U.N. Action Paralyzed by Clinton Flipflops on Jerusalem, Bosnia

By Ian Williams

As the saying has it, even a stopped clock is right once every 12 hours. So, as a British subject who was not one of her great admirers when she was prime minister, I must admit that Margaret Thatcher has been correct on Bosnia, while her successor, John Major, and President Bill Clinton have been catastrophically wrong.

The wobbliness of William Clinton is in a class of its own when it comes to foreign policy anywhere. In two key areas in particular, however, the Middle East and the Balkans, the U.S. administration's indecisiveness, inconsistency and general recklessness has done incalculable damage to whatever credibility the United Nations may still have had when Clinton took the oath of office in 1993.

For example, the U.N. Security Council spent three weeks overcoming American objections to a resolution on the Hebron massacre. Six previous U.S. presidents, along with the rest of the world, have defined East Jerusalem as occupied territory. But the Clinton administration has reversed the policy without admitting it.

At first, U.S. objections were mystifying. A compromise had been reached between Israeli, Palestinian and American diplomats in New York on the proposed resolution. It would, on the one hand, allow international observers into the Israeli-occupied territories. But, on the other hand, it would be voted on by paragraphs to allow the U.S. to abstain on sections containing references to Jerusalem, since that was what the Clinton administration had chosen to do.

Ten days later, however, on Wednesday, March 9th, American diplomats annoyed even their best friends on the Security Council by abandoning the painstakingly negotiated compromise. Disguised as an attempt to bring the PLO to the negotiating table, in reality the new U.S. position was simple pandering to the most reactionary wing of the Israel lobby, which had succeeded in rounding up 82 senators to sign a non-binding resolution calling for a veto.

That became apparent at the Annual Policy Conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel's principal Washington lobby, which began with a speech by Vice President Al Gore on Sunday, March 13 in which he stressed that he and the president had not forgotten "the meaning of Jerusalem." He was followed by such paragons of political purity as Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Sen. Alphonse D'Amato (D-NY), who called for a veto of the resolution in speeches whose subliminal text to AIPAC delegates was "send campaign checks to my address."

To be fair to members of AIPAC's "new leadership," they had tried to head off demands for a U.S. veto of the Hebron resolution, knowing full well that the Likud/GOP coalition's main purpose in calling for it was to embarrass Rabin and Clinton. AIPAC's leaders would themselves have been vociferously calling for a veto two years ago, but now they did not want to provide more ammunition for attacks on the beleaguered U.S. president, whom they described as the "best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. "

Indeed, Gore himself told the 2,000 delegates that the U.S. -Israel relationship was "probably the closest that we have with any of our friends and allies anywhere in the world. "As he was speaking,AIPAC President Stephen Grossman and newly appointed AIPAC Executive Director Neal Sher were proving his point by having, a Sunday morning meeting with Clinton in the White House. They reminded Clinton that one of his election campaign promises to Jewish voters and fund-raisers was that he would regard Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.

Clinton, they reported back to AIPAC delegates, told them, "That's still right. "

So the Security Council waited until Friday, March 18 to vote on the resolution which referred—as always before—to the occupied territories "including Jerusalem." On that paragraph, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright abstained. Clinton now seems to interpret the language in the Sept. 13 Declaration of Principles which deferred discussion of settlements and of the annexation of Jerusalem to mean the abandonment of all Security Council resolutions and international law on the issue.

Leaving the final decision on these two key issues to "negotiations between the parties" in the present unequal state of play is tantamount to accepting Israeli aggrandizement. In doing so, Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher have further undermined the diminishing support for Arafat and the peace process among the Palestinians in the territories while missing the chance to address the biggest single obstacle to peace—the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

Debacle in Bosnia

The threat that the U.S. would wield a veto at the say so of the U.S. domestic lobby for a foreign country did little to reassure even America's closest allies on the Security Council that the leadership of the New World Order was in good hands.

The diminishing order in that New World was demonstrated soon after by the debacle in Bosnia. As usual, the signals from the White House were mixed. But the message to the Bosnians was the same as to the Palestinians—you are on your own. The clashing comments from Clinton, Secretary of Defense William Perry and Secretary of State Warren Christopher indicated to Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic that they had little to fear from the U. S. and hence from NATO or the United Nations.

U.N. Special Representative Yasushi Akashi spoke with similar imprecision, bizarrely threatening to pull out UNPROFOR forces protecting surrounded Bosnian enclaves if the Serbs continued misbehaving. As Serbs accepted and then violated cease-fires without even a break in the shooting, and Serb tanks chased down and killed civilians at will within the Gorazde "U.N. protected areas," the Security Council's presidential statement picked up the theme, demanding that "the parties" refrain from any action which might escalate the situation.

Indeed, after Serb forces downed one NATO British attack-bomber over Gorazde, and severely damaged another carrier-based French aircraft, and Serb forces fought pitched battles with U.N. peacekeepers, U.N. senior staff were hypothesizing that the whole thing was a cunning Muslim plot. They fantasized that perhaps the retreat of Bosnian government forces under tank attack had lured the Serbs to advance and thus trigger Western intervention. Clearly, in the face of aggression they cannot halt, U.N. staff instinctively seek to maintain the status quo, whatever it is, regardless of moral or legal issues.

In a sense, the frustrated international civil servants are pragmatically correct. The Security Council churns out resolutions which represent the desires of member governments to appease public opinion at home by passing problems on to the U.N. without committing themselves to action. That is why governments are reluctant to invoke Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which mandates all member states to make armed forces available if necessary to defeat aggression.

The U.S., however, has excelled itself by refusing to commit forces. Recently it broke its own unchallenged record for unpredictability by first agreeing to an increase of other people's troop contributions, and then opposing that increase in the Security Council lest the White House have to go back to Congress for money to help pay for it.

The original resolutions, supported by the U.S., are quite clear, however. In May 1992, Resolution 752 called for all Croatian and Yugoslav forces to be withdrawn from Bosnia "or be subject to the authority of the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina. " Within weeks, Resolution 757 imposed sanctions on the rump Yugoslavia for its failure to withdraw Serb forces, while declaring the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina to be "inviolable."

The sanctions remain in force, presumably because of ample evidence of Belgrade's interference. But the U.N. and Clinton now speak as if the whole conflict were a matter of three equally culpable parties in a civil war, and U.N. negotiators continually try to force the Bosnian government to capitulate.

Indeed, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali's March 16 report to the Security Council speaks of the danger of UNPROFOR "compromisingits impartiality" as a result of newer tasks-like protecting the safe areas. The same report carries some hints of the agenda of the West's statesmen, describing "an important byproduct" of UNPROFOR deployment as "the containment of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, which had for some time threatened to spread beyond its present geographical confines."

If the world community is indeed going to maintain "impartiality" in the face of barbarism and aggression, of course it will spread. The Serbs will get the same message that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and then-Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon got from the Reagan administration before they launched their 1982 invasion of Lebanon: Some nations are more equal than others when it comes to Security Council resolutions and international law. And, of course, in the newest world order, it seems that both Bosnians and Palestinians are less equal.

Ian Williams is a free-lance writer based at the United Nations.