Annan's remarks on Iraq met with anger
U.S., U.K., Iraq fume over U.N. remarks
The Washington Post
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NEW YORK - The United States, Britain and Iraq angrily dismissed on Friday a warning from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that a military offensive in the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah could jeopardize the credibility of upcoming elections in Iraq. In letters dated Oct. 31 and addressed to President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Iraqi interim leader Ayad Allawi, Annan said using military force against insurgents in the city would further alienate Sunni Muslims already feeling left out of a political process largely orchestrated by Washington. ''I wish to share with you my increasing concern at the prospect of an escalation in violence, which I fear could be very disruptive for Iraq's political transition,'' Annan wrote. ''I also worry about the negative impact that major military assaults, in which the main burden seems bound to be borne by American forces, are likely to have on the prospects for encouraging a broader participation by Iraqis in the political process, including in the elections.'' Annan's comments and criticism drew anger and frustration from U.S.,
British and Iraqi officials. [...]
* * * www.un.org/apps/sg/offthecuff.asp?nid=636 London, United Kingdom, 19 October
2004
Q: Question for Kofi Annan. Two parts; first of all given what you said about the consequences of the international war on terror and the illegality of the war in Iraq, do you think Iraq now is a better place than it was before the fall of Saddam Hussein. And secondly, in particular on Fallujah, with American plans to finally push the rebels out of that town. What concerns do you have about that action, given American's tactics in the past, about their track record and about complaints from civilians in that town, that far too many civilians are killed in that kind of action? SG: On your first question, let me say that today we are all focused on Iraq, and I think as an international community we all have an interest in the stability of Iraq. Regardless of where you stood before the war or what we think about the reasons for the war, I think all our efforts should go into stabilising Iraq and helping the Iraqis take charge of their own destiny, economic and political, and move forward. I think no country, regardless of its political philosophy, its position on this, can afford to see a problematic Iraq in the middle of that region. So all hands on deck, let's do whatever we can to support the Iraqi people. On the question of Fallujah, obviously this is a question for the Iraqi
Government and the Multinational Force to make. But I think in these kinds
of situations, you have two wars going on; you have the war for the minds
and hearts of people, as well as efforts to try and bring down the violence
and the two have to go together. And it has to be calibrated in such
a way that you are able to move the people along with you, whilst at
the same time you improve the security environment. And I hope that that
approach is the one that is being pursued by the government and others
in Iraq.
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[www.un.org/News/ossg/hilites.htm] U.N. REFUGEE AGENCY CONCERNED AT FATE OF PEOPLE FLEEING FALLUJAH * The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) today [Nov. 9, 2004] said it is extremely concerned at the fate of tens of thousands of people who have fled the Iraqi city of Fallujah to escape the fierce fighting there. * The displaced people are staying with relatives, friends or other Iraqis around Fallujah, UNHCR says, citing information received from groups monitoring the situation in Iraq. * Some of the displaced people have been provided with tents. The majority [?] of civilians appear to have left the city, although it is difficult to establish numbers with any certainty. *
UNHCR says the most immediate needs of the displaced are food, shelter,
water and sanitation and health care.
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Surprise! A decent U.N. secretary-general.
The office of U.N. secretary-general is traditionally a refuge for knaves, lickspittles, and villains (in Kurt Waldheim's case, all three at once). So Americans are entitled to surprise at Kofi Annan's deft diplomacy in Iraq last week. U.S. warmongers had warned that Annan would give away the store to appease Saddam Hussein. But the soft-spoken secretary-general gave away nothing and got much. His persistent, polite diplomacy revived weapons inspections (which have eliminated far more Iraqi weapons than the war did); calmed nerves throughout the Arab world; and saved the Clinton administration from an ill-conceived, unpopular bombing plan--all without an apparently meaningful concession to Iraq. More important, Annan accomplished all this in a way that brought glory to the United States: He announced--emphatically--that the negotiations would have been fruitless without the U.S. military threat. The United States gains credit for diplomatic restraint; the United Nations gains credit for keeping the peace; the will of the U.N. Security Council is enforced; and the destruction of Iraqi weapons continues. Even if Iraq reneges on the agreement--which is likely--the United States has lost nothing but time: There will be far more support for bombing if Hussein flouts Annan than there was when Hussein was simply flouting Clinton. Kofi Annan is the perfect secretary-general for an age of U.S. triumphalism. It used to be that the Cold War stymied the United Nations. Today the United States does. It is dominant in politics, economics, culture. To the rest of the world, U.S. foreign policy is "We're Number One-ism"--an insufferable combination of gloating and bullying. The United States has its own ill feelings toward the United Nations. Conservatives see the organization as a mob of meddlesome, anti-American nags plotting for world government. (In some Americans' eyes, the United Nations' principal accomplishment is collecting loose change during UNICEF's trick-or-treat fund drives.) Bob Dole got his biggest round of applause during the 1996 presidential campaign when he mocked Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's name. