[casi] Handmaid in Babylon: Annan, Vieira de Mello and the UN's Decline and Fall

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http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08302003.html


August 30, 2003

CounterPunch Diary
Handmaid in Babylon: Annan, Vieira de Mello and the UN's Decline and Fall
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

"One has to be careful," said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in late
August, "not to confuse the UN with the US." If the Secretary General had
taken his own advice, then maybe his Brazilian subordinate, Sergio Vieira de
Mello, might not have been so summarily blown to pieces in Baghdad two days
earlier. As things are, the UN still craves the handmaid role the US
desperately needs in Iraq as political cover.

Whichever group sent that truck bomb on its way decided that Vieira and his
boss were so brazen in moving the UN to play a fig-leaf role in the US
occupation of Iraq that spectacular action was necessary to draw attention
to the process the process. So the UN man handpicked by the White House paid
with his life.

To get a sense of how swift has been the conversion of the UN 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 UN
Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had to go.

In a pleasing 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 US policy." But unlike Annan he
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 UN 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 US 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 importance of cooperation with
the world's first power." It took another foreign policy operative of the
Clinton era to identify Annan's appeal to Washington. Richard Holbrooke
later recalled that in 1995 there was a "dual key" arrangement, whereby both
Boutros-Ghali and the NATO commander had to jointly approve
bombing.Boutros-Ghali had vetoed all but the most limited pinprick bombing
of the Serbs, for fear of appearing to take sides. But when Boutros-Ghali
was travelling, Annan was left in charge of the U.N. key. "When Kofi turned
it," Holbrooke told Philip Gourevich of the New Yorker, "he became
Secretary-General in waiting." There was of course a further, very terrible
service rendered by Annan, in which, in deference to the American desire to
keep Sarajevo in the limelight, he suppressed the warnings of the Canadan
General Romeo Dallair that appalling massacres were about to start in
Rwanda.

Of course even in the UN's braver days, there were always the realities of
power to be acknowledged, but UN Secretaries General such as Dag
Hammarskjold and U Thant, were men of stature. These days UN functionaries
such as Annan and the late Vieira, know full well that their careers depend
on American patronage. Vieira was a bureaucrat, never an elected politician,
instrumental in establishing the UN protectorate system in Kosovo.

Then he was the beneficiary of an elaborate and instructive maneuver, in
which the US was eager to rid itself of the inconvenient 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. Bustani was no US catspaw but adamant in
maintaining his organization's independence, and admired round the world for
his energy in seeking to rid the world of chemical weapons.

When UNSCOM withdrew from Iraq in 1998, hopelessly compromised and riddled
with spies, Bustani's OPCW was allowed in to continue verification of
destruction of WMDs. The US feared Bustani would persuade Saddam Hussein to
sign the Chemical Weapons convention and accept inspections from Bustani's
organization, thus allowing the possibility of credible estimates of Iraq's
arsenal that might prove inconvenient to the US. Brazil was informed that if
it supported the ouster of Bustani, it would be rewarded with US backing for
Vieira's elevation to the post of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,
replacing another object of US disfavor, Mary Robinson.

Vieira was duly appointed. Then, earlier this year, the imperial finger
crooked an urgent summons for him to come to Washington for inspection by
Condoleezza Rice. Vieira made all the right. Desperate for UN cover in Iraq,
the Bush White House pressured Annan to appoint Vieira as UN Special Envoy
to Iraq.

Vieira installed himself in Baghdad where, in cooperation with the US
proconsul Paul Bremer, his priority together a puppet Governing Council of
Iraqis, serving at the pleasure of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The
council was replete with such notorious fraudsters as Ahmad Chalabi. It was
formed on July 13. Nine days later Vieira was at the UN 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 UN Security
Council eagerly commended this achievement. The Financial Times
editorialized on August 19: "America's friends, such as India, Turkey
Pakistan and even France, which opposed the war, should stand ready to help.
But they need UN cover." In Baghdad, the next day, in the form of the truck
bomb, came an answer. Two days later, Kofi Annan counselled on the dangers
of confusing the UN with the US.

If he meant what he said Annan should obviously resign forthwith as the man
who has done more than any figure alive to equate the two. But who would
imagine Africa's Waldheim being capable of that?







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