Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 2000, pages 52-53
United Nations Report
Handshaking and Foot-dragging at the U.N. Millennium Summit
By Ian Williams
In one way, the U.N.’s Millennium Summit and Assembly at the beginning of September, attended by more than 150 presidents, prime ministers and assorted potentates, was an attempt to exorcise an Arab ghost. The one tangible result of the affair is that it is almost inconceivable that Secretary-General Kofi Annan will face any opposition to a second term when the issue comes up, as did his predecessor, Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The latter made the term-ending error of endorsing a U.N. investigation’s conclusion that Israel’s attack on the U.N. peacekeeping base in Qana, southern Lebanon, in which some 100 Lebanese civilians were killed, could not have been an accident.
By contrast, speaker after speaker praised Annan, who basked in the warm glow of good public relations for what was, after all, a media event par excellence. One would be hard pressed to put a finger upon any substantive difference from the pre-summit world body.
The Millennium Declaration was a mixture of piety, about ending the scourge of war, and precision, about attacking poverty. It was mostly a case, however, of repeating pledges made so often in the past—and equally often broken. At Kofi Annan’s urging, the Assembly committed the massed governments to halve by 2015 the number of people living on less than a dollar a day. One need not be a cynic to wonder whether a pledge to give up adultery by the same date would be any more effective. Divorce lawyers doubtless would still be secure in their jobs.
Watchers of PBS may remember the episode of “Fawlty Towers” in which John Cleese, faced with a bus-load of German tourists, tries vainly not to “mention the War.” This would have been no challenge to U.N. resolution drafters, who are adept at not mentioning wars. Indeed the Gulf war resolutions are all headed as the “situation between Iraq and Kuwait.” Even in this extenuated form, however, none of the world’s major conflicts, let alone the Middle East, got a mention in the resolution’s consensual banalities.
The major point, as echoed by most leaders, was a call for an injection of funds and forces into U.N. peacekeeping. Based on a report prepared by former Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, the recommendation was eminently pragmatic in its avoidance of any hint of establishing U.N. missions to which the U.S. Congress could object.
The Millennium Declaration was mostly a case of repeated past pledges.
Many of the resolution’s other points were blunted to meet the consensus requirement. One U.S. contribution to this was to dilute the final statement so that countries were asked only to “consider” signing up for the International Criminal Court, rather than being urged to do so. Newly nuclear India removed a call for states to sign the Non-Proliferation treaty, while the other nuclear states, including the U.S., nixed Annan’s original suggestion for a conference on nuclear dangers.
One accomplishment, perhaps, is that funding pledges were made at a much higher level than before. It remains to be seen, however, if U.N. officials will hold leaders accountable—should, for example, the U.S. fail to pay up its $1.8 billion in dues arrears. President Bill Clinton did call for “better machinery to ensure U.N. peacekeepers can be rapidly deployed, with the right training and equipment, the ability to project credible force, and missions well-defined by a well functioning headquarters...All nations, including my own,” he concluded with a straight face, “must meet our obligations to the U.N.”
Waddling into lame-duckness after two terms, Clinton did not explain why he had not achieved any reduction to date in U.S. arrears. He did provide strong hints, however, of a post-presidential career as a replacement Jimmy Carter, peacemaker and olive branch-bearer to the otherwise obnoxious rulers of the world. In fact, he appears to be embarking on it already, and with quintessentially Clintonian deniability. He shook hands with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, for example, behind closed doors and away from the cameras. For a whole day the White House denied the encounter had taken place—until, probably, masses of rapidly conscripted focus groups reassured his aides that Cuban-American lobby strength was at an all-time low.
Similarly, Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stayed behind in the General Assembly Hall to listen to the speech of Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami. This could have been an accident, just as it could have been accidental that the Iranian leader’s speech was brought forward from the afternoon to adjoin Clinton’s. It also could also have been a coincidence that Khatami’s speech contained no abusive references to the Great Satan. And one day soon we may see pigs fly in formation over the Potomac.
Khatami himself played the game well. The Iranians were hosting an event on dialog between civilizations which they had scheduled to coincide with the Millennium Summit, and they were much in evidence, except at the luncheon given by the U.N. secretary-general. It was reported that Khatami absented himself so that opponents at home would not see him in a room full of wine-quaffing and toasting infidels.
It was also suggested that Khatami had dropped out from the heads of state photo-shoot lest the Clintonian thaw be tested to the breaking point by being in handshaking proximity.
Missing Handshakes
However, there was a whole lot of handshaking not going on, according to some Arabs, who claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak kept lunging to shake hands with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, only to be perpetually frustrated as the diplomatically adroit heir apparent turned his back on the Israeli’s overture.
Other missing handshakes included Clinton’s vain attempt to get Barak and Yasser Arafat back to the negotiating table. At least, thanks to a war of attrition waged by Palestinian Ambassador Nasser Al-Kidwa, Chairman Arafat was accorded all the dignities of a head of a non-member state. This included posing in the photograph with all his protocol peers, even if the distinction was somewhat attenuated when an interloper, the representative of the Knights of Malta, sneaked into the picture.
Iraqi Sanctions, in General
While the peace process was obliquely avoided by the declarers and resolvers of the summit, Iraq did at least get a reference, if only under the general heading of sanctions. The Declaration pledged “To minimize the adverse effects of economic sanctions on innocent populations; to subject such sanctions regimes to regular reviews; and to eliminate the adverse effects of sanctions on third parties.”
Just who is hurting whom, however, is a contentious issue. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook pointed out that Iraq is now selling more oil than ever before in its history, and that a regime that imports 1.75 million bottles of whiskey a year (he forbore to identify it as Scotch) can hardly blame sanctions for shortages of food and medicine.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz sermonized that “There is no guarantee, of course, for the proper application of the U.N. Charter unless all states, both largeand small ones, adhere to the principles of the Charter, particularly the principle of equal sovereignty of states.”
Aziz did not refer to the issue of Kuwait’s sovereignty having been almost terminally challenged by a neighboring member state, nor did he refer to the U.N. arms inspectors still waiting permission to enter Baghdad.
Just waiting for the hullabaloo of heads of state to depart, Hans Blix, head of UNMOVIC, the new weapons monitoring commission, will tell the Security Council that his new, improved inspection teams, minimally Anglo-Saxon and directly employed by the U.N., are ready to begin work in Iraq.
There is no sign whatsoever, so far, that Iraq is prepared to receive them. This means that, since Madeleine Albright explicitly renounced armed force as a reaction to Iraq’s defiance, there will be a continuing impasse, and continuing sanctions.
The political support for sanctions, however, is declining. While what Robin Cook says may have some validity, the Iraqis certainly have won the media war, and the sanctions certainly give Saddam Hussain’s regime a plausible excuse for its own depredations on Iraq’s civilian population.
Even Egypt, a strong member of the Gulf war coalition, is now urging an end to the sanctions. Foreign Minister Amr Moussa declared that the way forward was for the U.N. secretariat, the secretary-general or the chairman of the Security Council to start discussing a way to suspend the sanctions, since Iraq is no longer the threat it was a decade ago. The Egyptian stance will certainly stiffen Baghdad’s resistance, although France, which actually abstained on Resolution 1284 setting up UNMOVIC, has told Iraq that the way out is compliance.
If the Iraqi people indeed are starving as a result of sanctions, then Baghdad must explain how the presence of arms monitors is a greater evil than the deaths of its children. The sybaritic lifestyle of Iraq’s leadership, moreover, lends credence to the attacks of people like Madeleine Albright who are equally prepared for innocents to pay the price for their principles.
Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and the author of The U.N. for Beginners.
