IRAQ
and the UNITED NATIONS, Post-War and
Pre-Peace (
pdf.file
) - The
Dilemma of the Future By H.C. Graf Sponeck*
, Essex, January 2005 On 2 August 1990 Iraqi
troops invaded and illegally occupied Kuwait. The United
Nations Security Council reacted quickly. Four days later
the most comprehensive economic and military sanctions ever
pronounced against a nation were imposed on Iraq
(1).
The 1991 Gulf War forced the Iraq Government to withdraw its
troops from Kuwait. This fulfilled the conditions of
resolution 661. Economic sanctions, however, were not
lifted. Instead, the Security Council changed its conditions
for the lifting of economic sanctions and decided in April
1991 to pass resolution 687 which demanded of Iraq the
disarmament of all of its weapons of mass destruction
(2).
Throughout the years
the Security Council became increasingly disunited on the
question whether Iraq had fulfilled the disarmament
requirements of resolution 687. (3)
The result was that economic sanctions remained in place
until the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
(4) Six weeks after the
war, the UN Security Council formally lifted economic
sanctions against Iraq on 23 May 2003. The human conditions
at that time were appalling: ii) mortality among
children under five had plateaued after 1997 at the high
level of between 100 and 120 death/ 1000; iii) calories per
capita were at 65% of pre-sanctions levels; iv) literacy had
declined from 81% to 74%; v) water and
sanitation systems were in an extremely dilapidated
state; vi) unemployment
was estimated to be between 60 and 75% of the workforce;
In 1995 the United
Nations and the Government of Iraq had finally agreed on
what became known as the oil-for-food programme.
(5)
This followed years of confrontation over the introduction
of a humanitarian exemption to protect the civilian
population against the full impact of economic sanctions.
It has to be asked why
despite such a humanitarian programme socio-economic
conditions in Iraq at the time sanctions were lifted in 2003
were so poor? In 1999, the then
Canadian Foreign Minister, Lloyd Axworthy, participating in
an Iraq debate in the UN Security Council, made the
important point that the Security Council had to act for the
benefit of the international community and not in the
interest of individual member states. During the same year,
the then chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Jesse Helms, poignantly told the UN Security
Council during a visit that the US would be ready to
strengthen the UN, 'if this was in the interest of America'
and not hesitate to do the opposite if the UN acted
otherwise. An influential group
often referred to as neo-conservatives published in 2000 a
US strategy for the 21st century (6).
Two years later US President Bush formalized this position
in a national security strategy document. (7) A review of the
positions taken by the United States in the Security Council
during the 13 years of economic sanctions and military
embargo against Iraq reveal that US Government concerns
rested first and foremost with Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) and US security interests rather than with
the humanitarian implications of UN Iraq policies.
(8)
US rhetoric during
these years, in and outside the UN Security Council,
expressing apprehension over the human conditions in Iraq
can not hide this fact. Every effort was made by Washington
to prevent Iraq from re-gaining authority over its finances,
to maintain a complicated and seriously impeding UN
bureaucracy for the import of supplies into Iraq under the
oil-for-food programme and to block, permanently or
temporarily, goods and services from reaching the country,
allegedly for their dual-use potential. (9) All of this had to do
with US fears that Iraq may use funds or humanitarian
supplies to develop its arsenal of biological, chemical and
nuclear weaponry. These fears were not unjustified given the
Iraqi history of WMD production. However, had the US
authorities and the UN Security Council as a whole carried
out their oversight mandate more consistently and adjusted
UN sanctions policies accordingly and in a timely manner,
socio-economic conditions in Iraq could have developed
differently and more humanely. The UN Security
Council, as an institution, left political leadership
largely in the hands of its most powerful member. It also
often failed to act in a timely manner, e.g., in speedily
raising the revenue level for the humanitarian programme
when in 1997 the severe inadequacy of an allocation of $ 113
per person per year to cover all sectors of human needs
(food, health, water supply and sanitation, electricity,
agriculture and education) became apparent.
