Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2002, pages 45-46

United Nations Report

 

U.S., Israel Backtrack, Lose Track of Who Started It All in the First Place

 

By Ian Williams

It was George Orwell who invented the concept of “doublethink” to explain how people could convince themselves that what they were saying was what they had always said, even if it was the opposite of reality and even the reverse of what they had said the day before. And so as Shimon Peres wailed about “blood libel” as he helped fend off the U.N.’s Jenin fact-finding mission, it would be easy to forget that the idea originated with, well…him.

On Friday, April 19 the U.S. was faced with a British compromise draft in the Security Council condemning Israeli defiance of all the previous resolutions calling upon it to withdraw from Palestinian territories. It would have been very embarrassing to veto a self-evidently reasonable resolution proposed by a close ally—not to mention almost the only one Washington has left.

Israeli Foreign Minister Peres, however, was in Washington meeting Colin Powell that morning, and was inspired by the conversation to call U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and offer Israeli cooperation in a fact-finding mission. Yasser Arafat’s fellow Nobel Peace Laureate said Israel would accept whomever Annan sent, but wanted an impartial figure, not a political team. Peres also claimed that no more than 50 people had been killed in Jenin.

A few blocks away, President George Bush—clearly also prompted by Powell—called for a United Nations or International Red Cross investigation into events in Jenin.

Within a few short hours, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte had switched from declaring that no resolution was necessary to sponsoring one of his own, endorsing a fact-finding mission to be sent by Annan.

Within a few hours of Annan speaking to the Council at six p.m., the final text was quickly agreed upon and voted through unanimously—and, mirabile dictu, even welcomed by the Israelis. There was still room for ambiguity, however. The secretary-general’s spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said, for example, that “the secretary-general would hope that any fact-finding mission he sends would have full access to all areas of the West Bank.”

“The Americans were squeezed,” Palestine’s U.N. Ambassador Nasser El Kidwa commented to the Washington Report. “The British for a change played a very constructive role, since there is no doubt that their draft resolution put pressure on the Americans. When Powell met Peres in the morning he was looking for a way out. He obviously told Peres that there was unbearable pressure and that we cannot veto and we have to find a way out. They tried repeatedly to test our will, and realized that we were going to put something to the vote in any circumstances. They heard it for the first time, over and over again that we would push it to the vote.”

 

It would have been very embarrassing to veto a reasonable resolution proposed by a close ally.

Negroponte, trying to disguise the degree of the climb down, told reporters, “What we said was we didn’t think this issue should be decided by a resolution, but we are in fact responding to an initiative by the secretary-general of the United Nations....This is not an initiative of the Security Council but rather a response to an initiative by the secretary-general of the United Nations for which we are most appreciative.”

Indeed he should be. U.N. sources say that Annan was about to announce the fact-finding mission regardless of the resolution, and that the Arabs had in fact asked him to hold off in case it blunted the appeal of their draft or the British one. In Geneva the same day, U.N. Commissioner of Human Rights Mary Robinson had abandoned the attempt to send an investigative team from the Human Rights Commission because of Israel’s refusal to cooperate since, the Israelis claim, the Commission is biased.

Within two days of welcoming the mission, the Israelis already had begun to backtrack, with an announcement that they did not want Mary Robinson, Terje Roed Larsen or UNRWA's Peter Hansen on the team. This provoked a spirited defense of all three from an increasingly exasperated Kofi Annan—and even a half-hearted statement of support of Roed Larsen from Peres. Sharon, perhaps with words from Bush still in his ear, told the cabinet that they should accept the mission because, bad as it was, it was better than all the alternatives.

On MondayApril 22 Annan announced his team, to be headed by former Finnish president and U.N. official Martti Ahtisaari, former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, and Cornelio Sommaruga, former president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The secretary-general also said that retired U.S. Gen. Bill Nash would serve as military adviser, with Ireland’s Thomas Peter Fitzgerald as police adviser. It would arrive Friday, April 26, he had announced.

