Ian Williams 

Feeding the Foxes, Throwing to the Wolves   Ian Williams is The MaximsNews Global Pundit.  He is also a journalist, U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and the past president of the United Nations Correspondents Association.   Ian Williams is Available for Media Interviews:  IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com

            UNITED NATIONS - 9 June 2005   www.MaximsNews.com / -- Cherif Bassiouni, Joseph Stephanides, a long line of pink slips stretches to the horizon. 

The essential irrationality of the American position towards the UN has been shown again this week. Even in matters of personnel, Washington usually gets what it wants in the organization, and it costs the UN dearly, in cash, reputation and efficiency.

 Three years ago I wrote a column about the “US Hit list at the UN.”

At the time the Bush administration had just ousted the much respected Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Robert Watson, for disregarding advice from the oil companies on the benign effect of emissions, and then followed up by steamrollering the dismissal of Jose Bustani, the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a mere year after he had been unanimously elected for another five year term.

 A year later, the three-member U.N. tribunal said the U.S. allegations against Bustani were "extremely vague" the dismissal "unlawful," and mentioned that international civil servants should not be "vulnerable to pressures and to political change."

The Tribunal awarded him €50,000 euros, in damages and also his salary. Incidentally, I would personally bet on Joseph Stephanides, the recently fired fall guy thrown to the Foxes for Oil for Food, getting something similar, but see below for more on that.

Also on the “Hit List” were Mary Robinson, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who went later in 2002, and Peter Hansen head of UNRWA. When I met Hansen late last year, he joked, “I’m the only one remaining from  your list.” He went this March.

If Kofi Annan had not wisely declined to seek another term we can be sure that he would be getting the Boutros Boutros-Ghali treatment. (And to show how bipartisan we are, remember that that was under Clinton).

Currently Mohamed El Baradei of the IAEA is being faced with temptation: will the US continue to try to veto his reappointment, or will he succumb and deliver Iran on a plate to the Security Council.  We can but hope that he maintains the integrity he has shown so far. It does have some rewards.

One common thread in many of these dismissals is John Bolton. The other is that the US has managed to bully other members who should know better into compliance with their wishes. Sadly, the Christian Fundamentalists may be right about the lack of evidence for evolution. In international affairs, the evidence is more for devolution back to invertebracy. If there are backbones out there among the world’s politicians, let them please stand up where we can see them.

But do not hold your breath – if these examples are anything to go by.

Cherif Bassiouni

 Cherif Bassiouni, the American Egyptian human rights lawyer who was one of the movers behind the Hague Tribunals on crimes in the Balkans and Rwanda was been removed from his position as special representative for Human Rights in Afghanistan. Or more accurately, the position was removed from him. It was abolished.

A year ago, Kofi Annan appointed Bassiouni, a Professor at De Paul University in Chicago, to fill the vacancy which had been mandated by the UN Human Rights Commission, of which the US is a member. His job was to monitor human riots violations in Afghanistan and make recommendations on how the government could improve them.  

It would be no surprise to anyone who knew Bassiouni, or who has followed events in Afghanistan, that his two reports did not whitewash the dire position of human rights in the country, nor that they also detailed the US forces’ violations of them, which include unlawful detentions, and consequent murder and torture.

When the commission met this April, the statement on Afghanistan somehow erased all mention of the American contributions to the country’s gloomy human rights picture. The US and other Western countries have often derided the commission for its willingness to whitewash the human rights record of the violators who often seem to make their way onto it. The US seems to have proven its own accusations.

The EU ambassadors in Kabul wanted Bassiouni’s mandate to continue, and for him to remain. Afghan President Hamid Karzai  asked for him to be retained, Bassiouni chuckles “not because he liked the bad news I was bringing about human rights violations, but because his own ministers and officials weren’t telling him what was going on.”

Bassiouni noted that the US had not objected to his first report a year ago which was equally damning, so what changed? He maintains that it was Supreme Court decision which rescued Guantanamo from the extradimensional legal wormhole that the Bush administration had tried to squeeze it.

“They are trying to clean it up for when the Court looks more closely at what is going on. Their decision last year gave the administration a year to clean the place up, and that was running out.  Between February and April, they transferred 200 people from Guantanamo to Afghanistan,” he explains. They did not want a human rights lawyer poking into the cells and cages.

