General Assembly President Vilified for Stating Official U.N. Position on Palestine
| WRMEA Archives 2006-2010 - 2009 January-February |
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2009, pages 28-29
United Nations Report
General Assembly President Vilified for Stating Official U.N. Position on Palestine
By Ian Williams
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GIVEN THE distressing tendency of the U.S. and EU to cover for Israeli violations of international law and U.N. decisions, it is not surprising to see that the president of the U.N. General Assembly (GA) is regularly on the target list, usually described as a “U.N. official.” I have mixed views about this ascription. The president, HE Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the U.N., is not a salaried international servant, and those who say so are either being lazy or trying to maintain the hate campaign against the organization in the Jewish community.
On the other hand, one wishes he were, since he is attracting outrage simply for stating official U.N. positions. It is difficult, for example, to see how a U.N. personage could attend the official U.N. “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” without condemning Israel. After all, the day is in solidarity with their continuing dispossession in violation of U.N. resolutions.
At the annual event however, he excelled himself, emulating Nobel Laureates Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter in likening Israeli policy to apartheid, condemning Israel’s siege of Gaza, and describing the U.N.’s failure to establish a Palestinian state as “the single greatest failure in the history of the United Nations.”
In the official U.N. hierarchy, the General Assembly president outranks the secretary-general and is the titular head of the organization, but in the real world, it is the latter who controls the Secretariat and is, in turn, to whatever extent he allows, controlled by the U.S. and the rest of the permanent five Security Council members. By restating positions that derive from the decisions of the overall membership and not just from a few powerful members, however, the president of the General Assembly is a useful corrective, and his outspokenness creates space for others to emulate him.
Indeed, even without him, it is clear that Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon and others are getting increasingly restive about Israel’s blockade of Gaza and expansion of settlements in the West Bank, even if their muted criticisms do not yet approach the strength of those from d’Escoto Brockmann.
In fact, the relative silence and acquiescence of the international community—with the very honorable exception of UNRWA—to the plight of Gazans has saddening overtones of the long days of the Iraqi sanctions, where the noble aspirations of the organization, and of most of its staff, were diverted by the overweening power of the U.S. and its allies.
U.N. Role in Iraq Ending
The Iraq story is only now coming to an end. Many were surprised at how amenable the Bush administration proved to be to Iraqi suggestions over the Status of Force Agreement with the government in Baghdad. In fact, the presence of U.S. troops depended on the invitation of the Iraqi government—and the U.N. mandate that expires at the end of 2008. The outgoing administration did not want to go to the Security Council and allow Russia and China to have a say about it, so it had to be bilateral.
It remains to be seen how entangled the U.N. is in Iraq’s affairs, but when the issue comes up it will be difficult to see how the residual sanctions, and the 5 percent of oil revenues supposedly going to the compensation tribunals, can remain in effect much longer. The democratic government of Iraq has been paying reparations for the first Iraq war for far longer than Germany did under the Versailles Treaty.
It is worth recapitulating the relationship, since it highlights the amazingly ambivalent nature of the U.N.’s relationship with Iraq, and the struggle for the organization’s soul between the great powers and the U.N.’s own humanitarian institutional instincts.
The political side of the U.N., as represented by the member states, was very supportive of Iraq before the invasion of Kuwait. It condemned the Israeli bombing of the Osirak reactor, helped cover up the gassing of the Kurds in Halabjah, and stayed effectively silent in the face of Saddam Hussain’s bloody invasion and following war with Iran. Indeed, only after years and hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, did the U.N. secretary-general’s “good offices” secure a cease-fire, which was based on a U.N. inquiry into who caused the war.
With the invasion of Kuwait, however, Washington became unforgiving. In fact, invading Kuwait did break the cardinal rule of the U.N., which is, above all, an anti-annexation and invasion pact for its member states—although one suspects that if Saddam had had the moderation and good sense to simply install a new friendly regime and pull out without annexing the 19th province, he might well have had a free pass, from Washington as well as New York.
As it was, the Bush 41 administration reacted with all the fervor of a pet owner whose pandered poodle has bitten the baby. The draconian sanctions imposed on Iraq to persuade it to withdraw were envisaged as a temporary measure, but there was no sunset clause—and, after Iraq’s defeat, the same applied to the famous “Mother of All Resolutions” that laid down the conditions for Iraqi compliance and the terms of the sanctions until they did comply.
Initially, Beijing and Moscow had gone along because of Iraq’s clear breach of the U.N. Charter with its invasion of Kuwait, and because of illusions that the end of the Cold War implied a new multilateral approach by the U.S. It soon became obvious, however, that for far too many in Washington their interpretation of George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order” was closer to what became the Project for a New American Century.
