"One has to be careful," said U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan
earlier this month, "not to confuse the U.N. with the U.S." If the Secretary
General had taken his own advice, then maybe his Brazilian subordinate,
Vieira de Mello, might not have been so summarily blown to pieces in Baghdad
two days earlier.
Whichever group sent that truck bomb on its way had made the
accurate assessment that de Mello and his boss Annan were so brazen in
allowing the United Nations to play a fig leaf role in the U.S. occupation
of Iraq that drastic action was necessary to slow down the process. So the
U.N. man handpicked by the White House paid with his life.
To get a sense of how swift has been the conversion of the
United Nations into after-sales service provider for the world's prime
power, just go back to 1996, when the United States finally decided that
Annan's predecessor as U.N. Secretary General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, had to
go.
In a curious foreshadowing of Annan's plaintive remark cited
above, Boutros-Ghali told Clinton's top foreign policy executives, "Please
allow me from time to time to differ publicly from U.S. policy." And unlike
Annan, he duly did so, harshly contrasting western concern for Bosnia, whose
conflict he described as "a war of the rich" with its indifference to the
genocide in Rwanda and to horrifying conditions throughout the third world.
Then, in April 1996, he went altogether too far, when he insisted on
publication of the findings of the U.N. inquiry, which implicated Israel in
the killing of some hundred civilians who had taken refuge in a United
Nations camp in Kanaa in south Lebanon.
In a minority of one on the Security Council, the United States
insisted on exercising its veto of a second term for Boutros-Ghali. James
Rubin, erstwhile State Department spokesman, wrote his epitaph in the
Financial Times: Boutros-Ghali was "unable to understand the important of
cooperation with the world's first power."
Of course even in the U.N.'s braver days, there were always the
realities of power to be acknowledged, but U.N. Secretaries General such as
Dag Hammarskjold and U Than, were men of independent stature. These days,
U.N. functionaries such as Annan and the late De Mello, know full well that
their careers depend on patronage. De Mello was a bureaucrat, never an
elected politician, advancing up the ladder as a U.S. favorite. He was
instrumental in establishing the U.N. protectorate system in Kosovo. Then he
was the beneficiary of an elaborate and instructive maneuver, in which the
United States was eager to rid itself of the fractious Jose Mauricio
Bustani, another Brazilian, from his post as head of the Organization for
the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Chemical Weapons Convention's
implementing organization. The U.S. saw Bustani, assertive of U.N.
independence, as an obstruction to its Iraq policy. Brazil was informed that
if it supported the ouster of Bustani, it would be rewarded with U.S.
backing for De Mello's elevation to the post of U.N. High Commissioner for
Human Rights, replacing another object of U.S. disfavor, Mary Robinson.
De Mello was duly appointed. Then, earlier this year, the
imperial finger crooked an urgent summons for De Mello to come to Washington
for an inspection by Condoleezza Rice. De Mello made all the right noises
and thus signed his death warrant. Desperate for U.N. cover in Iraq, the
Bush White House pressured Annan to appoint De Mello as U.N. Special Envoy
to Iraq.
De Mello installed himself in Baghdad and busied himself, in
cooperation with the U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer, cobbling together a puppet
Governing Council of Iraqis, serving at the pleasure of the Coalition
Provisional Authority. It was formed on July 13. Nine days later, De Mello
was at the United Nations in New York, proclaiming with a straight face that
"we now have a formal body of senior and distinguished Iraqi counterparts,
with credibility and authority, with whom we can chart the way forward . we
now enter a new stage that succeeds the disorienting power vacuum that
followed the fall of the previous regime."
Though it did not formally recognize the Governing Council, the
U.N. Security Council commended this achievement. The Financial Times
editorialized on August 19: "America friends, such as India, Turkey,
Pakistan and even France, which opposed the war, should stand ready to help.
But they need U.N. cover." In Baghdad, the next day, in the form of the
truck bomb, came an answer. Two days later, Kofi Annan counseled on the
dangers of confusing the U.N. with the U.S. But what else is any realist to
do? At least Boutros-Ghali went down fighting, which is more than can be
said for his successor.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
