Interventions (41 page)

To the Security Council, which I met with shortly after the press conference, I was explicit about the risks. Reminding them that I had conducted the mission with the full authorization of the Council and that I had restored full and unlimited access for UNSCOM and strengthened its position with the Iraqis, I placed the onus of execution squarely on the Iraqi authorities. “I am under no illusions about the inherent value of this or any other agreement. Commitments honored are the only commitments that count . . . This agreement tests as never before the will of the Iraqi leadership to keep its word . . . If this effort to ensure compliance through negotiations is obstructed by evasion or deception, diplomacy may not have a second chance.” I knew that what Iraq craved most—dignity and respect—could be demonstrated by a well-prepared set of negotiations that would result in a degree of mutual trust.

What was also critical was that the Iraqis be given a sense of light at the end of the tunnel; not, as critics complained, because any of us were soft on Saddam or wished to give him a way out, but because we knew that such an intrusive inspection regime required an incentive for Iraq to cooperate. Otherwise, why would they continue to allow a degree of scrutiny without precedent? And of course casual talk at that time in Washington of never lifting sanctions on Saddam, no matter what, did not help matters. The United States and its allies were entitled to state this position as a matter of national interest. However, they could not expect to have a United Nations committed to the peaceful disarmament of Iraq to simply play along. Nor could they have been unaware that this gave Saddam the excuse to tell the rest of the world that the game was fixed no matter what he did. We needed the inspections to work toward resolving the ongoing crisis with Iraq. Until then, the Gulf War would not truly be over.

The Council unanimously endorsed the memorandum of understanding (MOU) I had negotiated with Saddam. Even Butler went on television to say that if the agreement was faithfully implemented by Iraq, it would provide the basis for UNSCOM to carry out its work successfully. That, of course, had been the premise of negotiations all along.

My mission to Baghdad early on in my tenure demonstrated the possibilities available to a secretary-general if one was willing to intervene when diplomacy through other avenues had failed. The agreement bought us six further months of inspections—although they would prove difficult and acrimonious almost from the beginning.

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M
atters came to a head in early August 1998. UNSCOM was characterized by a growing impression of unaccountable and undisciplined inspections. Butler called me on the afternoon of August 3 to brief me on his meetings with Tariq Aziz that day. The Iraqis had clearly taken a strategic decision to force the issue: they had told Butler that he must tell the Security Council immediately that Iraq had been disarmed; that it did not possess any more weapons of mass destruction; and therefore a decision on sanctions could and should be taken. When Butler replied—correctly in this case—that he was unable to do so absent further verification, Aziz ended the conversation with the warning that “Either you go to the Council and tell the truth—that we have no more weapons—or we will not meet with you or your technical staff again.”

Tariq Aziz was once again taking his country to the brink by declaring that Iraq was fully disarmed and demanding that UNSCOM state that forthwith or lose the regime's cooperation. Butler, of course, was not able to do this—but his position had been weakened further by increasing allegations, including from within UNSCOM itself, that the mission had been used by national intelligence agencies for information gathering unrelated to its disarmament mission. The Iraqis seized on this and won support from Russia in denouncing UNSCOM, and Butler in particular as untrustworthy.

When the Iraqis then issued a new set of demands about the makeup, location, and basic function of UNSCOM—essentially requiring it to be totally reconstituted—Albright and Sandy Berger together called me to insist that this was an attack on the UN and as “the face of the UN to the world,” what mattered was my reaction, not the Council's. It was my memorandum of understanding with Saddam that had been violated, they stressed, and unless I “hit the Iraqi statement out of the park” in the Council's next meeting, as Berger put it to me, the United States would act on its own. My immediate instinct was that my public reaction should be in reinforcement of the leading role of the Security Council, as was its proper function, but this argument went nowhere with the U.S. representatives. I now saw, and not for the last time, what my interventionist approach to the role of secretary-general had done: even though I was the servant of the Council, the reality around the world was that my voice in some quarters would now carry more weight in this moment of crisis than the statements and resolutions of a distant and impersonal club of great powers in the form of the Security Council.