(10)
The Security Council recognized the ensuing damage of
policies it had introduced or individual members had
unilaterally decided to follow. The Council, however, did
not have the political will or power to modify such
policies. Examples include, the Council's decision to deduct
30% of Iraq's oil revenue for payment of compensation of
foreign individuals, firms and governments that had
allegedly been victimized by Iraq's invasion into Kuwait.
The Security Council could easily have lowered or frozen
such deductions at the time when death rates and
malnutrition in Iraq were soaring. (11) The Council was aware
that the bureaucratization of the oil-for-food programme had
introduced long delays in the arrival of humanitarian
supplies. (12)
Some steps to remove such impediments were taken but only
after inordinate delays. The Security Council
was well aware that the introduction of two no-fly zones in
Iraq by the US, UK and French governments (13)
was without international mandate and therefore illegal.
Individual members of
the Council intermittently raised the subject of the
no-fly-zones in the Security Council. Yet, the Council
failed to ever carry out a debate on these zones, even when
in 2002/03 the violations in Iraqi airspace by the US and UK
air forces had no longer even remotely to do with the
protection of religious and ethnic groups such as the Shias
in the south and the Kurds in the north but instead involved
deliberate destabilization and preparation for
war. Deterioration of
socio-economic conditions in Iraq certainly can not be
explained solely in terms of the negligence of the UN
Security Council to carry out its oversight responsibilities
or to act in accordance with the knowledge it had of the
deteriorating conditions in Iraq. The dictatorship of the
Government of Saddam Hussein made its own and distinct
contribution to the misery of a people. It may be politically
convenient to leave accountability for what happened in Iraq
during the period up to the March 2003 war in a nebulous
state of interpretation with all the advantages this has for
the stronger over the weaker party. Objective analysis,
however, has to disregard a one-sided approach through which
the human drama is explained by either the brutality of a
regime or the failures of the international community. Much
more work has to be carried out in order to fully understand
the specific and separate roles the protagonists have played
in bringing about the desolate conditions in Iraq.
At this stage, one can
conclude that i) economic sanctions policy have played a
significant role in creating these conditions, ii) the
Security Council did cross the boundary between what were
unavoidable and negative side-effects of legally adopted UN
sanctions and the violation of international law including
international covenants and the convention of the rights of
the child, iii) the UN Security Council had more humane
options but chose not to introduce these in a timely and
decisive manner and thereby reducing the severity of the
impact of sanctions. In the context of the
re-emerging demands for the reform of the United Nations,
other elements must be cited to explain Iraq sanctions
policies. Among these is that the five permanent members of
the Security Council had the advantage of 'permanent'
association with a political issue such as sanctions against
a country. China, France Russia, the United Kingdom and the
United States were involved in the Iraq discussion from the
very beginning in 1990 and throughout the years shaped Iraq
policies. Process and substance of Iraq policy were in the
hands of these five countries. Elected members of the
Council, for example Malaysia, Bangladesh, Syria, Mexico and
Canada, as involved as they were during their two-year
tenure in the Council, had little chance to make a
significant impact on Council policies. For many low income
members it was also an issue of lacking human and financial
resources that prevented a more sustained involvement. More
powerful and better endowed members of the Council used this
fully to their political advantage. The United Nations
became like a tool box from which the powers chose what they
needed at any given time or disregarded this box when they
could not find or get the preferred implements. The international
debate leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq can
serve as a profound example of the disregard by powerful
governments represented in the Security Council for
positions taken by others when these questioned sanctions
policies or the justification to prepare for military
confrontation. The most extreme manifestation of this
approach is the unilateral decision by the Governments of
the United States and the United Kingdom to mount a military
offensive without a UN Security Council mandate.
(14) It has been argued
before that the UN Security Council had options in the
implementation of economic sanctions. The UN Security
Council ultimately, however, had no options to prevent
unilateral action by individual members of the Council to go
to war. The two governments and their parliaments that had
approved the invasion of Iraq, on the other hand did have
the options to chose what kind of a war they wanted to fight
and what kind of a peace they wanted to support afterwards.
