Boutros-Ghali Veto Isolates U.S. On Security Council

by Ian Williams

Most Americans were about to dig into their Thanksgiving turkeys to celebrate the survival of settlers on their shores almost four centuries ago. In New York, U.N. delegates were dealing with the problems caused by more recent settlersin Palestine. While the turkeys commemorate the New England Indian tribes’ charity to the settlers, who went on to clean them out of house and home, at the U.N., the problems were the Israeli settlers, who are continuing to push their involuntary Palestinian hosts out of house and home.

The annual U.N. resolutions on Palestinian rights were supported by the overwhelming majority of the nations of the world for, and two nations against. The Washington Report offers no prizes whatsoever to readers for guessing which two delegations stood alone against the rest of the planet. Indeed, this year the U.S. and Israel were even more isolated than usual, as European Union members, exasperated with the lack of progress on the peace process, moved from abstaining to supporting the Palestine resolutions.

New resolutions also were passed condemning settlements and on the importance of preserving natural resources for the Palestinians. Since these resources included land and water, the near unanimity was not exactly music to the ears of the Israeli mission, which has always tried to obscure its wholesale looting of the water resources of the occupied territories, nor to the Clinton administration, which has to balance its previous acknowledgment of the illegality of such thievery with its present domestic political needs.

By contrast, the EU also supported a stronger resolution reaffirming the principle of Palestinian property rights from 1948, including the refugees’ right to the revenues from such properties, and calling upon the secretary-general to update and modernize the records of refugee claims. “This means to put them in accessible electronic form,” comments Palestinian Ambassador Nasser El Kidwa, who attributes the success of the resolutions to several hard years of diplomatic lobbying.

He points out that the responsibility for the refugee claims rests with the Armistice Commission from the Rhodes agreement, which consists of Britain, Turkey and the United States. “I think that membership of bodies like that has helped prevent deterioration of the U.S. position,” El Kidwa suggests, “Since they have supported such claims in the past, it makes it easier for them to maintain their position now.”

Ironically, the international support for the reaffirmation of these claims may owe a debt to Senator Jesse Helms, and his legislative concern for the property rights in Havana of Cuban-American voters in Florida. Although it hasn’t stopped him from trying, he has found it difficult to explain logically to the rest of the world why it was immoral and illegal for the Arabs to boycott Israel, with which they were at war, but it is neither immoral nor illegal for the U.S. to enforce sanctions against third parties who do business with Cuba, a country with which the U.S. is at peace. And as for Palestinian property rights, the possibility of Palestinian Americans suing for restitution from Israelis in the U.S. courts as a result of Senator Helms’ efforts could have a seriously adverse effect on the North Carolina senator’s campaign war chest!

Crystallized Resentment

Some of the international resentment of the Helms-Burton approach to foreign affairs crystallized with the 14-to-1 vote in favor of a second term for U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The lone negative vote by the U.S. amounted to a veto of the reappointment, but left the U.S. totally isolated. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is supposed to be able to unite the world behind the United States, not against it, as she managed to do at the U.N. It is no mean achievement to incite Japan, Korea, Honduras, Britain, France, Germany and Italy to vote against an isolated U.S. in the Security Council in favor of someone like Boutros-Ghali, about whom many of the members have in the past expressed doubts of their own.

Traditionally, only Middle East issues can produce this degree of American isolation, and there are growing hints that the campaign against the U.N. secretary-general has indeed been primarily motivated by anti-Semitic feeling in the Clinton administration. Arabs, of course, are Semites and there is little doubt that anti-Arab sentiments are playing a large role in the U.S. campaign against the Egyptian secretary-general. That he is Coptic Christian, and his wife, Jewish, and that he played a crucial role in Camp David, is irrelevant to some pro-Israeli types who see only the man who has upheld U.N. resolutions on the Palestinians and refused to squash a report on the Israeli killings of Lebanese refugees in the U.N. camp at Qana. It says something very unpleasant about the present administration when even The New York Times’ frequently out of control columnist Abe Rosenthal seems broadminded and urbane in his support for Boutros-Ghali, compared to the diehards in the White House.

There is little doubt that anti-Arab sentiments are playing a large role in the U.S. campaign against the Egyptian secretary-general.

Although, in casting her veto against Boutros-Ghali, Madeleine Albright was careful to stress that she was acting on instructions, there is little doubt that she herself manufactured much of the ammunition that was fired at Boutros-Ghali. The first thing she did on arrival at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. was to fire Ambassador April Glaspie on suspicion of being an “Arabist,” the term used by pro-Israel witch hunters for diplomats with language skills and knowledge of the Middle East that does not come via Israel.

Since Albright’s arrival, the U.S. position at the U.N. has on occasion been even more obdurately “pro-Israeli” than that of the Israeli mission itself.

Even so, mission sources suggest that the pressure on Boutros-Ghali to drop the report on the Qana bombing came from the White House. Let us simply say that Ms. Albright did not resist such pressure which, more than Bob Dole’s sideswipes at him, seems to be the cause of the veto against Boutros-Ghali. She did not, however, fire the trigger personally. Although she certainly did want him out, and even though she is not famous for her diplomatic skills, she is unlikely to have countenanced the pre-emptive announcement of a veto that was made in her absence. Predictably, that veto has made American diplomacy an oxymoron for the rest of the world. Mindful of her burning ambition to replace Warren Christopher, it was no wonder that she emphasized that she vetoed under orders.

By the time this is published, the issue should have been settled. Either some compromise will have been made enabling Boutros-Ghali to serve another one or two years, or a replacement will have been named.

In the latter case, the White House can claim a victory, but it will be of the Pyrrhic variety. Tremendous diplomatic reserves have been expended, and enormous enmity incurred to achieve nothing more than venting the spleen of the most unregenerate Likudniks and Know-nothings in the Clinton administration and in Congress.

On the face of it, the juxtaposition of U.S. isolationists and Likud may seem odd. But both are united by more than a steady stream of campaign dollars. Neither wants to see international law enforced. For the Palestinians, on the other hand, for 50 years the U.N. has been the sole reminder to the world that they have legal rights and claims to their homes and freedom. Which is why this administration, even more than any other, has tried to exclude the U.N. and its resolutions in favor of the “Final Status” negotiations, in which the weak Palestinians can be bullied and cozened into renouncing their rights. No wonder the Palestinians support the organizationand no wonder Israel and its U.S. supporters are so vigorously opposed not only to the U.N.’s Palestinian programs, but to the very existence of the U.N. itself.