 

An Unusual Intervention

Then, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, intervention came from an unusual source. Daniel Bethlehem, a Cambridge (UK)international law professor and adviser to the Israeli government, sent a memo warning that “Unlike the Mitchell inquiry this exercise is not focused on finding a pathway back to negotiations. It is an exercise inquiring into allegations of war crimes. Given the nature of the allegations against Israel, this inquiry is much more serious and poses much greater risk for Israel than the Mitchell inquiry.

“If the committee’s findings uphold the allegations against Israel—even on poor reasoning,” Bethlehem concluded, “this will fundamentally alter the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian leadership and may make it impossible for Israel to resist calls for an international force, the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state and the prosecution of individuals said to have committed the alleged acts.

“Israel has already lost the public relations battle,” he added. “Whether or not there was a massacre in Jenin as the Palestinians contend, there is a widely-held perception in the international community that Israel’s use of force in Jenin was excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate and that this was compounded by a failure to provide, or allow the provision of, humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of the conflict.

“Even assuming that all the facts are in Israel’s favor, it will be difficult to redress this balance,” he continued, cautioning that “IDF personnel who are able to speak to the committee with credibility and authority will be powerful advocates for Israel’s case. Those who cannot do so will both damage Israel’s case and may place themselves at risk.”

 

Bethlehem also advised Israeli officials to screen potential witnesses.

Moshe Kochnovsky, the Israeli government attorney who had sought Bethlehem’s advice, rang alarms bells throughout the government. The immediate response was an attempt to impugn the team in general as too “humanitarian” in its scope, and then, with specific and by now standard tactics, to show that Sommaruga in particular was at least anti-Israeli, if not anti-Semitic.

Israel demanded a halt while it sent a legal team to New York to negotiate. Annan relented—and postponed the team’s arrival in Jenin from Friday to Saturday. Israel wanted more military people who, they hoped, would understand the necessity for leveling Jenin. They wanted the mission to restrict itself to Jenin—but at the same time to study Palestinian suicide bombings. They would cooperate—as long as everyone (at least every Israeli) giving evidence automatically received immunity. After first expressing alarm at the prospect of the mission reaching findings and conclusions, Israel wanted prior view of them before publication.

The Israelis then asked for a further postponement of the team’s arrival until Sunday, since Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath and the cabinet thus would not meet until Sunday. By Friday, Annan and Ahtisaari had agreed to the additional delay and to add some extra military support for Nash and extra counterterrorist police support for Fitzgerald. Despite repeated statements to the contrary by Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, however, there was no suggestion of any alteration to the core team of three. This may be why the Israelis were claiming that the U.N. had “gone back on its agreements,” when they finally lived up—or down—to everyone’s worst expectations and refused entry on Sunday morning, even as the team waited in Geneva.

Announcing the cabinet decision, Israeli Information Minister Reuven Rivlin had said, “This awful United Nations committee is out to get us and is likely to smear Israel and to force us to do things which Israel is not prepared even to hear about, such as interrogating soldiers and officers who took part in the fighting. No country in the world would agree to such a thing.’’

Sources at the U.N. say that Annan, who had spoken to Colin Powell and Martti Ahtisaari on Sunday morning, wanted the mission to go ahead anyway—in which case, said Zalman Shoval, a Sharon adviser and former Israeli ambassador to Washington, they would be “welcome tourists.” He also said, however, thatIsrael could stop the team from entering the camp if it wanted.

Somehow forgetting that the mission was his idea to begin with, Shimon Peres tried to cover his tracks for the Israeli public by declaiming that “Israel won’t sit in the place of the accused. Israel will sit in the place of the accuser. This is an attempt to place baseless blame, almost a blood libel, on Israel.”

Peres also said it would be pointless to send the mission now, because“Israel cannot accept the demand by the United Nations mission to decide which military people it will question.”

President Bush also had supported the call for an investigation. His reaction to yet another slap in the face from Sharon, however, was another demand that Arafat control terrorism. It is clear from Israeli reports that a deal in fact was made to drop pressure for the team in return for a settlement of the stand-off at Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. Indeed, implicit confirmation came from State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, who said, “The United Nations should work with the parties involved, the Israelis and Palestinians, to try to coordinate on this mission”—feigning a spurious even-handedness, since no one had actually heard any Palestinian objections to the team, its composition or its mission.