The issue which needed to be debated was not who would win
this asymetrical war. The answer was clear. Public pronouncements
showed that there was a distinct pre-occupation as early as
2002 by these two governments with the strategies and
tactics of warfare, the duration and cost of the war, Iraq's
military response including the possible use of weapons of
mass destruction and the likely number of casualties within
the invading armies. (15) Understanding Iraqi
reaction to defeat, defining civilian priorities for the
immediate period after the war, anticipating the response to
the invasion of Shias, Sunnis and Kurds were issues either
not discussed at all or considered of secondary importance.
"While there may have been plans none of these 'plans'
operationalized the problem beyond regime collapse"
(16).
Iraqi pride of their ancient civilization, the importance of
dignity in Arab culture, local values and mores only became
issues after their neglect had created an enormous backlash
for the invading armies and the civil administrations that
followed. At that point, the winning of the 'hearts and
minds' of the Iraqis had become another battle and as it
turned out, a loosing battle. There was a high
price, first and foremost for the Iraqi people, but also for
the invading armies and foreign civilian personnel of this
fundamental shortsightedness. Instead of a welcome to
liberators came armed and increasingly organized resistance
to occupiers. Iraqis during the
years of sanctions had been deprived of all the basics of
life: Lack of electricity, shortage of water, largely
non-existent sanitation, life-threatening lack of medical
services and poor housing facilities. Speedy and sizeable
reduction of these difficulties during the initial period
after the war combined with large scale employment creation
programmes could have convinced many Iraqis that progress
was in the making. None of this happened. As conditions
worsened instead of improving, the number of angry and
disillusioned citizens increased and with it instability and
insecurity. The period of looting
in Baghdad and other cities across Iraq, especially the
thefts of ancient artifacts from the museum of antiquities
and the burning of the national library in the capital
evoked a strong reaction from the population. They felt that
their identity and the core of their ethos had been
attacked. As pictures of US soldiers watching these thefts
without intervening emerged and it became known that the
invading armies had protected selected ministries such as
the ministries of oil and interior but destroyed or severely
damaged others such as the ministries of health, social
welfare and education anger and consternation increasingly
became hatred and willingness to resist 'invaders'. Public
sentiment worsened rapidly in the second half of 2003 as a
result of the heavyhandedness of the US civil administrator
and his staff and the fundamental errors of judgment
committed by them: the entire Iraqi army was demobilized and
converted into an army of unemployed able bodied men,
de-ba'athification (17)
resulted in many civil servants and others working in the
public sector loosing their jobs, lucrative contracts were
awarded to foreign, and primarily US companies, without
possible Iraqi association, oil-for-food programme funds
handed over by the United Nations to the US interim
administration were not accounted for in a transparent and
for the public understandable manner and their impact not
felt, 'Iraqi' delegations to international meetings were
often headed by non-Iraqis (18),
privatization and for-eign investment regulations were
unilaterally introduced to the perceived disadvantage of
Iraqis, profits by non-Iraqi enterprises could be
transferred abroad without any local reinvestment or
taxation. The humiliating
behaviour of members of the US military in their house
searches (breaking doors, entering houses with dogs, hooding
male members of households, frisking females ), the
revelation of torture and extreme humiliation of male and
female prisoners not just in Abu Ghraib but also other
detention centres in Iraq was to Iraqis further evidence
that the occupiers of their country were first and foremost
concerned with their own political, economic, military and
security interests and did not care much for Iraqi welfare
and post-war reconstruction. All of this created an
environment of disillusionment and rejection by extreme
elements of the positive efforts on the part of the interim
government and US authorities to improve socio-economic
conditions. The March 2003 war and the poor handling of the
period after the war resulted in a life of deprivation for
the average Iraqi that to-date has not been materially
different from life under economic sanctions. Fear had been
a latent feature of life during the years of dictatorship,
the war and post-war period have created conditions under
which fear has become an overt aspect of daily living.
