Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Pages 47, 91

United Nations Report

Balancing Double Standards at the U.N.

By Ian Williams

Kofi Annan is clearly a well-meaning person. Certainly more so than the curmudgeons he is dealing with in Congress like Representative Gerald Solomon, who declared that the secretary-general should be “horsewhipped” for his agreement with Saddam Hussain.

And when Kofi Annan says he is a friend of Israel, he is not just being polite. He is, and not just because his wife was the niece of Swedish hero-diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who paid with his life in a Soviet prison after saving the lives of so many Jews from the Nazis. Like many Western liberals, the courtly U.N. secretary-general finds it difficult to believe that Israeli behavior can really be as bad as it so often appears.

He also is surrounded by advisers who know that the awesome task of getting the U.S. Congress to stop welshing on its debts to the U.N. will be all the harder if he can be branded as anti-Israel. It was, after all, on the Israel-Palestine question that the U.S. first began to renege on its obligations to the organization after decades of paying scrupulously on time to set an example to the Russians.

In this context, Kofi Annan bowed to the pleas of the Israeli Mission in New York and went beyond his duties as secretary-general by calling during his recent tour of the Middle East for Israel to be accepted into one of the regional groups at the U.N. Otherwise, he said, “it has no chance of being elected to serve on main organs such as the Security Council or the Economic and Social Council. This anomaly should be corrected.”

None of the regional groups has been eager to accept Israel, however, and even if one of them were bulldozed into acquiescence, it would take a very reckless gambler to put money on Israel to be elected to the Council in the near future. In any case that would seem superfluous, since with the U.S. delegation it has a veto there already.

Predictably, on his tour Kofi Annan seems to have charmed everyone. His agreement with Iraq gave him a head start in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and the Israeli-occupied territories, compounded by his own benignity. When in Israel, his reputation gave him a firm bully pulpit to tell Israeli leaders things that they would not listen to from others, including the U.S., and the secretary-general took advantage of it. “The founding of Israel and the founding of the United Nations are connected in spirit and in history, in promise and in peril,” he told the Israelis. “Indeed, Israel’s birth was enshrined in an historic United Nations resolution: the partition plan of 1947. When war erupted with the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948, the United Nations stood by Israel. The Security Council called for an immediate cease-fire and established a truce commission.”

When Kofi Annan says he is a friend of Israel, he is not just being polite.

He continued, “Before and since, United Nations officials, civilian and military, made the ultimate sacrifice in search for peace between Israel and its neighbors. First among all, of course, was Count Folke Bernadotte.”

Tactfully, Annan did not mention the much more recent UNIFIL victims of Israeli bullets, bombs and shells. Since it was the political ancestors of the Likud Party, including former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who planned and carried out the 1948 assassination of Bernadotte in Jerusalem for his temerity in suggesting that Palestinian refugees be allowed home, it presumably had some effect.

Apart from being nice to the Israelis, Annan took the opportunity to make a few telling points. “As a friend, it gives me no pleasure to recite a list of the grievances which the international community has against Israel,” he said. “But I think it is important for you, my Israeli friends, to try to understand that those grievances do not come out of a clear blue sky. Here is what the great majority of the Member States of the United Nations say: they regard Israel as having been responsible, directly or indirectly, for provocative acts that undermine goodwill and spark hostilities.

“In their view, Israel has not abided by Security Council resolutions. They point out that you have been slow to fulfill your obligations under the Oslo agreements, and that you have made your implementation conditional in a way that the Oslo accords did not. They see that you have expanded old settlements, and started new ones.

“They are concerned by the closures, roadblocks and other restrictions that aggravate the economic and humanitarian crisis facing the Palestinians. They regret other actions that take from Palestinians their homes, their land, their jobs, their residence permits—their very dignity.”

It was a fairly telling recital of things that Israel had done. However, Annan’s good sense presumably was jet-lagged out of him by the time he got to Beijing. There he issued a statement welcoming the Israeli “acceptance” of Security Council Resolution 425, which he said he had discussed with Binyamin Netanyahu on his tour.

Connoisseurs of unconscious doublethink relished The New York Times description of this, which said that the Israeli cabinet had accepted the resolution, “which calls for unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, on condition that….etc.”

Unconditional for Real

When it comes to Iraq, of course, unconditional means just that, according to Washington, and already the next crisis over inspections began bubbling up with the first fistful of reports from different aspects of the UNSCOM inspections. At first, all was sweetness and light following the Annan agreement in Baghdad. Then Charles Duelfer, the American who headed the inspection teams at the presidential palaces, reported that during one recent inspection Iraqi General Amer Rashid told him that such inspections would only be for a limited period. This was no one else’s interpretation and was of course just what Washington opponents of the Annan deal wanted to hear.

Added to Executive Chairman of UNSCOM Richard Butler’s conclusion that “Iraq’s claim, uttered repeatedly and sometimes stridently during the period under review—to the effect that it is now absolutely free of any prohibited weapons and the equipment used to make them—is a claim which most would prefer to be true, but which has not been able to be verified,” it suggests that the lifting of sanctions is as unlikely as ever.

Instead, the Security Council has accepted that some $300 million in cash and imports will be needed to get the Iraqi oil infrastructure up and running to meet the enlarged “oil for food” quotas that it has already agreed to. The Iraqi government has not been cooperating whole-heartedly since it sees this as a diversion from its number- one priority of lifting sanctions. However, its reluctance to come clean about its weapons programs makes that extremely unlikely while the U.S. and UK can veto any attempt to lift the sanctions regime.

Contrasting the treatment of Iraq with less punitive measures against more favored states makes some people see Saddam Hussain as a victim to be supported. Any such knee-jerk compassion should be tempered by reading U.N. special rapporteur Max Van der Stoel’s report on human rights in Iraq. He concludes that Iraq should “bring to an end summary or arbitrary executions, arbitrary arrests and detention, torture and ill-treatment by members of security and military forces.”

He reported on last year’s “prison cleansing campaign,” involving an estimated 1,500 executions by “shooting, hanging or electrocution” of oppositionists. He also reported on what he forebears from calling ethnic cleansing around Kirkuk, Khanaqin and Douz, where Kurdish and Turkoman families were effectively deported from their homes at short notice.

Iraqi diplomats at the U.N.’s Economic & Social Commission rebuffed the report and admonished Van der Stoel that he should “have called for the immediate lifting of the blockade as the only way to promote and ensure the full enjoyment of all rights of the Iraqi people.” Van der Stoel agreed that sanctions had caused suffering and death in Iraq, but notes that “most provisions of the Convention [on Civil and Political Rights], e.g. freedom from torture, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, have no conceptual or practical link with the existence of sanctions.”

Unfortunately neither Van der Stoel nor anyone else in the U.N. has been able to square the circle and come up with a plan that relieves the Iraqi people of their double burden of domestic repression and international isolation. Sadly, few seem to care unless it is politically expedient at home in the brave new world order.