Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1998, pages 48, 116

United Nations Report

Palestine Upgraded at U.N. in 124-to-4 General Assembly Vote

By Ian Williams

It has not been a good summer for American diplomacy, as the rest of the world has consistently outvoted the U.S. by large majorities in the U.N. It is a small consolation in some quarters, no doubt, that on each occasion Israel was on the side of the U.S. Of course, this often happens, but the votes on Palestine’s status in the General Assembly and the establishment of an International Criminal Court were both in the teeth of a full-court press by what currently passes for American diplomacy.

To begin with, after a year’s wrangling, on July 7 the U.N. General Assembly voted by 124 votes to 4 to upgrade the Palestine Observer Mission to the U.N. so that it would have almost all the prerogatives and privileges of member states, except a vote.

Nasser El Kidwa, the assiduous and patient Palestinian ambassador to the U.N., can now sponsor and co-sponsor resolutions on the Middle East, and speak on any matter on the agenda, and seat himself with other non-member states like Switzerland and the Vatican in the General Assembly hall.

Months of arm-twisting by the U.S. produced one extra vote on the Israeli side. The Marshall Islands joined Micronesia as the only other supporters of the U.S. and Israel. The two former U.S. trust territories are the only countries to be even more dependent on U.S. aid than Israel. In view of their vote against Palestine, it is ironic that when they themselves were first admitted to the U.N., several other members questioned whether their treaty ties to Washington allowed them to be sovereign members in the real sense.

El-Kidwa has worked hard and successfully on this and similar initiatives at the U.N. So it is no disrespect to him to say that Binyamin Netanyahu worked even harder. What is more, in his own perverse way, the Israeli prime minister has won the Palestinian case—for the Palestinians. The last six months of negotiations with the Europeans over a compromise formula were suddenly made much easier by the obduracy of the Israeli prime minister.

U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson called the upgrading the “wrong resolution at the wrong time,” and referred to “unilateral gestures which raised suspicion.” It was an odd inversion of the reality of a multilateral global gesture of total impatience with Netanyahu, whose obduracy has been castigated even by the U.S. State Department. But Dore Gold, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., was stressing to the press how grateful he was to Richardson, so maybe the U.S. envoy’s remarks had some effect in the quarters he was trying to impress.

At the U.N., however, Al-Kidwa’s closing hope that the resolution would not be in force long, because Palestine would soon be accepted as a full member state, seemed to be based on solider ground than ever before, even if that state were to be confined to only a small percentage of the ground that the Palestinians would like it to stand on. Within days the prospect of Palestinian statehood was getting the vociferous support of Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.

Next year the vote will be even stronger.

The U.S. was also cruising for a bruising in the Security Council, where the Arab group forced a debate on Netanyahu’s plans to expand Jerusalem’s boundaries. This put Bill Richardson’s dilemma in its starkest form. The U.S. has also criticized the plans, which he described as “unhelpful at this delicate stage of the negotiations.” In his speech he admitted that the Palestinians had accepted the proposals put forward by the U.S., “and we are now working with the Israelis to determine whether they can accept” them. However, he stuck to the Clinton line that the Security Council should not “interject itself into issues that the parties themselves have decided will be dealt with in face-to-face negotiations.”

Since at least one of those parties was actively seeking the Security Council resolution on the issue, Richardson sounded even more like the representative of Never Never land than ever before. After desperate lobbying by the U.S. and the Israelis, the Council issued a strongly worded and unanimous statement, but not an actual resolution. That avoided the U.S. vetoing, for domestic policy reasons, a resolution that expressed its own publicly stated views on Israeli actions.

Apart from the unanimity of the important section of the statement, condemning the Israelis “in substance beyond the usual U.S. position,” says El-Kidwa, was the final clause that kept the issue under review by the Council so that if the Israelis persist, it will be back on the agenda. The Palestinians agreed to accept a statement rather than a resolution on the “advice of European friends—and the even stronger advice of Arab friends,” he told WRMEA. “And we didn’t want to undermine the previous week’s victory on status.”

In fact, as he points out, two years ago the Americans managed to keep the Middle East question completely off the Security Council agenda. It is a measure of the rest of the world’s exasperation with Netanyahu that when the U.S. delegates tried to do that again this year, they failed.

 Next year even the General Assembly vote will be stronger. Unless, as seems unlikely, Congress comes up with over $200 million in arrears payments by next January, the U.S. loses its vote in the Assembly—but not its veto in the Council. However, there will soon be a new guy using the veto there, since on June 17 the White House confirmed that Richard Holbrooke will be replacing Bill Richardson as Washington’s man at the United Nations.

