Salim Lone
19 October 2007
Nairobi — BEFORE THE WORLD KNEW it, on March 19, 2003, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was informed by the White House that the war in Iraq had begun. The first warplanes would be over Iraq in a few hours.
As the director of the UN's News and Media Division, I was immediately asked to make arrangements for recording and disseminating to the media a statement by Mr Annan on the war.
A few hours later, with the world now glued to their television sets watching Baghdad being bombed, Mr Annan was about to begin reading his statement in the UN's television studio, when he suddenly turned to me and asked me what I thought of it.
Very politely but without mincing words, I told him that I thought it was a terrible statement. It would undermine his own and the United Nations integrity since it would be read as supporting the war when most Security Council member states strongly opposed it.
MR ANNAN WAS TAKEN ABACK BY my comment, but to his quite remarkable credit, he had the statement rewritten on the spot.
Such openness and the freedom we had to express our points of view internally on even the most sensitive issues, was one of the hallmarks of the Annan UN and made it an inspiring place to work.
But the fact that the statement had been approved by a number of senior officials - many of whom I knew were opposed to the impending war - also reflected the extraordinary pressures at the UN since 9/11 to hew to the American line.
I tell this little story for two reasons. First, it is a preamble to apologising for having written in a column two months ago that Mr Annan's envoy to Iraq in 2003, Sergio Vieira de Mello, supported the Iraq war. I do not know whether he did or not. My poor excuse for this lapse, as indicated in the note to the Nation editor that accompanied the article, was that the column was written at 4am.
The only assertion I should have made is that Sergio, who has since died, had told me that he could have supported a war to unseat Saddam Hussein if it had been fought not, over weapons of mass destruction - which did not exist, as it turned out - but for his gross violations of human rights, which brought so much death and destruction to his own people.
Such an approach would have led to a consensus in the Security Council about use of force to unseat a tyrant, he felt.
That is the second reason I recount the March 19, 2003 event: many senior officials in the UN, and Mr Annan in particular, repeatedly emphasised before the war began that it was vital for the Security Council to be united in confronting Saddam. The sub text was that the war would be all right if the Council approved it - even if no evidence of banned weapons was found.
That message had horrified me. I felt the only UN message to the big powers should be that war must be avoided. Such an anti-war position was dictated by the UN Charter and was non-negotiable, since Iraq had neither attacked nor threatened the U.S.
But those appeals for "consensus" reflected the acceptance since 9/11 that U.S. strategic interests should determine the framework within which the UN secretary-general and all his staff operate.
So Sergio wished to ensure that US interests were intelligently protected in Iraq, but he also wanted to ensure the emergence of a representative and democratic regime there, unlike the U.S., for whom its own strategic goals were what mattered most.
KEEPING IN MIND AMERICAN GOALS is now the paramount consideration in determining virtually all UN actions. Terrible as that sounds, I understand that there is little alternative to it.
But it is the responsibility of UN secretary-general to engage forcefully with the U.S. - and other states - whenever they pursue policies which are undermining peace, stability and the rule of law.
Finally, there are red lines that no honourable UN official should ever cross. To avoid pressure to do so, the prospect of a resignation must always hover in the background. That might moderate superpower behaviour - and boost respect for core traditional values.
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