U.S. Pushes Security Council to Intrude in Iraq, Keep Out of Israeli–Palestinian Dispute

By Ian Williams

The new millennium is shaping up pretty much like the old one as far as the Middle East is concerned and, indeed, for the United Nations. Resolution 1284 adopted in December gave U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan a month—or a millennium, depending which way you look at it—to name “in consultation with the Security Council” a head for the UNMOVIC. The U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission is supposed to replace UNSCOM, the original Iraqi arms monitoring commission set up by the Mother of All Resolutions in the wake of the Gulf war.

However, it is increasingly difficult to get the Security Council to agree on anything more substantial than what day it is. Annan floated some 25 names past the council members, and one side or another rejected them all. In the end, in desperation and perhaps even defiance, he met the deadline by proposing Rolf Ekeus, currently Sweden’s ambassador in Washington and, of course, the founding director of UNSCOM.

Many of the names were hardly front-rank diplomats. Few who watched what had happened to Ekeus last time he held the job, let alone the public immolation of Richard Butler, his successor, would push for this job unless they had other motives. Several prominent names publicly refused. Others made it plain from the beginning that there was no way they wanted to interpose their careers between a stubborn Iraq and an increasingly wobbly Security Council.

At the end of last year, asked what qualities he was looking for, Annan said, “someone like Rolf Ekeus.” In the end he found that there was no substitute for the real thing and he persuaded a reluctant Ekeus to go forward, friends suggest, because, after several years’ recuperation in the Swedish Embassy in Washington, “he was getting bored—after all, there are not many issues between Sweden and the U.S.,” one said.

Russia demurred at Annan’s choice of Ekeus, since he was “unacceptable” to Iraq. Not to be left out, so did China, which wanted a Third World candidate, and, even more surprisingly, so did France, which regarded his associations with UNSCOM as too much. As several of the colleagues sardonically remarked, their objections effectively gave Baghdad a sixth veto in the Security Council

Unfortunately there is also a precedent. Iraq is not really the “sixth veto holder.” It is only the seventh. Israel has serious seniority in that department. It is over a decade since the Security Council has been able to pass a resolution about Israeli actions because of the U.S.’s proxy veto. It is difficult to be harsh about Iraq pulling Moscow’s chain under the circumstances. The U.S.’s role in abusing the cover of UNSCOM for intelligence operations hardly helped those who want the U.N. to succeed in disarming Iraq.

“Iraq is not really the sixth “veto holder.” Israel has serious seniority.”

Even so, to appreciate the absurdity one must remember that the U.N. resolutions on Iraq resulted from Saddam Hussain’s vicious and bloody attempt to invade and absorb a U.N. member state. The U.N. sanctions and arms inspections followed the military defeat of Iraq at the hands of a world-wide coalition fighting with the blessing of the United Nations. Incidentally, the prospects in the new resolution for the ending of sanctions put much of the onus back on Baghdad. Iraq should be explaining to the world why it would rather have its people suffer sanctions than allow arms inspectors in.

The three objectors to Ekeus abstained over Resolution 1284, and it now looks as if they are manning a second line of defense against the resolution being implemented. It has to be said that the resolution is far from perfect, but it still is farther than anything since the Gulf war in offering a realistic chance of ending sanctions—if the Iraqis cooperate with the arms monitors. Since Annan has done his part, it is now up to the bitterly divided Council to find an alternative to which everyone can agree.

On the one hand are the members who want someone who will not crumble in the face of unrelenting Iraqi pressure. On the other, however, the Iraqis, and hence their surrogates, will only accept someone who will take at face value every assurance that Saddam Hussain offers, and give the Iraqi weapons program a clean bill of health regardless of the evidence. That is Ekeus’s problem. During his time as head of UNSCOM, he proved over and over again that Saddam Hussain’s regime consistently lied about its weapons programs.

It is also true that sanctions were originally designed as a step on the way to war, not as its aftermath. Official American insouciance to the damage they inflict on Iraqi civilians, restated only this January by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, has helped Iraq gain many sympathizers who otherwise would be less than ecstatic at the thought of Saddam Hussain possessing weapons of mass destruction.

As a result, Baghdad’s rejection of Ekeus is unlikely to get its full significance. The only reason for opposing him is that he knows the Iraqi leadership all too well, and will demand real access before verifying that the country has indeed disarmed.

Even so, the present impasse does not help the Iraqi people, the U.N., or the cause of peace in the region. Present American policy alienates many potential allies while still giving ammunition to the Iraqis. But then, Washington has rarely distinguished itself in Middle East diplomacy.

Wandering Borders

Nowhere is that more obvious than U.S. insistence that while the U.N. must intrude at no matter what cost into Iraq, it should keep its nose right out of the Arab-Israeli conflicts. Unsurprisingly, in contrast the Arab parties have been invoking the U.N. in their negotiations. Israel claims to accept Resolution 242, for instance, and its demand for the return of territories occupied in 1967.

For Israel, this means guaranteeing the cease-fire lines as borders for themselves, but allowing them to advance beyond, and in any case ignoring, the only “legal” boundaries as established in the U.N. partition resolution. Syria’s delegation seized upon this point when it demanded that Israel withdraw to the pre-June ’67 line of control, handing over areas that the Arabs had held on to beyond the Mandate borders in 1948. Suddenly, the Israelis claimed that the international border between the old Mandate and Syria was sacrosanct.

In fact, from the partition map, it should be Yasser Arafat who claims those parts of former mandatory Palestine, although quite what he’d do with a 10-meter strip along the shore of the Sea of Galilee taxes the imagination. However, while he is unlikely to do that, Palestinian negotiators have indeed been referring to General Assembly Resolutions 181 and 194 of the third General Assembly session in 1948.

The Israelis can hardly dispute the legitimacy of 181, which authorized the establishment of a Jewish state along with an Arab Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as an internationally controlled zone. The resolution also marked the boundaries of the two states and, according to Palestine’s ambassador at the U.N., Nasser El Kidwa, that section is also still highly relevant. “I’m deadly serious about that,” he warns.

A crucial part of GA 194 (III) which is reiterated every year in the resolution mandating UNRWA’s operations is the right of the refugees from 1948 to return, or be compensated. “These are inalienable individual rights,” comments El Kidwa, who also stresses that this is a separate issue from any rights of Palestinians to return to the Palestinian territories.

He also cites no fewer than 24 Security Council resolutions affirming the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the occupied territories—and Jerusalem. There are also GA resolutions on the natural resources of the territories, which El Kidwa says are very important because “in fact, the Geneva Conventions are somewhat deficient on that matter—so maybe we’re helping to improve international law.”

It is perhaps no wonder that Israel and the U.S. want the U.N. out of any negotiations. The Palestinians have an impeccable legal case, just as the U.N. has about admittance of arms inspectors into Iraq. However, the veto is on the other foot this time.

Unfortunately, a paralyzed U.N. is not necessarily good news, except for the bad guys on both sides.

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.