, the Israelis have no great desire to put themselves in the international pillory yet again.

Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and now U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, maintained her strong stand in support of humanitarian law. ”It is important to emphasize that neither the Israeli policy of targeted assassination of Palestinian civilians, nor Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians, can be reconciled with provisions of international humanitarian law,” she told the conference, and called again for an international monitoring presence there.

 

The U.N. Version of Realpolitik

Back in New York, Israel and the U.S. could not even count on the support of Australia. Several dozen resolutions passed in which the two could only muster the Marshall Islands and Micronesia to join their no lobby. Two of the tiniest states in the world, they are bound by treaty to cooperate with the U.S. on defense and foreign policy, and almost their entire budget is based on congressional appropriation. They would pay a heavy price to buck the Israel lobby, so their support is hardly a triumph of argument and diplomacy.

Most of the votes were nearly unanimous, although the Europeans and others abstained on a resolution which condemned the “excessive use of force” over the previous year that had killed over 700 Palestinians and inflicted tens of thousands of injuries. The Europeans felt that it did not give enough attention to Israeli victims of terrorism. Others picked up their cue from the Geneva meeting and reaffirmed the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention, i.e., the illegality of settlements. To most delegations these propositions are incontrovertible: it is like voting on Newton’s law of gravity. The real surprise is that, year after year, the U.S. can vote for the equivalent of saying that apples fall upward and could not have hit Newton on the head.

 

Year after year the U.S. votes for the equivalent of saying that apples fall upward.

Thus there is a morbid fascination in watching the vagaries. The resolution on financing UNWRA contains a reference to 194 (III), the famous resolution which called for the repatriation or compensation of Palestinian refugees. Even the U.S. could not bring itself to vote against, but, doubtless terrified of the effects on the lobby in Washington, the Marshall Islands voted against with Israel. Micronesia and the U.S. abstained. Go figure.

With such inconsistencies, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the General Assembly could not pull together an accepted definition of terrorism. After Sept. 11, delegates were supposed to produce a resounding draft of an Anti-Terrorism Convention, which would marshal all the material from all the other related international instruments. At the end of November, they quietly admitted that they could not agree. The Legal Committee of the GA agreed instead to resume work in the New Year.

The sticking points, not surprisingly, were on the definitions of terrorism and on the applicability of any convention to states’ own armed forces, with the Syrians and Arab group, represented by Lebanon, arguing for more explicit “freedom fighter” exceptions. It is a measure of how close they are to consensus, however, that even the usually embattled Israeli delegate praised the consensus that had been reached—as he nevertheless condemned those who had suggested that Israeli “measures to protect civilian lives” were a form of terrorism. But Syria and Lebanon had the last word, invoking Sharon’s indictment in Belgium for Sabra and Shatila, and Israel’s 1996 attack on the UNIFIL compound in Lebanon.

 

Trust in the U.N. Vindicated

Speaking of terrorism, the denouement of the war in Afghanistan showed just how important and useful the United Nations is—particularly in the form of Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister. Strengthened by the need for coalition building, Colin Powell’s State Department was able to get the upper hand in the administration and use the U.N. for the negotiations. With the Bonn agreement, Brahimi vindicated that trust. Even U.N. diplomats who were very pessimistic about the outcome of the war now are expressing their surprise and optimism about the results.

While Brahimi has been correctly reticent about the use of actual U.N. peacekeepers whose record in such circumstances has been somewhat less than stellar, the Bonn agreement does provide for a multinational force in Kabul, and most diplomats expect that it will expand its mandate to other major cities. Certainly the U.N. will be deeply involved in reconstruction activities.

The rapid collapse of the Taliban, however, seems to have led to a shift of power in the Balkanized administration in Washington. The multilateralists aligned with Powell seem to be losing ground. The abrogation of the ABM treaty, the refusal to agree to an inspection regime under the biological weapons convention and, above all, the uncritical support for Sharon evidenced by the Dec. 15 veto do not bode well for the administration’s foreign policy.

Apart from the Palestinian question, there is room for concern that having won the war in Afghanistan with multilateral support, the unilateralists may now lose the peace by failing to back the U.N. efforts there. And if they want to put truth in every rumor the Islamists have been spreading about America’s anti-Arab bias, they could compound their support for Sharon with an attack on Iraq. Even U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan felt the need to caution against that as he received the Nobel Peace Prize for himself and his organization.

In fact there are the tiniest signs of a break in the Russian attitude toward Iraq, with Moscow’s agreement to implement a new list of controlled goods under Iraqi sanctions resolutions in six months. A cynic might observe that a U.S. promise to pay Iraq’s debts to Moscow would go a long way to win Russian support. Other countries are trying to persuade Baghdad that the best way to keep the B 52s at bay is to let in U.N. weapons inspectors and avail itself of Colin Powell’s more relaxed sanctions offer. One dreads, however, that the Iraqi leader will decide to emulate the hard-liners in the Bush administration. As a result, the new year does not promise to be much more relaxed than was 2001.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.

< Prev		Next >