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UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com,
UN/ - 03 January 2007 --
Ban
Ki-moon became the eighth U.N. Secretary General
on Monday, 01 January.
Any secretary general's honeymoon in Washington
is likely to be short.
Who now remembers that outgoing Secretary
General Kofi Annan was a US nomination back in
1996, or that he managed to persuade Jurassic
Jesse Helms to cut a deal on paying off
Washington's debt to the UN?
As Annan leaves, it gives him some wry
satisfaction that John Bolton, the US ambassador
who thought he was a viceroy, has been sent off
the field by the new Democratic Congress.
After spending his first term perceived almost
as a secular saint, Annan spent much of his
second being reviled by Bolton's soulmates as a
global kleptocrat.
It was mostly in the United States that the
sustained neocon Swift-boating, through the
alleged "Oil for Food Scandal,"
muddied Annan's reputation.
Fortunately, the rest of the world took little
notice of those furious and hyperbolic
exaggerations.
Annan's historical position is now clearer, and
it is not just customary valediction to say that
he has been one of the most effective secretary
generals in UN history.
Successes in Sierra Leone, Liberia, East Timor,
Lebanon and Congo's first free elections in four
decades are no mean vindication of Annan's
principled pragmatism.
Bill Clinton pushed Annan's appointment because
of a misapprehension that he would be a reverse
of his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali: more
secretary than general.
Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine
Albright, did not want someone with big ideas
and a big mouth engaging in public debates with
their Administration.
They thought they could count on the reserved UN
bureaucrat to deliver.
They were right about the big mouth, wrong on
the big ideas. Annan is not a great
orator.
Audiences have to strain to hear his softly
spoken phrases, whose content has usually been
carefully polished to remove any language that
would be too confrontational.
Yet the big ideas kept coming.
As a cog in the UN juggernaut hijacked by the
great powers, Annan was implicated in the bloody
failures in Bosnia and Rwanda, and on taking
office he tried to make "Never Again"
more than an empty slogan, beginning with an
unprecedentedly open report on the UN's role in
those events.
Human rights, development and global
responsibility were his constant refrain over
the years, and he reclaimed a role for the UN as
a standard setter, making development a global
issue.
Annan's quiet authority and palpable decency
made him a perfect standard-bearer both for the
organization and for these values.
It was precisely those strengths that the
xenophobic wing of the US media tried to
undermine in his second term, when he stated the
obvious truths about Washington's disregard for
international law and human rights, most notably
in Iraq.
However, there is a built-in contradiction in
combining the roles of peacemaker and tribune of
the world's peoples.
The secretary general cannot bad-mouth
perpetrators too strongly, since he may have to
negotiate with them.
Even some close aides wish that Annan had been
more stentorian in his statements.
Annan admits that sometimes he may have been too
low-key, but he argues that "particularly
when it comes to human dignity and individual
rights, some of the positions I have taken...are
also intended to empower others, particularly
the civil society. In some countries people can
quote the secretary general...and not go to
jail. If they say it themselves they will be in
trouble."
When Annan took office, the UN was still reeling
from decades of Congressional
assault--culminating in the US putsch against
Boutros-Ghali.
The organization had few friends in Washington.
Annan realized the importance of engaging the
United States actively--not just for the sake of
his own survival but for that of the
organization itself.
That predicated cultivating a US constituency,
and Annan was remarkably successful at it for
most of his tenure.
In particular, he engaged American Jewish
organizations and worked hard to end the
isolation of Israel inside the world body, at
the risk of alienating key international
constituencies.
This led to criticism--some of it from
supporters and close associates--that he was
forgetting the Palestinians.
However, Annan has consistently restated and
emphasized the UN's legal and humanitarian
positions on Israel, and he condemned the
Israeli attack on the UN's Khiyam outpost in
Lebanon during the summer war.
Annan had built enough trust from both sides for
the resolution of this summer's war in Lebanon,
which was perhaps the best vindication of his
principled pragmatism.
Once again, the UN had to cope with the
consequences of Washington's refusal to listen
to others.
Annan called for a cease-fire when two permanent
members, the United States and Britain, regarded
it as "premature."
While the Security Council was tied down by a
threatened US veto, Annan had the UN
pre-emptively preparing a solution--an expanded
and reinforced peacekeeping force, which allowed
the Israelis and their allies to climb down from
the pole up which they had clambered.
Ten years ago it was a major plank of Israeli,
and consequently US, Middle East policy to
exclude the UN from any role.
Following ten years of Annan's tightrope
diplomacy, the Israelis pleaded for the UN to
step in.
While the Bush White House did not overtly join
the assault on Annan's integrity during the
so-called Oil for Food Scandal, it certainly did
not try to curb the rabid right when they were
calling for his resignation.
Annan admits, "There have been times when
it has been tough, particularly when some people
on the Hill or the right wing begin attacking
the UN and the Secretary General, and no one
pulls them back....
If you undermine the organization to that
extent, your own population may ask you, Why are
you going to this organization that you've
discredited so much?"
For fifteen years the US perception of the UN
has revolved around the issue of Iraq.
The organization was a convenient scapegoat for
US policy failures, which ricocheted
catastrophically from insufficient resolution to
too much. Washington expected the UN to follow
faithfully every wobble.
Saddam Hussein did consistently violate the
terms of UN resolutions, but Washington's
positions, not least in treating weapons
inspectors as a branch of US intelligence,
succeeded in giving his defiance quasi
legitimacy.
Both the Clinton and Bush administrations made
it plain they would veto any lifting of
sanctions until regime change--even though this
was not in any way a part of the UN
resolutions.