But how did they get this through the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva? Here, Bassiouni was a casualty of the German attempt to lick Washington’s fundamentalism on their way up  to a permanent seat on the Security Council. He says the Germans lobbied hard in the European delegation to let the Americans have their way because they said the issue of human rights in Afghanistan, despite the wishes of the government and diplomatic corps in Kabul, was not the “right one” to confront the Americans. 

When he saw which way the noxious wind was blowing, Bassiouni says he tried to lobby the other Europeans to keep the mandate and position in return for him stepping down. But there was no flexibility either from the Americans or from their lackeys. Someone should tell the Germans (and the Japanese, Brazilians and Indians) that this is hardly the stuff that real permanent members should be made of.

Stephanides – Thrown to the Fox

In ancient times, the Danes raided England every few years, looting and pillaging. And the King had the bright idea to pay them not to. He levied a tax called the Danegeld to pay them to go away. The Danes thought it was a bright idea too. They came back every year for more. As Rudyard Kipling said:

 “ But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
    You never get rid of the Dane.”

In the face of the wildly exaggerated, scurrilous, inaccurate and politically motivated furor over the Oil for Food programme, from the beginning the UN has appeased the attackers, and conceded ground to them when a vigorous counter-attack was in order.

When the UN summarily dismissed Joseph Stephanides last week, even some of the press who had been in the van of the witch-hunt could see that this was a fall guy dangling in the wind in front of them.

Stephanides was accused of securing the contract to inspect cargoes going into Iraq for Lloyd’s Register and breaking the rules to do so. He was not accused of taking money himself, nor of costing the organization any money, and it was confirmed that he thought he was acting in the best interests of the organization. Even if he had broken the rules, as determined by an American Volcker committee investigator whose ethical standards encompassed waltzing off to Congress with box loads of purloined UN documents, there is no justification whatsoever for firing him.

But in fact, he has documentation that makes it clear that he was following the decision of the ranking UN committee, the Iraq Steering Group, and that he was doing his job as the official liaison between them and the Sanctions Committee of the Security Council. Between them they had taken a sensible political decision: the lowest bidder was a French company, BureauVeritas. But France already had two other crucial contracts, and also the company proposed to use inspectors from the region and in effect just to sample inspections rather than examine each cargo, both of which were precluded by the invitation to bid.

It is worth remembering that a lot of the paper work and anxiety at the time had been generated by yet another American coup de personnel.  It was almost deja vue all over again. In 1993 also the UN was strafed by a press barrage of, as the mantra of the time had it “UN mismanagement and corruption,” and Boutros Ghali was under attack. So when Madeleine Albright claimed she had evidence that eight UN procurement staff were being bribed to give air transport contracts to a Canadian company instead of to a CIA linked American company, Boutros Ghali suspended them all.

Of course there was no evidence whatsoever. It took some years, but all the staff involved were reinstated, and paid compensation, so yet another politically motivated American attempt to clear up “mismanagement and corruption” ended up costing millions.

However, at least one of those initially fingered was in a crucial position in the Oil For Food contract process. Determined not to be fingered again, he insisted on documentation for any attempt to award the contract to the next lowest bidder.

That paper trail really shows how unfair the dismissal of Stephanides is. Far from asking Lloyds to submit a lower bill to win the tender as the Volcker Report suggested, the relevant committees had already decided that the company would get the contract. Stephanides saved the UN, and the Oil For Food programme $900,000 because he used the leverage of the lowest bid to chisel down Lloyds.

He has citations from German, American French and British diplomats substantiating his story. And he was fired.

A lifetime UN Civil Servant, Stephanides is deeply concerned at the damage to his reputation. He only has a few months to retirement, and so he loses only his repatriation grant and five per cent of his pension, but after a career of glowing reports he has been made a scapegoat.

He points out that neither he, nor his lawyers, which he had to pay for himself, were allowed to cross examine confidential witnesses. He has not been in front of any juridical tribunal where he could present his case. He is confident that he will be vindicated by the UN Tribunal, as indeed are many senior UN officials – but the backlog is several years. His hope is for a Joint Disciplinary Committee to hear his case quickly so that he can retire with his reputation intact.

It is ironic, that if that is refused, then far from being appeased, those who have manufactured the scandal will almost certainly shout that it is a cover up and that he is a scapegoat being cast into the wilderness to carry off the sins of those higher up.  The lesson that the UN needs to learn is that as far as American Conservatives are concerned, whatever it does is always wrong.

Sacking Stephanides is wrong in principle and in tactics. They will be back for more.