The fertile ground for
insurgency will remain as long as these conditions exist and
as long as Iraqis believe that they are remote controlled
and not free to decide how to conduct their lives in the
post-Saddam Hussein era. The manner in which the current
interim Government of Prime Minister Ilhad Allawi has been
chosen, its obvious lack of independent decision making
powers in the conduct of national affairs, the Prime
Minister's false and repeated portrayal of progress in Iraq
have intensified the suspicion among Iraqis that their
sovereignty is being squandered. It is tempting to
argue the case for the establishment of a national truth and
reconciliation commission. Such a commission could come a
long way to start a national healing process. Part of such a
process would have to be responsible use of justice for all
those in prominent positions of the Government of Saddam
Hussein and the exoneration of the others. It would also
have to include the immensely difficult reconciliation
between the northern areas of Iraqi Kurdistan and the Arab
center and south as well as between the Shi'ite clerics and
secular groupings. This calls for a national leader of
extraordinary qualities and competence who has yet to
emerge. As long as there is
direct and indirect outside interference as distinct from
international cooperation and the basic conditions of
security do not prevail, there will be no chance for such an
approach. The current power vacuum in which a national
administration exists but is perceived as a front for
foreign interests, security will not improve and therefore
national reconstruction will not be possible beyond at best
little clusters of physical improvements. These will not
have the political ripple effect to make a fundamental
difference in the psychology of the national situation.
The elections planned
for end-January could set in motion a national healing
process. At this point it is more than doubtful that they
will take place and if they do that they will be
country-wide rather than only partial elections in those
areas of Iraq where enough security exists. An essential
ingredient of reconciliation would be that Iraqis are left
alone in the preparations for elections and the subsequent
formation of government. This, too, is doubtful. Continental Europe,
countries in the Middle East, Turkey and Russia will have to
get much more and visibly involved in impressing on the
governments of the United States and the UK to change their
approach for Iraq. This should include the withdrawal of
their troops. The claim that such withdrawal would lead to
civil war and the disintegration of Iraq is part of a
powerful misinformation campaign. Kurds, Sunnis and Shias
have co-existed for centuries. Close to a million Kurds have
been living in Baghdad making it the largest 'Kurdish' city
anywhere. Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and other minorities have
intermarried, lived together in mixed neighbourhoods, shared
workplaces, served in the Iraqi foreign service and the
military and participated in politics. This does not mean
that Iraq has been a country with total ethnic and religious
harmony. There were and are ethnic and religious differences
and political confrontations have been fueled by these
differences. The years of
dictatorship witnessed the misuse of power and the
victimization of Kurdish and Shia communities. Being Kurd or
Shia in itself, however, was not the cause for political
persecution, opposition to Saddam Hussein and his government
was. Sunnis who were working against the regime were
therefore equally subjected to punishment. Occupation and
external meddling harbour the distinct danger that relations
between these groups will be re-defined and become more and
more determined by ethnic and religious identities. 'Divide
et impera' is nothing new in political history. This lends
urgency to the call for the withdrawal of foreign troops and
an end to the massive political involvement of foreign
powers in Iraq's internal affairs. To identify such
demands is not difficult, to translate these into a new
agenda of relationships between Iraq and the international
community is. The US and UK authorities would see this as a
major political defeat, and those presently in power in Iraq
as the end to their ascribed leadership. For these reasons
alone there will be powerful and sustained opposition to
anything that changes the present political paradigm.
National and international political leaders must
nevertheless have the courage and the sense of urgency to
work in this direction as otherwise the Iraqi cataclysm will
continue. At the same time, the
existing incapacity of the international machinery to handle
complex issues such as the Iraq crisis must be addressed to
avert a recurrence of similar crises elsewhere and to allow
a comprehensive handling of terrorism. The pre-occupation
with terrorists rather than with terrorism and its causes
will ultimately do little to improve global security.