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., threatened to stop all U.S. funding for the United Nations, and many of Helms' Republican colleagues in Congress have proposed U.S. withdrawal. Since he took over as secretary-general 13 months ago, Annan has begun to do the improbable: restore America's faith in the United Nations and the United Nations' faith in America. Annan's United Nations has shelved Boutros-Ghali's grand ambitions. Annan is building an organization we can live with, one that is smaller, better run, and more deferential to the United States. On paper, Annan isn't a promising candidate to reunite the United States and the United Nations. He is too attached to his organization, the first secretary-general to rise from inside its bureaucracy. (This does not exactly recommend him to anyone outside that bureaucracy.) He has spent his life as an "international civil servant," a phrase that conjures an image of someone wasting millions of U.S. dollars pushing paper around the Third World (which is basically what he did). Born to a powerful family in Ghana--his father was a hereditary chief--Annan attended Minnesota's Macalester College in the late 1950s on a Ford Foundation grant. As Ghana's promising democracy collapsed into a dictatorship, Annan, like many bright young West Africans, decided to remain overseas. He went to work for the United Nations, rising gradually through the ranks at the World Health Organization, the High Commission on Refugees, and the Secretariat. Eventually he supervised peacekeeping operations in Somalia and Bosnia. In the Byzantine, languorous U.N. bureaucracy, Annan earned a reputation as someone who actually Got Things Done. Thanks to his straightforward manner and overwhelming decency, he was the only U.N. official associated with Bosnia and Somalia to survive with his reputation unharmed. When the United States decided to dump Boutros-Ghali in late 1996, everyone touted Annan as the compromise candidate to replace him. (Everyone, that is, except the French. They wanted a secretary-general from Francophone Africa.) Annan is a true internationalist: He speaks English, French, and several African languages fluently. He has lived in Geneva, Nairobi, Cairo, Accra, and New York, among other places. His wife is Swedish (the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, in fact). But Annan is an internationalist with an American inflection. He was educated here, he loves living here--and, according to an aide, he'll probably retire here. A U.N. secretary-general is a CEO, someone who needs to be independent enough to take the initiative but tractable enough to heed his board members (that is, the member states). Annan is well suited to this dual role. For example: Americans have been demanding management reform for decades, and Annan is the technocrat who may do it--after all, he has a management degree from MIT. Annan's recent reform package cuts 1,000 jobs from the 10,000-person Secretariat, slashes administrative costs by one-third, and streamlines the United Nations' absurd bureaucracy. Annan is pushing merit-based promotion and management training, ancient ideas that are new to the United Nations. Americans say Annan hasn't cut enough; others say he has cut too much. In other words, he's doing it just right. Under Boutros-Ghali, the United Nations kept 80,000 peacekeepers in uniform. Now, post-Bosnia, post-Somalia, and post-Boutros-Ghali, there are barely 20,000. Annan is the world's most gentlemanly politician. Where Boutros-Ghali was highhanded and arrogant, Annan is gentle, soft-spoken, calm. Boutros-Ghali spoke English poorly, rarely visited American leaders, and regularly berated U.S. misbehavior. He was vicious without being tough. Annan is tough without being vicious. The United States would never have let Boutros-Ghali negotiate with Hussein. He was too reckless, too erratic, too anti-American. But Annan has formed a strong friendship with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She and her colleagues could trust him to win peace without appeasement. For the United Nations to thrive, it's not enough that the United States trust it. The United Nations must also trust the United States. That is Annan's next test. America's reputation is at an ebb in U.N. Plaza. The United States owes more than $1 billion in U.N. peacekeeping dues. These arrears are crippling the United Nations, which gets a quarter of its $2.6-billion budget from the United States. The organization has already curtailed essential activities, and may be forced to shut down next year if the Americans don't pay. Annan has been trying to pry the cash out of Washington since he took office. Last fall, Congress all but OK'd a $1-billion payout. Then a few conservative members killed the funding bill by attaching an unacceptable anti-abortion amendment. Annan visits Washington this week to push again. Albright is on his side. Clinton is on his side. And--perhaps the best indication of Annan's appeal--even Jesse Helms is on his side. Helms, who just two years ago threatened to end all U.N. funding, was charmed when Annan called on him last year. Helms, too, favors settling the U.N. debt. When a U.N. secretary-general can get Jesse Helms and Saddam Hussein to fall in line, he is doing something right. (David Plotz is SLATE'S deputy editor) * * * http://www..middleeast.org/launch/redirect.cgi?num=357&a=34 The Heritage Foundation Research - International Organizations
