The Hindu : U.N. credibility at stake

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Sep 05, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

U.N. credibility at stake

By Balakrishnan Rajagopal

To prevent a bad situation from getting worse, Kofi Annan must ask the U.S. to provide a clear time frame for a pullout as well as for the transfer of authority back to the Iraqis.

THE KILLING of Sergio Vieira de Mello and other United Nations staff members in Baghdad in a bomb blast on August 19 by suspected terrorists is indeed an outrage. As outrageous is that they died in the course of legitimising what is basically an illegal occupation of Iraq by the United States. The U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who is himself a deeply committed humanitarian, must refuse to send in any more cannon fodder from the U.N., unless the U.S. performs its legal obligations towards the Iraqis quickly and pulls out of the country. Washington's current move to make concessions towards a U.N. involvement is a desperate ploy to legitimise the occupation of Iraq and is unlikely to save the U.N. from further attacks. Unlike several tragic incidents involving its staff in the past, the recent attack in Baghdad strikes at its very foundation as it challenges the U.N.'s viability as an impartial international organisation.

The U.N. has lost several charismatic staff members in the past in many conflict zones. In none of these kinds of incidents was the attack perceived to be against the U.N. as an institution and what it stood for. In fact, these attacks were aimed at preventing the world body from doing what it was supposed to do. But, the Baghdad attack seems aimed at preventing the U.N. from doing what it is, in fact, prevented from doing: namely, endorsing and legitimising an illegal occupation following an aggressive war.

The U.N.'s options have been admittedly quite limited. Once the U.S. decided to invade Iraq, there was little it could do. And when the U.S. approached it for playing a role in reconstruction, it could not easily reject it. Humanitarian concerns for the Iraqis lie behind the U.N.'s decision to collaborate with the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq. It was also choosing a pragmatic path, avoiding confrontation with the U.S.

On the other hand, the U.N. should not be surprised if it gets enmeshed in hostilities in Iraq. In the eyes of many angry Muslim men and women, the U.N. has to be blamed for much of the turmoil in that country. The first such grudge is that the U.N. legitimised what are perhaps the most devastating economic sanctions on any country, while winking at the constant bombardment of Iraq by the U.S. in the so-called "no-fly-zones." A second grudge is that the U.N. failed to prevent what most of the world saw as an illegal act of aggression against Iraq. When it decided to enter Iraq to help the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq's reconstruction, the U.N. was seen, rightly or wrongly, as a collaborator in aggression against a member-state, indeed a founding member. Mr. de Mello and his colleagues have paid dearly for these institutional failings towards Iraq.

To prevent a bad situation from getting worse, Mr. Annan must ask the U.S. to provide a clear time frame for a pullout as well as for the transfer of authority back to the Iraqis. The U.S. presence in Iraq rankles a lot of people and it smells very badly of colonialism, which remains a subject that arouses great passions in the non-Western world, no matter what the pundits say. This is no longer the 1950s, when colonial powers could decide at leisure whether they would hold elections to transfer power to the natives while the decolonisation and trusteeship committees of the U.N. assist the orderly transfer of power. Since then, a revolution in thinking has occurred, partly due to the U.N.'s heroic work, and ordinary people in the rest of the world take democracy and freedom from colonial domination very seriously. By insisting on a time frame for a quick U.S. pullout and a transfer of power back to the Iraqis, Mr. Annan would only be returning the U.N. to its original purposes. Unless the U.S. is willing to provide these guarantees publicly, he must refuse to send more staff to their death.

More must and can be done to assure people in Arab countries that the U.N. is trying its best to be neutral and impartial in Iraq. Mr. Annan should assemble an independent monitoring team to investigate abuses by U.S.-led forces in Iraq. A number of incidents that constitute clear violations of existing international humanitarian law by U.S.-led forces have been reported during the last several months and almost none has been investigated by the U.S. Army, and certainly nonebyan independent agency. There is open scepticism whether events such as the recent shooting of a Reuters cameraman by a U.S. soldier will ever be investigated and people held accountable. If the U.N. could appoint weapons inspectors to investigate Iraq, it should, by the same token, appoint human rights and humanitarian inspectors to investigate the conduct of U.S. troops and administrators. Measures such as these must be taken by the Secretary-General to ensure that the U.N. is seen to be even-handed.

Irrespective of what steps the U.N. takes in the short term, the security situation in Iraq is likely to remain fragile, since it is now a full-blown guerrilla war. However, the U.N. could and should do more to ensure that the fallout from this conflict does not permanently damage its credibility in the non-Western world, which has historically provided its real constituency.

(The writer is Director, MIT Program on Human Rights and Justice.)

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

News Update

Stories in this Section

Better late than never

Proof of marriage

Professional education and the S.C.

U.N. credibility at stake