As U.S. Raises Hoops on Iraq, It Joins Allies Appeasing Serbs

By Ian Williams

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that consistency "is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen." While I beg to differ with the New England sage, I can confidently report that there are no such hobgoblins in the U.N. Security Council. On Feb. 28, at the request of many Arab and Islamic countries, the Council formally debated the question of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. And what a formality it was.

They all spoke. Their words were recorded for posterity, but there was no resolution put, no vote taken. The U.S. veto, like the ghost at the feast, hovered in the background of the deliberations, giving implied support to Israel's position that it was of course perfectly in order for Rabin to allow facts to be created on the ground but that the Palestinians were being very naughty to raise the issue before it limped to the agenda of the peace negotiations some way down the line.

In their own way, the Palestinians were fortunate. The Lebanese didn't even get a formal debate when they tried to raise the matter of the illegal blockade of their southern ports by the Israeli forces. They weren't blockading Lebanon, merely preventing attacks on Israel, according to the Israeli ambassador.

On the other hand, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright was on a world tour trying to persuade an increasingly skeptical world that sanctions should be maintained on Iraq in the face of more and more testimony that Baghdad has fulfilled, or is at least well on the way to fulfilling, its obligations under Security Council resolutions. It is not that anyone thinks that Iraqi President Saddam Hussain is any more a moral person than he was when he invaded Kuwait. After all, his recent program of amputations and brandings should dissuade anyone from that idea. It is just that there are many unpleasant leaders around the world (some of them represented on the Security Council) and they have no sanctions against them.

In addition, countries like France and Russia are owed a lot of money by Iraq—much of which was for arms sales at a time when, encouraged by Britain and the U.S., Saddam Hussain was regarded as the bulwark against Iranian militancy in the first Gulf war. Iraqi Ambassador Nizar Hamdoon challenged the U.S. and Britain to put the issue to a secret ballot in the Security Council, which he claimed with confidence Iraq would win. He was probably right, but the numbers are meaningless so long as both Britain and the U.S. are prepared to veto lifting the sanctions.

As soon as Saddam Hussain, albeit reluctantly and gracelessly, makes another concession, like the recognition of Kuwait and the recently demarcated border, Washington produces a new hoop for him to jump through. The resolutions imposing sanctions are long and involved, and no one is entirely sure just what Saddam has to do, officially, to get them lifted. However, there is little doubt among U.N. diplomats, unofficially, about what he has to do, even though it is not written anywhere. Resign. And, as they say, the rest is commentary.

The planes had not actually "appeared." They were heard.

Meanwhile, some of the same people who raise the hoops for Saddam are jumping through hoops themselves to avoid reimposing the full mandatory sanctions on Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, to whom they seem willing to deliver a peace settlement. He started the war, so it is indeed logical to assume that it is in his power to stop it. However, it is an interesting experiment in self-rehabilitation for war criminals. Give them parole before the trial.

In February, despite Milosevic's promise to maintain an embargo on his fellow Serbs in Bosnia until they agreed to the peace settlement, and the U.N. promise to enforce a "no-fly" resolution over Serb-occupied areas of Bosnia, the skies of Bosnia were crowded with swarms of unidentified flying objects. In the first week of February, Dutch peacekeeping troops in Srebrenica counted some 62 helicopter sorties into Bosnia from the direction of Serbia, sometimes 15 to 20 at a time. U.N. officials professed uncertainty about the origin of the flights. And they remained unsure even when, a week later, they mentioned that while the mysterious aircraft were flying across the Drina River, which serves as the boundary between Serbia and Bosnia, U.N. monitors had been refused their agreed access to the radars at Surcin airport near Belgrade. Later they further confused the issue by saying that they were indeed permitted to enter the radar room—it's just that they were not allowed to look at the radar screens.

The flights constituted prima facie evidence of a breach of the embargo that Slobodan Milosevic had solemnly promised the Security Council he was imposing on his Serb neighbors in Pale. That meant that if the Council were to stand by its word, it should immediately reimpose the full range of sanctions on Belgrade.

However, just as the U.N. was squirming under press questioning, UNPROFOR reported "sightings" of heavy supply aircraft with fighter escorts near the Bosnian-controlled Tuzla airport on the 10th and 12th of February. They did not land at Tuzla airport—which is hardly surprising since the Serb artillery controls it, and has refused all flights. Under closer examination, it appeared that the planes had not actually "appeared." They were heard, by trained UNPROFOR hearers, who had identified them as C130s.

Despite the inconvenient fact that NATO AWACS planes had not sighted the aircraft, the hearings without sightings soon were worked into an elaborate fairy tale by UNPROFOR spinmasters. This, they assiduously whispered to correspondents, was because NATO was being used by the U.S. as a cover to resupply the Bosnian government forces.

Quite apart from the inherent unlikelihood of President Bill Clinton's administration doing anything so honorable or decisive, this would have involved the equally unlikely collaboration of numerous British, Italian and French military officers in the NATO Southern Command in an elaborate operation to hoodwink their own governments.

The whole UFO affair epitomizes UNPROFOR's Orwellian news management techniques. By then the speculation was achieving its presumed purpose, at best inducing media amnesia about the helicopters, and at the very least drawing on reporters' sense of balance to conclude that "all sides are at it." But by the beginning of March the Contact Group and UNPROFOR could breathe a deep sigh of appeasement. The threat of reimposed sanctions on Milosevic was over, demonstrating that although there may be many little minds and perhaps even some hobgoblins in the U.N., none are concerned with consistency.

Ian Williams, a British free-lance journalist based at the U.N., is president of the United Nations Correspondents Association.