My answer to the standoff was to acknowledge that we had undergone a seven-year process, and we were still without prospects for an outcome that either side would accept. I therefore proposed a comprehensive review of the UN's relationship with Iraq, including the role of UNSCOM. While Washington opposed such a move—it would amount to “bargaining” with Saddam they insisted—the broader Council, including the UK, understood the value of engaging the Iraqis in a process whereby they would come back into compliance and we could set out on a path to conclusion, rather than permanent crisis. Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock, the UK permanent representative to the UN, was authorized in October by all members of the Council to engage with Tariq Aziz on the terms I set out. What they kept going back to, however, was the fundamental distrust between Iraq and UNSCOM. The standoff continued for another month. There was even a renewed attempt by Greenstock to convince the Iraqis that through a new Security Council resolution the path to an end to sanctions would be made clear.

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A
year's exhaustive diplomatic efforts to achieve Iraq's peaceful compliance with the demands of the Security Council were about to come to an ugly—and messy—end. On an official visit to Morocco, I was awakened at 3:30 in the morning of November 11 by a phone call from Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. UNSCOM was withdrawing its staff from Baghdad, he told me. From Butler himself I had heard nothing and so I called Albright to find out what the Americans were planning with Butler. She was able only to confirm that the United States was withdrawing dependents from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Kuwait City, but what she clearly wanted to know was if I would be making a statement in response to UNSCOM's withdrawal.

The United States had in the meantime been coordinating their response with the UK and France in order to achieve maximum impact from the Butler announcement. Half an hour later, while I was reviewing our options with Elisabeth Lindenmayer, my close and trusted special assistant, Albright called me back to ask if I had received a statement in my name drafted for me by the United States, the UK, and France condemning Iraqi intransigence, and whether I would issue it. I told her as politely as I could at 4:30 in the morning that I was perfectly capable of having my own statement drafted and would issue one if I thought it appropriate—and that it would be in my own words. I was still furious about Butler's deeply unprofessional behavior and I was in no mood to accommodate his masters. I had a far more serious responsibility now: by withdrawing the UNSCOM staff precipitously without informing me—and knowing that it could be a trigger for military action—he had placed in grave danger the lives of nearly four hundred UN staff doing vital humanitarian work. Of course, Butler thought he would force my hand on withdrawing the other UN staff, but I refused. Even though the inspectors would leave, the UN's humanitarian workers stayed in Iraq until the 2003 invasion, alleviating the suffering of the Iraqi people and carrying out their mandate.

Previously that year, on August 5 and October 31, Iraq had halted cooperation with UNSCOM, and each time we had walked them back. Now, in November, after Butler removed his inspectors without consulting us at UN headquarters, U.S. planes were ready to take to the skies, intent on bombing targets across Iraq in punishment for noncompliance. In response to this threat, on November 13, I immediately called in the Iraqi ambassador to tell him that I would be sending Saddam a letter calling on him to readmit the inspectors—and this time the Iraqis reacted promptly and sent a reply within twenty-four hours accepting my request. When I received it, I called Berger right away—who was furious. “Kofi, I've got to tell you frankly. We literally had our planes in the air. We stopped this and we're taking an enormous risk if once again you and we are embarrassed by noncompliance by the Iraqis.” I assured him that I agreed, and that I had made no promises on the lifting of sanctions—something I neither wanted nor was in a position to do. In closing, however, he requested that I back the United States if Iraq were to break its renewed pledge. “I've no doubt that it will work for one week—I'm concerned that in three weeks he will again restrict access and we'll be humiliated.” Once again, Saddam miscalculated and soon gave the United States and its allies the justification for launching Operation Desert Fox, which on December 16 ushered in four days of bombings.