September 17, 2004 |
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the war with Iraq as an “illegal” violation of the U.N. Charter in a September 16 interview with the BBC, adding that “I hope we do not see another Iraq-type operation for a long time.” [1] Annan’s remarks were immediately condemned by U.S. allies who had supported the liberation of Iraq, including Great Britain, Australia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Japan, and are likely to also draw a strong response from the White House.[2] Kofi Annan’s ill-considered jibe undercuts efforts to stabilize postwar Iraq that have been endorsed by the U.N. Security Council. It stigmatizes the embryonic Iraqi government, while strengthening the hand of Iraqi insurgents and foreign terrorists determined to strangle democracy in Iraq and inflict a defeat on the U.S.-led, U.N.-backed security force in the country. It is difficult to understand why Annan would want to undermine the U.N.’s own efforts in Iraq at a time when the international organization faces increasing criticism for its failure to respond effectively to international crises. Annan’s statement that the war was “illegal” is both false and spurious. By Annan’s logic, the 1999 U.S./British-led intervention in Kosovo, which was conducted without benefit of a Security Council resolution, also would be “illegal” despite the fact that it was [as the interventionists say] widely supported by the international community.[In other words, the thief thinks if he stole once and got away with it, he is entitled to do it again?] It is true that Washington failed to convince Paris and Moscow to vote for a final Security Council resolution that explicitly endorsed the use of force if Iraq’s dictatorship continued to renege on its legal commitments to disarm. But the Security Council did unanimously pass Resolution 1441 in November 2002, which threatened “serious consequences” if Iraq failed to do so. Iraq also defied sixteen other Security Council resolutions on disarmament, human rights, and support for terrorism. Moreover, Iraq put itself in a state of war with the United States by violating the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqi forces shot at American and British warplanes assigned to enforce the U.N.-imposed “no-fly zones” over Iraq on a daily basis long before the 2003 war. While the Clinton Administration chose to ignore these and most other cease-fire violations, the Bush Administration correctly decided to take action in view of Iraq’s manifest failure to prove that it had dismantled its prohibited weapons programs. The U.N. Charter explicitly recognizes the right of every state to act in self-defense, a fact that Annan curiously neglects. An Ill-Timed Intervention Kofi Annan’s ill-timed comments should
be seen as a poorly conceived attempt to undercut the U.S. President’s
impending address to the U.N. General Assembly and to indirectly influence
the electoral debate in the United States. The notion of U.S. isolation,
a prominent theme advanced by Senator John Kerry, is a myth that Annan
is keen to promote on the world stage. He ignores the fact that the U.S.
is backed by over 30 allies with troops on the ground in Iraq, including
12 of the 25 members of the European Union and 16 out of 26 NATO members
states.[3]
The U.N. Secretary-General’s gratuitous comments
were an extraordinarily undiplomatic and inappropriate intervention from
a world figure who is supposed to be a neutral servant of the international
community. They raise serious questions about Annan’s judgment and his
suitability to continue in his post. The United States should press Secretary-General
Annan to clarify his harmful remarks and should demand an apology for the
offhand, gratuitous manner in which they were offered.
UN Insecurity Kofi Annan’s attack on the United States [will they retaliate?] over its decision to go to war with Iraq is indicative of the insecurity running through the corridors of power (or what’s left of them) at the U.N. headquarters in New York. The prestige and reputation of the U.N. is running at an all time low. The world organization failed spectacularly to deal with the Iraqi dictatorship under Saddam Hussein, is failing to provide leadership in disarming Iran, and is weak-kneed in the face of genocide in the Sudan. At the same time, the U.N. faces serious allegations of mismanagement and corruption [Halliburton contracts? Enron related favoritism, documented in public papers hidden from the public eye?] relating to its administration of the Iraq Oil-for-Food Program. The U.N. is a world body in steep, possibly terminal decline, struggling for relevance in the 21st Century, and Mr. Annan’s remarks only further underline his organization’s growing impotence [when confronted with a unilateralist, neo-imperialist U.S.A.]. James A. Phillips is Research Fellow in Middle
Eastern Affairs, and Nile Gardiner Ph.D. is Fellow in Anglo-American Security
Policy, at the Heritage Foundation.
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Houston Chronicle, Feb. 26, 2004 Feb. 26, 2004, 12:38PM
British agents allegedly spied
on Kofi Annan
LONDON -- British intelligence agents
spied on U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in the run-up to the Iraq war,
a former member of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Cabinet said today.