Large scale reforms of
international structures and global application of norms
relating to justice, tolerance and equal opportunity must
become part of the international agenda. This points to the
urgency of broad-based reforms of the United Nations. The
reform debate will have to include clarification of many
fundamental issues which have plagued the international
community for a long time. Among them: i) a functional
division of labour between the International Court of
Justice and the UN Security Council. A Security Council
holding legislative, judicial and executive
responsibilities, as is presently the case, produces
counterproductive conflicts of interest; ii) the enlargement
of the UN Security Council. The Commission appointed by UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan has recently come up with
various proposals to add permanent and non-permanent members
to the existing Council of fifteen members. The proposed
enlargement reminds of a refined caste-structure with
various layers of permanent members, some with veto rights
others without and non-permanent members elected to the
Council for varying periods of time. This will not be
acceptable to the community of nations as it perpetuates
inequality of membership. Enlargement needs to be looked at
from another angle than merely more government membership.
Global human security and global environment and development
issues have become the top international concerns. Why could
non-governmental organizations with extensive experience in
these areas not become part of a reformed Security Council?
The immediate and forceful rejection, especially by
unilateralists of such a proposal as utopian and therefore
unworthy of consideration should not be allowed to prevent a
debate. In the context of the
reform debate, the question that needs an immediate answer
is: what steps for reforms have to be taken, by whom and
when. Before this question can be answered, the
international community will have to first clarify the roles
international organizations such as the United Nations
should be expected to play to stay relevant, what structures
are needed to play these new roles and what networks have to
be created to foster peace and security. The challenge to any
reform of international structures will be the willingness
of superpowers to operate within a multilateral framework
and to accept international law. In the case of Iraq, it
must be re-membered, the United States as the dominant
global power in this era decided to step outside this
multilateral framework and determine its approaches on a
unilateral basis. The establishment of the no-fly-zones, the
December 1998 operation desert fox and the March 2003 war
are straightforward examples of such unilateralism. There
are less well known examples of multilateral decision making
prompted by unilateral determination. The designs of the
compensation machinery to handle claims from parties
victimized by Iraq's invasion into Kuwait (19)
and the sanctions bureaucracy (20)
to manage the oil-for-food programme must be identified in
this respect. Even more difficult to gauge is the unilateral
force-fulness of resolution making in the UN Security
Council. Key Iraq resolutions
(21)
were seemingly 'negotiated' in the Council but in fact
driven by individual governments and ultimately accepted on
a consensus basis by the Security Council. There have been
Iraq resolutions with abstentions by permanent members or
dissenting votes by elected members but there has not been a
single resolution which was defeated by the veto of a
permanent member. This is not an example of successful
diplomacy but rather an example of successful power
politics. It furthermore demonstrates the weakness of the
current multilateral machinery. The international
community has an opportunity to learn much from the case of
Iraq. It can be said unequivocally that comprehensive
economic sanctions are not just blunt instruments as they
have often been called. They are tools which have inflicted
significant damage to innocent civilians and therefore
should not be used anymore. (22)
Linking economic sanctions with a military embargo is
holding a population responsible for the acts of their
government. Such linkage, if there is genuine concern for
the welfare of people who have nothing to do with a
conflict, should not be introduced in the future. Instead
rigorous oversight on the part of the UN Security Council of
imports into Iraq could have allowed a much more liberal
inflow of goods and services needed by the population. This
oversight was lacking. The normative and
structural unpreparedness of the international machinery,
especially of the United Nations, to handle conflicts such
as the one in Iraq, both before and after the wars of 1991
and 2003, must be fully comprehended as a first step towards
remedial reforms. Global security, a
major concern for all countries, must not be seen as an
issue one can handle with military might. The priority is
human not military security. Of course, those who endanger
