Despite Israel’s Anti-Damascus Campaign, Syria Headed for Security Council Seat

By Ian Williams

When Israeli politicians get a bee in their bonnet, the buzzing usually can be heard loudly around the domes of Capitol Hill. The credibility of this Israeli administration, however, must leave something to be desired—or perhaps the Knesset’s angry froth has subsided in the face of reality. For, regardless of Israel’s campaign to discredit Syria, Damascus is pretty much assured of a place in the Security Council next year.

The Council’s temporary seats are allocated according to regional groups. Because the Arab states straddle Asia and Africa they have a complex rotation system which ensures that candidate states usually are elected unopposed. To block the election, Israel and the U.S. would have had to find another Asian Arab state prepared to contest the seat. Amazingly enough, none of them is rushing to fulfill Israeli whims.

Previous attempts to derail—as in the case of Libya, for example—were successful because, on the one hand, there were official U.N. sanctions against Tripoli and, on the other hand, Muammar Qaddafi had become a thorn in the side of his Arab neighbors. Neither situation applies to Syria, which now has good relations even with its former archenemy, Iraq.

Israeli accusations about Syria being a “terrorist” state will carry little weight in the international community, coming as they do from a country whose cabinet has just blithely sat down and publicly authorized the assassination of several dozen Palestinian leaders and officials—not to mention a country that itself is in defiance of so many U.N. resolutions! So far, the State Department seems wisely to have resisted any urgings to launch a campaign against the Syrian candidacy that would so surely fail. Arab unity is often almost an oxymoron, but in this case, at least, it should hold the line.

Annan Secures Second Term

As predicted, Kofi Annan’s low-key campaign for re-election came to a stunningly successful conclusion with his unanimous nomination by the Security Council and unanimous adoption by the General Assembly in June. The campaign’s main element was not mentioning that it was happening, which put the burden on would-be rivals to advance themselves. Although extremely popular, Annan was by no means a foregone conclusion. Many Asians considered it to be “their” turn for the secretary-generalship, since their last success was U Thant. On the other hand, the East Europeans claimed it was theirs because, alone among the regional groups, they had never been there.

Syria now has good relations even with its former archenemy, Iraq.

China and Russia may have had reservations about Annan’s support for human rights interventions and for Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, France because his French is not so brilliant, and the U.S. because of his unilateral diplomacy with Baghdad. Indeed, many delegates were unsure of the U.S. position—not for any specific reason but simply because of the irrationality that clouds any foreign policy decision making in Washington. In fact, it appears that Secretary of State Colin Powell and the U.N. secretary-general have a close and friendly relationship.

One question being asked, from two different angles, is whether, now that he is assured of a second term, Annan will be more outspoken on issues, such as the Middle East. It is unlikely. Not only is acerbity usually alien to his character, but his forbearance toward Israeli Labor leaders seems to be based on his own political feelings, which were always unlikely to extend too much toward, for example, Ariel Sharon. Above all, any U.N. secretary-general is always faced with the conundrum that the U.N. cannot function effectively without engaging the world’s only superpower. Boutros-Ghali certainly realized that, and acted on it. His termination had more to do with U.S. domestic politics—of both the conservative and lobby varieties—than with any anti-American moves on his part. In the end, there may be some strengthening in Annan’s tone, but there is little chance of change in style or content.

Status Quo in Iraq

And for five months there is little chance of change in Iraq. Baghdad refuses to allow weapons inspectors into the country, and so sanctions remain. When the new “smart sanctions” resolution, the result of months of hard diplomacy by the British, came to the vote, there wasn’t one. In the face of a threatened Russian veto, the Security Council simply agreed to roll over the existing sanctions regime for a further five months.

The proposed resolution would have allowed a much broader range of goods and trade to bypass the U.N. sanctions committee, but it would have cut down on Saddam’s slush fund—the receipts from smuggling oil to neighboring states like Turkey, Syria and Jordan. Even though currently thwarted, the British proposal was a diplomatic success in that it blunted the humanitarian objections to Iraqi sanctions. It is difficult to put a good face on Russian and Iraqi insistence that they preferred the old “inhumane” sanctions to a proposal that only had a downside for the regime itself while promising to alleviate many of the problems for civilians.

Consequently, neither Russia nor Iraq made much play of the suffering of Iraqi civilians. The Russians, in their public speeches, were almost embarrassingly open about their commercial motivations. In private they were even more candid, with President Vladimir Putin reportedly telling British Prime Minister Tony Blair that they had to do this, or Iraq would not honor its Soviet-era debts. The Russians are actually being rather naîve, since neither gratitude nor contractual obligations figure highly in the Ba’athist party program. Indeed Moscow is already complaining that British and American companies get more Iraqi contracts than Russian ones do!

For his part, the Iraqi ambassador concentrated on Western and U.N. perfidy but had his case somewhat undermined when within days his deputy and several other Mission staff sought political asylum in New York rather than return home.

Despite the Russian nyet, the final proposal assembled a surprising degree of support from all other members of the Council, including China and France. Almost as surprising—perhaps demonstrating the pragmatic nature of Colin Powell’s State Department—was American support for the drastically truncated list of trade items that would require sanctions committee scrutiny.

While the deal played well in New York, it is unlikely to win many friends in the Middle East, where the double standards between Saddam and Sharon, Iraq and Israel will remain a potent objection for as long as Washington considers that the latter can do no wrong.

Western Sahara Saga Continues

Five months was also the key number for the Western Sahara, which saw yet another rollover. Here, the French assumed the role for Rabat that Moscow played for Baghdad, but in some ways more successfully. The resolution that emerged, based on the most recent efforts of former Secretary of State James Baker—who basically concluded that the Moroccans were not going to allow the referendum, and that no one was going to force them—offered a five-year autonomy period, after which the decision on independence would be made. Were it not for Morocco’s decade-long record of intransigence on the issue, the proposal looks quite plausible.

Because the memories linger on with Polisario and its friends, however, they immediately saw it as abandonment of international law, the right to self-determination and previous Security Council endorsements of the referendum plans. And, of course, they have a point.

So the resolution firmly pointed in all directions. It endorsed exploration of James Baker’s five-year autonomy plan, welcomed new proposals from other parties, such as Polisario, and instructed MINURSO to continue preparations for the referendum plan that has been the basis of U.N. operations for the past 10 years. It also called upon both parties to release prisoners. While even-handed in principle, in practice it puts heavy pressure on Polisario to release the 1,479 Moroccan prisoners they have held, some for over 20 years.

It remains to be seen whether the life span of this unwieldy conglomerate will extend beyond the five months until it is next up for discussion.

Polisario’s U.N. representative, Ahmed Bukhari, expressed satisfaction that the resolution had reversed the U.N.’s drift away from the settlement plan toward Baker’s “Framework” proposal—which, he said, “Polisario will never accept as a basis for talks.”

Some diplomats even expressed delighted surprise, since some of the most active participants in the debate, such as Jamaica and Namibia, had no discernible interests other than a deep attachment to principle. This is not common in the United Nations, especially not in the Security Council. They were helped by the reluctance of other members who, even if they did not, in James Baker’s memorable phrase about the Balkans, “have a dog in this fight,” could at least see that the original U.N. report threw the Sahrawis and international law to the wolves.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.