Throughout the preceding year's negotiations, whenever the military option was floated, I would ask the question: “After the bombing, then what?” I never got an answer—not from Washington, not from London. And, of course, the four days of bombing did nothing to advance the disarmament of Iraq. In fact, Desert Fox ushered in a four-year period without inspections and without a dialogue with Iraq about its place in the international system, even as sanctions continued to devastate its people and hand Saddam the ultimate propaganda tool—to be able to blame the West, and not his own misrule, for the misery of his people.

9/11, A
FGHANISTAN
,
AND A
N
EW
W
AR

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was at my home, the residence of the secretary-general on the East Side of Manhattan, when Iqbal Riza, my chef de cabinet, called to tell me of the first plane striking the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, some three miles from the headquarters of the UN. Insisting that I stay at the residence, Riza took charge of evacuating the building and managing the immediate response. What then followed, the second plane in New York and two further planes targeting Washington, was more shocking than we could have ever predicted. In the course of the next few hours, nearly three thousand people were killed from more than a hundred different countries making it an attack not merely on the United States but on “humanity itself,” as I said on that day. As Nane and I, like millions of others around the world, watched the unfolding horror on our television screen, we felt a deeply personal sense of grief and sympathy for our fellow citizens of a city that had become our home as well. In response, the UN then became a center for the outpouring of support and sympathy for the United States. In the Security Council, an extraordinary diplomatic drive swiftly produced two resolutions unanimously: One reaffirming the inherent right of self-defense of the United States against the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had harbored and supported Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda; the other creating a new counterterrorism body under the Council, which was to coordinate the global response to a menace that had taken a new and terrifying form.

Three months later, on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for our efforts to revitalize the United Nations—and, in the words of the citation, making “clear that sovereignty cannot be a shield behind which member states conceal their violations”—I began my acceptance speech with the image of a girl born in Afghanistan and spoke of the twenty-first century as having been entered through a gate of fire. I wanted to honor the memory of those who had perished on 9/11, but also set the confrontation with terrorism in the broader context of the challenges facing the international community, including the human rights of the Afghan people and their prospects for peace and development.

After the Taliban was swiftly toppled in late 2001, the question of who was to govern Afghanistan, and how, had to be answered. Here, the United Nations had valuable experience, and a superb diplomatic troubleshooter perfectly suited to the role of forging a new government in the form of Lakhdar Brahimi. “The UN is left alone in Afghanistan with no real support from anywhere,” Brahimi had told me in a dispiriting conclusion in mid-1999 when he was my envoy for Afghanistan. I had appointed him in 1997, early in my tenure, to see if the UN could bring peace to the ravaged and internationally neglected nation. But after two years on the job and a series of fruitless efforts, he saw absolutely no prospect of ending the war.

Back then we had repeatedly raised the alarm to the UN membership of the serious consequences of what was happening in Afghanistan. For instance, I warned the General Assembly in a November 1997 report that the external players

must also be held accountable for building a fire which, they should be aware, is unlikely to remain indefinitely confined to Afghanistan. Indeed, that fire is already spreading beyond the borders of Afghanistan, posing a serious threat to the region and beyond in the shape of terrorism, banditry, narcotics trafficking, refugee flows, and increasing ethnic and sectarian tension.

Among those playing with fire were the Pakistanis, who remained ambivalent about the international cooperation process that we had established in the “Six plus Two” contact group (involving the six nations bordering Afghanistan as well as the United States and Russia), and Pakistan continued their support for the Taliban, fearing the alternative of a pro-India government.

While we had predicted in 1997 the worsening of a cocktail of regional problems created by the civil war in Afghanistan, I had never imagined that this fire would erupt in New York just a few miles from UN headquarters, on a bright September morning four years later. When it did, and the Security Council authorized an international coalition to remove the Taliban regime by force of arms, the outcome of the military confrontation was never in doubt. Much less clear was how to put Afghanistan back on its feet. After a quarter century of war, a decade without a nationally agreed-upon government, and an international military campaign, how would the country be governed and rebuilt?