Holbrooke has been an effective career diplomat but, in the end, a diplomat is a message carrier. As long as the messages are written by an administration and a Congress each trying to outbid the other in supporting Israel, he is unlikely to be effective.

U.S., Israel Join Iraq, Libya

That message came over clearly in Rome on July 17, when the U.S. was trounced by 120-7 in its opposition to setting up an International Criminal Court. It was joined definitely by Israel, and reportedly by Iraq, Libya and China in its nay voting. The Israeli grounds for opposing were interesting. Israel persuaded the U.S. to try to water down the Court’s powers to prosecute breaches of the Geneva Convention on occupied territories, particularly on the transfer of populations. In effect, it tried to make settlement activity non-indictable.

In response, the Arabs, helped tremendously by Professor Cherif Bassiouni’s position as chair of the drafting committee, actually tightened up the language to specifically include settlements. Bassiouni, the Egyptian delegate, and also professor of international law at De Paul University, is a specialist in ethnic cleansing, having headed the first, underfunded, and for a long time ignored, U.N. commission into war crimes in Bosnia.

Even with the dilution of powers caused by the American opposition, led mostly by Jesse Helms and Defense Secretary William Cohen, the new court will have an independent prosecutor who can decide which crimes against humanity bear investigation. Instead of the U.N. Security Council having to approve a prosecution, which meant that any permanent member, like China or the U.S., could veto it, now all the permanent members have to agree to suspend the prosecution for 12 months.

For prosecution to take place, either the country of the criminal or the country where the crime took place has to approve. That means, for example, that Kuwait could bring proceedings against Saddam Hussain if he were to invade again—or Lebanon against Israel in case of any future repetition of Qana, or Sabra and Shatila. Needless to say, the court will not have retroactive jurisdiction, since there was no way that countries were prepared to have their past behavior scrutinized in this way.

And, of course, some will not be prepared to have their future behavior scrutinized either, which is doubtless why Israel and its friends in the U.S. are mounting such a vitriolic campaign against the court, and invoking American sovereignty as the rallying cry.

In fact, Bassiouni pointed out, there are so many protections, political and juridical, that he would be prepared to go to Congress and give them an unequivocal guarantee that no American military would ever be in the dock.

Rush to Reason on Pan Am 107

The opposition to Americans and Israelis appearing before foreign courts does not, naturally, apply to Libyans suffering the same fate. However, there appears to be a breakthrough. After a long period in which Britain and America obdurately refused to allow any bending at all in the Security Council resolution that Libya should hand over the two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing to either Scottish or American courts, within a week of the vote in Rome they both accepted President Muammar Qaddafi’s long-standing offer for the two Libyans to be tried under Scottish law in The Hague.

The rush to reason has two causes. The first is the Labor government in Britain, which has been listening attentively to the pleas of the British victim families group that their search for justice should not be impeded by political vendettas against Libya, and the second is the real world. The OAU and Arab League are close to deliberately breaching U.N. sanctions against Libya because of what they see as the unreasonable demands of the West in the face of Libya’s reasonable and pragmatic offer. That was eloquently demonstrated when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak clearly and ostentatiously broke the U.N. resolution by flying into Tripoli.

If the sanctions against Libya were ignored, then it would establish a potent precedent for breaching the sanctions against Iraq, the plight of whose people is causing concern everywhere except the White House. So, in the interests of holding the line against Iraq, it appears that the U.S. is prepared to swallow its previous words and accept Libya’s compromise.

Arab jurists point out that, apart from reasons of political face, Libya’s main concern is that the two accused should not in any way be interrogated by intelligence services from the U.S. or Britain, and that forms an important condition of any agreement to hand them over to the Hague.

There is some way to go, since the Dutch and the British, for example, have to change their own laws, and work out procedures to make it happen. But it could reverse the dire precedent that once an Arab country has U.N. sanctions, they remain in force in perpetuity. Once again, the U.S.’s global position has been weakened by its slavish adherence to the Israel lobby’s agenda.

Saddam Hussain Miscalculates—Again

As we go to press, it seems that Saddam Hussain, perhaps mistakenly, has sensed the weakness with his latest challenge to weapons inspectors. If he pushes it much further, then he risks eroding the position and stature that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan gained with his intervention in Baghdad earlier this year. It is a little too much to expect gratitude from Saddam Hussein, as many of his erstwhile allies have discovered, but this risks losing his regime even the expedient friends he has.

And if he is banking on President Clinton’s domestic—in every sense—problems, he has probably miscalculated. There could be nothing more welcome to the beleaguered White House than a foreign military adventure of the kind that Saddam Hussain is offering. In neither case will the position of the Iraqi people be improved.