Blair refused to say whether the allegation was true but said the minister, International Development Secretary Clair Short, had been "deeply irresponsible." A U.N. spokesman said any such espionage would be illegal. For Blair, Short's accusation was yet another potentially damaging aftershock from his alliance with President Bush to topple Saddam Hussein. British intelligence dossiers claiming Iraq had an active and growing program of weapons of mass destruction have not been validated by evidence on the ground. It also was only the latest allegation of spying on U.N. missions ahead of the United States' invasion of Iraq. Earlier this month, Mexico's former ambassador to the United Nations said it was common knowledge that the United States spied on U.N. delegations in the lead-up to war.Chile also alleged its U.N. mission telephones were tapped as the Security Council considered a resolution backed by Washington, Britain and Spain authorizing the war. On Wednesday, prosecutors in London abandoned a case against an intelligence employee who leaked a memo disclosing U.S. and British intentions to eavesdrop on several U.N. missions in advance of a key Security Council vote. Blair's government also became involved in a furious controversy over the death [a supposed suicide, according to British officials] of a weapons scientist who reportedly raised questions about the integrity of the intelligence dossiers [that reported the "existence" of non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq]. At U.N. headquarters in New York, the world body gave its first reaction today to allegations that Annan was spied on. "We would be disappointed if this were true," U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said in New York. "Such activities would undermine the integrity and confidential nature of diplomatic exchanges. Those who speak to the secretary-general are entitled to assume that their exchanges are confidential." Short, who resigned her post after the campaign to topple Saddam, said she had read transcripts of Annan's conversations while she was a Cabinet member. "The U.K. in this time was also getting, spying on Kofi Annan's office and getting reports from him about what was going on," she said in an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio. The charge dominated Blair's monthly news conference, "I'm not going to comment on the operations of our security services," Blair said. "But I do say this: we act in accordance with domestic and international law [giving a damn in fact when it came to triggering an illegal war, in breach of - you get it - international law], and we act in the best interests of this country, and our security services are a vital part of the protection of this country [which Blair claimed could be imperilled if not obliterated by Saddam's non-existent weapons in a few minutes]. "So I'm not going to comment on their operations, not directly, not indirectly. That should not be taken, as I say, as an indication about the truth of any particular allegations [because, obviously, for him, the truth doesn't matter; appearances matter, and the media people employed by his office were to take care of that.... ] And [ - Blair continued, showing again what he thought DID matter - ] I think the fact that those allegations were made, I think, is deeply irresponsible," Blair said. [Because to be a whisteblower is shameful, to tell the truth and expose the crimes of a government is shameful. Whereas to lie is "in the best interest" - but of whom? Of the country? Of its population? Or of Blair and that stratum he belongs to - the so-called "elite"?] In her interview, Short spoke of seeing evidence of eavesdropping. "These things are done. And in the case of Kofi's office, it's been done for some time," she said. Asked whether Britain was involved, she said: "Well, I know I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan's conversations. In fact, I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war thinking 'Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying.'" Asked explicitly whether British spies had been instructed to carry out operations within the United Nations on people such as Annan, she said: "Yes, absolutely." Short had publicly questioned whether Britain should go to war in Iraq but eventually backed it in the House of Commons. She resigned in May, complaining the United Nations did not have a large enough role in reconstruction. Since then, she has called for Blair to resign, accusing him of misleading the country about the threat posed by Saddam. Short's comments came as she was interviewed about Wednesday's decision to drop legal proceedings against a former intelligence employee who leaked a confidential memo raising concerns about spying in the United Nations. Katharine Gun, 29, a former Mandarin translator with Britain's Government Communications Headquarters listening station, leaked a memo from U.S. intelligence officers asking their British counterparts to spy on members of the U.N. Security Council. At the time, the United States was seeking to win Security Council backing for war. The Observer newspaper quoted the memo, dated Jan. 31, 2003, as asking British and American intelligence staff to step up surveillance operations "particularly directed at ... U.N. Security Council Members (minus U.S. and GBR, of course)." Opposition politicians have questioned whether the decision to abandon the case was politically aimed to avoid embarrassing disclosures. Reacting to the Gun case and Short's allegations,
Blair
told reporters: "We are going to be in a very dangerous situation as a
country if people feel they can simply spill out secretsor
details of security operations -- whether false or true actually -- and
get away with it." [Which is why a certain
scientist had to die? These kinds of suicides - don't they remind us of
Stalin's Russia - which of course used violence for political reasons on
a much vaster scale, internally...]
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