international security, terrorists, have to be caught and
brought to justice. However, in order to improve global and
regional security, it is much more important to understand
the causes of terrorism and act accordingly. The agenda for reform
of the international machinery for peace, conflict
resolution and international development remains formidable
but is achievable if all nations, including the most
powerful, accept multilateralism as the starting
point. * Served in the United
Nations for 32 years holding senior posts as UN Resident
Coordinator in Botswana, Pakistan and India, Director of the
UNDP European Office in Geneva and UN Humanitarian
Coordinator in Iraq. Footnotes: 1) see
UN Security Council Resolution 661 of 6 August
1990 2) see
UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 15 April
1991 4) see
UN Security Council Resolution 1483 of 22 May
2003 5) A
memorandum of understanding to this effect was signed on 20
May 1986 in New York between the United Nations and the
Government of Iraq 6)
Rebuilding America's Defenses, Strategy, Forces and
Resources for a New Century, A Report of the Project for the
New American Century, September 2000 7) The
National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
September 2002 8) As an
example, the then US Ambassador to the United Nations in New
York, John D. Negroponte told the US Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on 7 April 2004 that the humanitarian
programme for Iraq was important but US pre-occupation
concerned Iraq's disarmament; 9) In
2002, the US and the UK governments had put a record $5.5
billion worth of humanitarian supplies on hold; 10) For
the initial three phases of the oil-for-food programme in
1996/98, the total allocation per phase of six months for a
population of 22.5 million was $ 1.3 billion; 11) For
most phases of the oil-for food programme, the value of
humanitarian supplies arriving in Iraq was little more than
the amount of compensation payments Iraq had to make to the
UN Compensation Commission in Geneva 12)
Procurement of humanitarian supplies involved a minimum of
23 seperate steps by Iraq, the UN and the
exporter 13)
Initially, France had joined the US and the UK in
establishing these zones in 1991 covering Iraqi airspace
north of the 36th parallel and south of the 32nd parallel,
yet left this alliance in 1996 when the US and UK decided to
extend the southern zone to the 33rd parallel 14) The
UN Security Council refused to legitimize the US/UK decision
to go to war against Iraq on the basis of UN Security
Council resolution 1441 of November 2002. The majority of
governments represented in the Security Council in March
2003 did not accept that Iraq was in material breach of this
resolution 15) On
31st July and 1 August 2002 the US Senate Foreign Affairs
Committee called over 30 witnesses to Washington. This
briefing dealt overwhelmingly with issues of war and its
costs, military occupation and weapons of mass destruction
and hardly at all with post-war issues 16)
This is the conclusion of Major Isaiah Wilson, official
historian of the US Army, as reported by the Washington
Post, 25 December 2004 17) The
Iraqi Ba'ath party consisted of a five tier structure. While
it was not mandatory to belong, there was pressure to join
the party, particularly civil servants. After the 2003 war,
the US civil administration dismissed not just the entire
Iraqi army but anyone who had been a member of the Ba'ath
party at whatever level. This approach was later given up as
unrealistic. 18) As
examples, an Iraqi delegation negotiating possible WTO
membership in Geneva was headed by a US official, at the
Amman Economic , Iraq was represented by US Administrator
Paul Bremer 19) It
was US government pressure which created the UN Compensation
Commission in Geneva. While the UN Security Council on
previous occasions had recommended that countries pay
compensation for damages they had caused to other countries.
Iraq was the first case of a country for which the UN
Security Council worked out the details of compensation,
decided that Iraq provide 30% of its oil revenue for
compensation and enforced this policy. 20) The
Un Security Council Sanctions Committee instead of
overseeing policy implementation micro-managed, under US/UK
pressure, the procurement of humanitarian
supplies; 21)
These includes UN Security Council resolutions 687 (1991),
1284 (1999) and 1483 (2003); 22) The
UK House of Commons in a report on sanctions published on 27
January 2000 referring to the human conditions in Iraq
concludes that it is hoped that there will never be another
case of comprehensive sanctions
http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/human/iraq.html
i) one out of
five children in central and southern Iraq was
chronically malnourished;
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Emanzipation
Humanum,
version January 2005, translation from german to english by
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dialogue, translation into other languages are all
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