However it was a work not so much in progress, as in regress. After all, the reason Desert Storm did not go on to Baghdad and effect regime change was a concern for international law, and it was that demonstrable concern that allowed Bush and Baker to assemble a global coalition, including the French and Syrians, for example, with tacit support from the Russians and Chinese, against Iraq.
It could be argued that Bush senior was in fact too scrupulous in respecting Iraqi sovereignty, certainly in the light of the later U.N. doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect. The hands-off approach allowed Saddam’s regime to massacre Marsh Arabs, Shi’i and Kurds with impunity until French and British pressure persuaded the U.S. to declare the “No Fly Zone.”
As whispered occasionally by U.N. officials, the “No Fly Zone” had no explicit U.N. backing, and morphed over the years into more of a means of teasing and humiliating the regime than any great humanitarian concern. That became obvious as the U.N.-designed sanctions began to cause as many, if not more, civilian casualties than had Saddam Hussain and his regime.
The sanctions were grandfathered in by the veto. Washington and London made it plain that they would veto any lifting of the sanctions, but other members’ unease made it equally plain that if the sanctions ever had to be renewed, they would be unlikely to secure enough votes to do so. In effect, they were making Saddam Hussain look good to a world community that, after all, has been remarkably forgiving and tolerant of tyrants and genocides.
The rest of the world will not stand up to the big powers, either.
At the same time, the great powers’ intelligence services were abusing the UNSCOM weapons inspections for their own purposes, and since U.S. politicians like Madeleine Albright had explicitly put regime change on the agenda as a condition for lifting the sanctions, it’s hardly surprising that some Iraqi objections began to look logical to many other countries. Once again, there was indeed a case for humanitarian intervention, but it was one that was probably not made most effectively by the representative of a nation that had armed, equipped and covered for the regime when it was gassing Kurds and Iranians.
The Oil for Food program was successful in feeding Iraqis, but at the price of compromising the United Nations, most of whose staff shared the growing global view that the draconian sanctions were both vindictive and ineffective.
It forced the organization into a role for which neither it, nor anybody else, was prepared: which was to manage the entire foreign trade of a medium-sized nation. The U.S. and others actively condoned smuggling to Turkey and Jordan, but became irate when Syria joined in. The various big powers connived on behalf of their companies for advantageous deals, whether buying oil or selling food.
There is a strong case to be made that if Washington had been less hubristic and called Moscow, Paris and Beijing to assure them that a successor regime to Saddam would recognize the exploration contracts their respective companies had signed with Iraq, there would have been a clear majority in the Security Council for an invasion.
But Baker and Bush senior were no longer in the pilot’s seat. That was now occupied by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. When Washington and London decided to ignore the U.N. and go ahead with their invasion, they were forced to ask the U.N. to carry on feeding the Iraqis, and had to return to it to legitimize oil sales and the transition. And, of course, the U.N. paid the price for its help. Not only did it not get much in the way of gratitude from the Bush administration, but 22 people were killed in the bomb blast at its Baghdad office. And soon the U.N. was becoming the official scapegoat for all the money that had been looted from the Oil for Food Program, while the biggest perpetrators—ranging from most of the Russian political establishment, via the Australian wheat board, to the U.S. occupation authorities in Iraq—escaped unscathed.
Which brings me to the point. The U.N. Secretariat has a long tradition of acting as the “humble servant” to the international community and trying to square the circle between adhering to its own charter, international law and decisions, while trying to accommodate those principles to the demands of the big powers. It is not entirely to blame. The rest of the world will not stand up to the big powers, either, as was shown when not one nation of the scores who stood up to denounce the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was prepared to sponsor an actual resolution condemning it. Nor have they ever stepped up to the plate with finances when the U.S. has tried to starve the Secretariat into submission by withholding dues.
But the lesson is that standing up for principles is not only spiritually satisfying, but pragmatic politics as well. Sidekicks get kicked sideways.
While the U.N. now has a window of opportunity for a new beginning with the incoming Obama administration, the combination of Susan Rice as U.N. ambassador and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state clouds the crystal ball. However, if Ban Ki Moon and the U.N. Secretariat wanted an opportunity to reassert their independence and adherence to the U.N. Charter, now is the time.
One key issue on which they could start would be to raise officially Israel’s disregard of its own promises to the U.S. and Quartet about settlement expansion and ask President Obama to support a resolution condemning it. The U.S. is on the record as opposing the settlements, after all, and it would be a small step with huge implications for credibility in the peace process to cast a vote accordingly.
Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and has a blog at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>.
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