Blix Appointment May Set in Motion an End to Iraq Sanctions
By Ian Williams
Between them, Iraq and the U.N. are guaranteed public attention. Things keep changing but, in the end, they always look the same. Saddam Hussain and sanctions are still there, and ordinary Iraqis still suffer on both accounts.
However while Saddam is a fixture, all the other actors seem to have quick turn-arounds and January and February saw an array of personnel shifts. The Security Council, or rather the Security Council’s "friends of Iraq"—Russia, China and France—stopped U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s proposal that Rolf Ekeus, the man who started UNSCOM just after the Gulf war, be brought back to head UNMOVIC, the new monitoring and inspection commission for Iraq.
Instead, on Jan. 26, the French successfully proposed Hans Blix, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, to head the agency, and received unanimous support from a wrangle-weary Security Council. The Americans and the British greeted the appointment as a step forward for Resolution 1284, and both they and the pro-Iraqis looked on Blix with benign eyes. The word that everyone used was "independent."
There was time when such a concept would have provoked an American veto, but that was long ago. There was even a time when the U.S. was unhappy that Mr. Blix’s agency, which had been inspecting Iraq’s nuclear program for some decades, had somehow overlooked several parallel nuclear weapons programs.
But now Washington was just very grateful that Blix was not totally in Iraq’s pocket. He was scheduled to take up office at the beginning of March, and that starts the clock ticking for the end of sanctions if, and a highly conditional if it is, Iraq cooperates.
Resolution 1284 gives 45 days from starting for Blix to submit plans for staffing and organization, and then, if Iraq allows inspectors in, 60 days for UNMOVIC and the IAEA to compile a list of what Iraq has to do. Then, 120 days after the inspectors enter, if Blix and the IAEA certify cooperation, sanctions could be suspended.
To protect against accusations of spying and to minimize governments’ interference in his work, Blix wants staff employed on U.N. terms rather than seconded by member countries. That means that he faces fewer accusations that his staff are covert operatives, which pleases the Russians, French and Iraqis. For their part, the Americans and British, who allegedly used to supply the spies, are happy that he is independent enough to shrug off any attempts by Baghdad and its friends to micro-manage his staff choices.
Blix has to walk a tightrope. Baghdad and its friends hope that he will neither find, nor indeed look too hard for, signs of clandestine weapons programs. Most of the Security Council would like to see a rapid end to sanctions, but realize that the U.S. will not tolerate that without a credible certification that Iraq is not arming. Just how credible is an issue awaiting the diplomatic fudging process.
Interestingly, Iraq has made the usual noises against the resolution, but not very noisily. And Iraqi leaders have warm feelings for Blix for exactly the same reason that the Americans were chilly about him, since he was on the record against UNSCOM’s zealous attempts to track down suspect weapons systems. Many diplomats think there is indeed a serious chance that Baghdad will cooperate. So there is a real possibility of the end of the more devastating sanctions by the end of the year.
Enhancing that, Kofi Annan announced the appointment of former Russian Ambassador to the U.N. and to the U.S. Yuli Vorontsev to oversee the settlement of the disputes between Iraq and Kuwait on repatriation of missing people and property. Presumably, he will persuade the Iraqis to cooperate on the issue which, even assuming total compliance and cooperation on disarmament issues, could hold up the permanent lifting of sanctions imposed in the "Mother of All Resolutions" after the Gulf war.
There were yet more personnel changes connected with Iraq when Hans von Sponeck resigned in protest against the U.N. sanctions on Feb. 13. Von Sponeck, reappointed last November in the face of public American and British disquiet, was due to go soon anyway, as was his compatriot Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Baghdad, who also resigned.
There were mixed feelings since, while Burghardt was careful to apportion blame equally to the regime in Baghdad, whose obduracy has given the U.S. the opportunity to maintain sanctions, von Sponeck was felt by many of his colleagues to have neglected his responsibilities for distributing food so that he could grandstand on the issue. Even so, the question he asked remains unanswered. "How long should the civilian population, which is totally innocent of all this, be exposed to such punishment for something that they have never done?"
-from The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs April 2000
