Veto Shows U.S. Consistency in Support for Israel at U.N.

By Ian Williams

It is not true that the Clinton administration is consistently inconsistent on foreign policy. On Middle East questions it has been extremely consistent. It has never allowed the mildest breath of criticism of Israel, and nowhere is that more true than in the United Nations, where the U.S. exercised its first veto for five years on May 17. The occasion was an extremely bland resolution which suggested that perhaps it would be nice if the Israeli land confiscations in Jerusalem stopped. The sponsors of the resolution had done everything they could to put it through the U.N. blanding machine. As Botswana Ambassador Legwaila Legwaila said, the resolution was "a statement of facts. It makes no value judgments. It does not deplore the action, nor condemn the offending party. There are no threats, ultimatums or measures aimed at modifying or changing the behavior of the offending party."

However even that was too much for the U.S. delegation, which vetoed the resolution supported by all of the other 14 members of the Security Council. In fact, the consistency of the Clinton administration has led to a distinct inconsistency with previous U.S. policy. Since 1948, along with the rest of the world, the U.S. had refused to accept Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. And, since 1967, the U.S. had refused to give legal recognition to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem. But now these long-standing positions have been reversed, under the guise of waiting for final stage negotiations under the Oslo peace accords.

This led to the Clinton administration's paradoxical position that it is wrong for anyone to talk about the territories, but it is fine for the Israelis to act about them. Luckily, this nicety of diplomatic etiquette escapes all but two of the 185 U.N. member states, the United States and its Israeli mentor. For all of the others, the occupation is illegal and Israeli land confiscations are doubly so. As Australian Ambassador Richard Butler said, "East Jerusalem is part of the occupied territories and not, as Israel has declared, that country's 'eternal capital.' The continuing expropriation of land belonging to the Palestinians runs contrary to international law and impedes the peace process."

In the face of this irrefutable logic, the best rejoinder that the U.S. could offer was that it cast its veto "on an issue of principle." This principle is that "the only path to achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace in the Middle East is direct talks between the parties." Those inspiring words conceal an extremely slithery snake in the grass: the abandonment of every principle of international law. But that is presumably a small price for an incumbent U.S. administration to pay as the presidential primary election season draws near.

Administration, Congress Differ Over U.N. Bosnia Financing

However, U.S. policy is not consistent on any other issue. Called in for an unusual midnight meeting on June 16, delegates to the U.N. Security Council in New York could almost be forgiven for thinking that Balkanization had spread to Washington. The reason for their late-night session was a letter to President Clinton from the Republican heads of Congress, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, which had been passed to the press the previous afternoon. It threatened that Congress would not support U.S. payments toward the proposed Rapid Reaction Force for UNPROFOR in Bosnia. It further claimed that French "President Chirac assured us that he was only seeking U.S. political support, and not a financial commitment" for the RRF. The French reaction was to call the witching-hour meeting.

In fact, the resolution had begun as an attempt to bring the Security Council mandates down to size—a size cut by the Serbs and the U.N.'s instinctive grovelling to them. That had been derailed by the Bosnian Serb shelling of Tuzla and Sarajevo and the later taking of U.N. hostages by the Bosnian Serbs.

So the draft for Resolution 998 had been broadly agreed. As a compromise it mentioned the desirability of demilitarization of the safe areas. By that it meant, as always, the disarming of the Bosnian government in return for the inept protection of the U.N. The draft resolution "underlined" the need for "mutually agreed" demilitarization of the safe areas, but left intact the earlier mandates to defend them.

The squabble has not and will not clarify the tangled web of mandates woven by the 60-plus previous resolutions. However, with no U.S. troops on the ground, the U.S. delegation was not in a strong position to argue Dole and Gingrich's point, and even they recognized the need for the NATO allies to send an additional force following the Serb hostage taking. The pledges originally demanded by the congressional leaders were reduced to an added phrase calling for "the modalities of financing to be determined later."

The interpretations of the delegates varied widely. U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright said that American support for the resolution was "on the clear understanding that, by doing so, we are not incurring any direct financial obligation." She added that, "We are not now prepared to pay the lion's share of the cost of expanding the force," and concluded that "we do stand ready to consider all reasonable alternatives" without, however, offering any concrete suggestions.

The British and French both said, with a hint of condescension, that it was not up to the Security Council to determine payment or methods anyway. The amendment "does not and cannot change the financial procedures followed by this organization" and that the resolution would be referred to the General Assembly, where the $414 million cost would be apportioned as usual. That meant the U.S. share would be slightly less than one-third.

At some point the U.S. will have to either capitulate or confront its allies.

The veto postpones, and certainly does not solve, the constitutional point of whether it is the White House or Capitol Hill which has the primary responsibility for U.S. foreign policy, particularly in relation to the U.N. At some point the U.S. will have to either capitulate or confront its allies and the United Nations over the financial issues. Although Bob Dole had some telling points to make about the general failure of UNPROFOR's policy of neutrality, the strange U.S. amendment on financing, added to the pro-Israel American veto, convinced some delegates that the U.S. was only kidding when it signed the U.N. Charter. The Russians and the Chinese abstained because they thought the new force might take sides, while others complained that if it followed existing UNPROFOR practice, it would be neutral. As the meeting finished at three in the morning, it could be said that everyone was still in the dark.

Western Sahara Referendum

In the Western Sahara, many things are in the dark. Five years ago the second special representative, Ambassador Johannes Manz, declared to the press that the whole U.N. operation, MINURSO, and the referendum it was going to conduct on independence for the territory, would be over within a year. Although it is one of the cheaper U.N. operations overall, it is per capita one of the most expensive, since its sole purpose is to identify an electoral roll of less than 100,000 Sahrawis. In fact, at over $5 million a month, it is costing $600 a year per voter to maintain. As a measure of the problem, the Moroccan government is supposed to reduce its armed forces in the territory to 65,000 11 weeks after the completion of the compilation.

Concerned about the slowness of the operation, the Security Council sent a mission of its members to study the Sahara situation. The ambassadors returned with some insight into how complex the identification process is, and expressed another pious hope that the Mission will be over by January 1996.

"We told the parties, they don't have time to waste," said Botswanan Ambassador Legwaila, who headed the mission. However, that is not strictly accurate. King Hassan and the Moroccan government, who are in de facto control of the Western Sahara, have all the time in the world.

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