In the face of Israel’s final refusal to let in the team—and an equally blunt American refusal to allow the Security Council to pass any further resolution on this snub to what was, after all, a resolution proposed by the U.S.—the Arab group called for a resumed session of the Emergency General Assembly resolution under the Uniting For Peace resolution.This procedure, developed by Washington to bypass the Soviet veto in the Council during the 1950s, has been disavowed by the U.S. since the Palestinians revived it to bypass the generally automatic pro-Israel American veto.

The General Assembly resolution deplored Israel’s activities and requested the secretary-general to “present a report, drawing upon the available resources and information, on the recent events that took place in Jenin and in other Palestinian cities.” The resolution did encounter some problems, as much of the European Union, aspirant members and their friends around the world objected to some of the language in the resolution about Israel. As a result, there were 54 abstentions when the measure passed by 74 votes to 4. The Russians, however, had cleverly proposed voting in sections: this produced an overwhelming majority of 120 to 4 for the crucial clause, which called upon the secretary-general to prepare a report on Jenin. Those opposed were of course, Israel, the U.S. and their stalwart allies, the Pacific microstates of Micronesia and Marshall Islands—whose budgets are entirely derived from the U.S. Congress.

U.S. Ambassador Negroponte produced the clearest evidence yet that diplomats are not quite of this world when he unblushingly declared that “as a sponsor of Resolution 1405, which welcomed the initiative to send a fact-finding team to the Jenin camp, the United States did not believe that any Member State was in violation of operative paragraph 2 of that text.”

The rest of the world clearly did not believe him. If not quite on a par with President Bush calling Sharon a “man of peace,” it was a good attempt. As this issue goes to press, the U.N. has confirmed that the new report would be drawn up in house. It will be interesting to see how much pressure Washington applies to ensure that the report is to its liking.

 

Sahara Deserted—But Rescued

A U.S. proposal to force the autonomy agreement on the Western Sahara has been defeated for the time being. The Security Council met April 30 to formally adopt a resolution that renewed the MINURSO endorsement for another three months without committing itself to any particular option.

In his last report to the Council, the secretary-general’s special envoy, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, had posed four options:

First, that the referendum originally agreed upon 10 years ago go ahead using the U.N.-defined voting list, which would almost certainly mean a Polisario victory.

Secondly, that there should be five years of autonomy within Morocco, with a vote which would include Moroccan settlers— which Morocco would win.

Thirdly, that the territory be split, part going to Morocco and part to Polisario.

And, lastly, that the U.N. walk away and leave them all to it.

The U.S. had circulated a draft resolution mandating Baker to update the second, “framework” option and report back to the Council by July with a settlement to be imposed regardless of the views of the parties. Faced with the abandonment of the referendum that had been the basis of the U.N. mission for a decade, however, the majority of the Council forced the U.S. to withdraw the draft.

At the same time, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard formally denied on behalf of James Baker that he had threatened to resign if the “framework” autonomy proposal was denied. “There have been press reports that Mr. James Baker has stated he will resign if the Security Council does not give him the mandate to work on the draft framework agreement,” Eckhard said. “This is incorrect. Mr. Baker has persistently declined to recommend any one option to the Security Council. As he stated on April 27, he favored any option which would give him a clear mandate and which will have the support of the Security Council. He is of the view that any option the Security Councilchooses should give the secretary-general and his personal envoy sufficient authority to resolve the longstanding conflict.”

It is indeed true that Baker never publicly made those threats himself. Western diplomats were certainly making them in his name, however. Now that their bluff has been called, Baker can deny it and stay in position to try again.

Polisario’s U.N. representative, Ahmed Boukhari, told the Washington Report, “I believe the Security Councilwas wise to request a technical resolution and to make an in-depth examination of all options, not just the second. By doing so the Council has demonstrated that it is serious about dealing with the conflict and its efforts to achieve a lasting settlement.”

He may be a little optimistic. The Council may not have wanted to abandon its principles—but it shows little enthusiasm for enforcing them!

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

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