Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 51-52

United Nations Report

As Palestine Settles Into Its New Role as Non-Voting Member, Arafat Schedules General Assembly Speech

By Ian Williams

President Yasser Arafat was scheduled to address the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 28 as part of the so-called General Debate. The “debate” was not itself important, since it usually consists of politicians making boring and narcissistic speeches for the benefit of their own domestic electorates—or dictorates, in some cases.

What was important was his presence. He was on the roster along with heads of state and government like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and he was making history as the only representative of a non-member-state to be allowed to speak.

It also marks a significant improvement on the time that the U.S. defied its treaty obligations by refusing him entry to New York. Of course, that backfired and emphasized American isolation when the rest of the U.N. members moved the entire General Assembly session from New York to Geneva to hear Arafat speak.

The Palestinian president’s speech was the result of the Palestine Mission’s steady push to enhance its status in the United Nations. That campaign will continue, as this summer’s General Assembly resolution granting the Palestine Mission almost all the prerogatives of a member state goes into effect.

Ambassador Nasser El-Kidwa returned from the Durban meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in September confident that its members, the majority of the U.N.’s membership, were committed to backing the Palestinian cause in the world body and elsewhere. In small, incremental steps, statehood is on the way.

And, of course, diplomatically speaking, the obduracy of Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition has been steadily pushing the European Union and its allies, the next biggest bloc of votes, into resisting American and Israeli pressure to keep the so-called peace process and its failures off the agenda.

The point man for the U.S. effort to keep Palestine off the U.N. agenda has, of course, been Ambassador Bill Richardson the former New Mexico congressman who left New York at the beginning of September to become secretary of energy. His designated successor, former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, was named back in June, but the State Department had not sent the nomination to the Senate by Sept. 11, thereby missing the deadline for confirmation in this congressional session.

One of the problems appears to be an investigation provoked by a letter from an un-named complainant about Holbrooke’s relations with the State Department after he left it to work on Wall Street with Credit Suisse First Boston. Another problem appears to be Sen. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Helms aide Mark Theissen has been hinting that the nomination will meet more obstacles than just the calendar. As a result, the U.S. does not have an official ambassador at the U.N. at a time when its agenda there demands a lot of skilful adjustment.

On the other hand, being the number one superpower, even with an administration that seems to pay far less attention to foreign than intern(al) affairs, means that you get cut a lot of slack. For example, when the Arab group broached Sudan’s request for a U.N. technical team to examine their seemingly well-founded claim that the U.S. had just bombed a Khartoum pharmaceutical factory, there was an embarrassing lack of support.

Bahraini Ambassador Jassim Mohammed Buallay raised the issue, but when the Council president asked if there were any comments, there were none at all. Instead delegates shuffled their feet and looked over their shoulders. There are people there prepared to challenge the U.S., but not for the unpopular Sudanese regime, which is why the Security Council is so clearly a political rather than a judicial body.

Which is why, of course, it took so many years for the U.S. and UK to agree to accept Libya’s offer to hand over the two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing to allow them to be tried by Scottish judges in The Hague. As a result, the Security Council resolved that the sanctions against Libya would be suspended immediately if the two were handed over. That is even better than it seems, since there is not a popsicle in the desert’s chance of them being reimposed once suspended.

As it turned out, the U.S.-UK agreement to a proposal originating with Qaddafi was a long-overdue shrewd move. Even as President Muammar Qaddafi declared satisfaction, as did everybody else, observers wondered how he would wriggle out of turning the two suspects over if they were in fact guilty, since in that case they almost certainly would implicate their own government in the planning not only of the Lockerbie bombing, but also the bombing of a French airliner over Chad.

Predictably, Qaddafi raised new objections, complaining there was no provision for them to be imprisoned in Holland. Therefore, since the British insisted that since they would be tried under Scottish law, they would also be imprisoned behind Scottish bars. As we said in the last issue, a main concern of the Libyan leader is to avoid having his two agents fall into the hands of the American or British security services. As we go to print, therefore, it begins to look as if the deal that would have raised the sanctions against Libya was dead on arrival.

And of course, the deal that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan cooked up with Saddam Hussain back in February has gone the way of all scraps of paper. Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, played Iraqi prime time for all it was worth by televising the meeting he held with UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler, telling him that Iraq was withdrawing cooperation.

One can only hope that Aziz derived a great deal of satisfaction out of it. He may not have provoked U.S. military strikes, but he did annoy the whole Security Council, even Iraq’s best friends, by unilaterally ripping up the agreement that so many of them had accompanied Kofi Annan out on a limb to secure.

As a consequence, there was a unanimous vote to suspend the regular sanctions reviews so that the already slender chance of lifting sanctions and relieving the misery of ordinary Iraqis disappeared completely. It is clear that Washington is prepared to fight to the last Iraqi to overthrow the dictator whom the Iraqis never voted for. And Saddam is equally prepared to use starving children to defend his clandestine weapons’ programs.

Butler may not be starving. But he is also stuck between two unscrupulous regimes, one in Baghdad and the other in Washington. His is an unenviable position. His task, the disarmament of Iraq, is one which Washington above all wants, even if it got the support of the U.N. for it after Baghdad’s defeat. But for the last six months it has been domestically inconvenient for the U.S. administration to “wag the dog” with military threats, so they suggested that he should be less vigorous in his searches for hidden evidence.

As an international civil servant, Butler should go ahead regardless of what Madeleine Albright says, but in the real world he knows that without the U.S. and UK pressure, the rest of the U.N. would just as soon forget the whole thing. At the same time, some people close to Kofi Annan, adopting the usual U.N. servile role to governments, have blamed Butler for his attitude, forgetting that even before he had taken over, his predecessor, Rolf Ekeus, was facing the same difficulties and the same dissimulation from the Iraqis. An UNSCOM inspector’s lot is not a happy one!

The end result of Baghdad’s bravado was unanimous Security Council support for a resolution that stopped the regular review of sanctions until Iraq resumes cooperation. The carrot is a promised overall review of the disarmament program which would draw up a “road map,” but the route that it describes will be little different from what Iraq has already been asked for.

The nuclear file is on the verge of closure, since nuclear facilities tend to be on the large and visible side, but the independent experts called in at Iraq’s request to review progress all seem to think that there is a strong case to answer about the chemical and, particularly, the biological weapons, where facilities can be more easily disguised and hidden. The discovery of a VX nerve gas agent in a warhead fragment was an especially disturbing piece of evidence, hitherto unexplained by Iraq, despite Baghdad’s bluster.