First Boutros-Ghali and then Annan had to
negotiate compliance from Baghdad, even though
Washington's veto insured that they could offer
no "light at the end of the
tunnel."
Iraqi civilians paid the price for the obduracy
of both Baghdad and Washington.
In 1998, after negotiating with Saddam, Annan
himself pointed out, "You can do a lot with
diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force
you can get a lot more done." That was
never consistently forthcoming.
Annan is deeply conscious of the collateral
damage of the Iraq War on the global
community:
"It led to a major division in this
organization and in the world. And it has not
healed yet.... At the early stages the leaders
themselves were quite divided, and they were
very vocal about it.... They are trying to mend
fences and work together, but we are not there
yet."
In his typically oblique way, Annan lodges a
criticism of the invasion:
"The member states debated it fully here,
and you noticed that the majority of the members
in the Council could not bring themselves to
vote for the military action. The US and others
decided to go outside the Council to take
action, and of course individual governments are
free to take decisions that they wish to. But I
think it was appropriate that the Council took
the decision it did."
True to form, even at this late stage, when he
is beyond the reach of Rush Limbaugh and Norm
Coleman, he persists in a non-confrontational
correction.
Following the UN's laudable but ineffective
refusal to authorize the invasion, neocon
warrior Richard Perle, a member of George W.
Bush's Defense Policy Board at the time, crowed
over the organization's troubles in an article
headlined,
"Thank
God for the death of the UN."
It
wasn't long before triumph turned to quagmire,
with Washington calling on the UN for its
services.
The war was also to have profound consequences
for Annan's media image in the United States, as
it allowed all the obsessive UN-baiters out of
their kennels.
Hitherto
the perception of him had been of one who was
Teflon-coated and unassailable, exuding moral
authority. No longer.
One
of the postwar responsibilities the UN accepted
was the transition from occupation to Iraqi
self-government, and the officials involved were
well aware that the neocons' man, Ahmad Chalabi,
was a self-promoting carpetbagger with a bigger
constituency in Washington think tanks than in
Baghdad.
Chalabi
and the think tanks bitterly opposed UN
involvement, not least for that reason.
He
came to New York and threatened Annan's office
with consequences--with the Oil for Food
Scandal, in fact.
At
the time Annan described the imbroglio as
"a bit like lynching."
A
distressing number of American media assessments
of his tenure are still presenting it as a taint
on Annan's reputation rather than a blot on
their colleagues' integrity for joining in the
malicious Swift-boating.
In
fact, as demonstrated in these pages [see
Williams, "The Right's Assault on Kofi
Annan," January 10/17, 2005], by any
rational standards Oil for Food was a success,
so much so that Washington asked that it be
continued in the year after the invasion.
The
Volcker Commission inquiry alleged that the OFF
director had received $140,000 over four years
in kickbacks from perfectly legal, if unethical,
oil trades.
The
rest of the money allegedly transferred to
Saddam was the result of oil sales in breach of
sanctions but condoned by Security Council
members, or from companies whose behavior was
overlooked by member governments.
Still bemused by the media battering, Annan
suggests that publicity during the inquiry was
"patently unfair.
What
was interesting was the way they handled it,
with rogue investigators leaking information and
leading people astray.
When
the full story came out and they discovered that
the scandal was not here but in the capitals,
with the 2,200 companies involved in kickbacks,
the story died."
No
part of the scandal was more dead than the $10
billion from the program that was given to US
occupation authorities--spent lavishly and with
very little paper trail.
Representative
Henry Waxman has been a lonely voice in
Washington following the trail from OFF to GOP
crony contractors. So far Annan's media
persecutors have shown little interest.
Those who do not read or watch the Murdoch media
will probably note that Annan's biggest
historical legacy will be the
"Responsibility to Protect."
Rather
than try to amend the UN Charter, in 2005 he
maneuvered the heads of state at the UN's
sixtieth-anniversary World Summit to reinterpret
it.
From
now on, the threats to "peace and
security" that the Security Council is
chartered to fight include governments' failures
to protect their own people, thus overturning
the centuries-old principle of absolute national
sovereignty accepted by the Charter.
Annan reminisces about the initial reaction to
his raising the subject:
"When
I said, back in 1999, 'We cannot accept that
governments can hide behind the shield of
sovereignty and brutalize their people or allow
these violations to go on,' quite a lot of
ambassadors were very upset that I was
encouraging interference in their internal
affairs. And yet five, six years on, we have the
'Responsibility to Protect' as a principle
accepted by all heads of state."
It
has taken several millennia for an accepted
principle like "Thou shalt not kill"
to be implemented, so we should not be too
disappointed if the continuing carnage in Darfur
casts doubt upon the sincerity of many of those
heads.
At
least the concept strips the defenders of mass
murder of any spurious legal or ethical defense
based on national sovereignty.
Even
if it is unfinished business, Darfur is
certainly not Annan's failure; he has been
remarkably outspoken about the culpability of
Khartoum.
"When
I hear heads of state get up and say, 'The UN
must act in, say, Darfur,' who is the UN
here?" he asks.
"We
need to hold governments to the solemn pledge
they made in the General Assembly. Most people
believe that Darfur is a sort of test, so we
need to remind them that they made this solemn
pledge and we want them to redeem it. What's
even more important is that peoples around the
world can use this to push member states to
action."
He
adds, "Without pressure from the population
and civil society, I don't think they would do
it."
Annan has done more than any predecessor to
insure that those invoked in the opening words
of the UN Charter, "We the peoples of the
world," have a serious place on the UN
agenda.
Under
very difficult circumstances, one of which was
the negative role of US administrations, he has
done remarkably well.
IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com
~~~~~~
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