| |
'Dysfunctional' UN takes
stock
By Alexander Casella
As Washington steadily attempts to
draw a reluctant United Nations, albeit deprived of all
political power, into its Iraqi quagmire, a
recently-released report by an independent panel tasked
with investigating the August 19 attack on the UN
headquarters in Baghdad has concluded that, for all
practical purposes, the UN bureaucracy is simply not
geared to operate in a high-risk situation.
"Dysfunctional" is how the
panel defines UN security management, adding that not
only does it lack "professionalism", but that "the
current system is not able to provide the expertise".
Following the August 19 attack, which resulted
in 22 dead and some 150 injured among UN staff in
Baghdad, the UN secretary general came under strong
pressure, especially from UN staff, to appoint a panel
to provide an impartial assessment of the circumstances
of the bombing.
It is not the first time that UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan has requested an
investigation into alleged UN shortcomings. Following
his election to the top job, he ordered an internal
review to investigate the circumstances of the
Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1993 and the failed UN
response in preventing the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
While both reviews came to the conclusion that
there had been oversights within the UN system, none of
them pointed the finger at the guilty parties, namely
those governments which had shied away from taking
action when needed. In Bosnia, outnumbered and outgunned
Dutch peace keepers had to watch passively while some
6,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians were massacred by Serb
paramilitary forces. In Rwanda, lack of UN action can be
traced directly to the Bill Clinton administration,
which, following the Sudan debacle, was instrumental in
preventing the deployment of UN troops to preempt the
genocide.
While Annan gained considerable praise
for initiating the review process and accepting his part
of the blame, he probably gained even more appreciation
from various countries for not identifying them as
having turned a blind eye to murder.
On
September 22, one whole month after the Baghdad bombing,
Annan decided to launch an investigation into the
attack. He chose to format it on the concept of an
independent panel rather than that of an in-house review
group. The panel was chaired by former Finnish president
Martti Ahtisaari. Though having served in a number of
senior UN posts, he is essentially a no-nonsense Finnish
statesman indebted to no one. Ahtisaari formed a group
of senior police officers and security experts and
started his investigation barely two days after his
nomination. His report, which has now been made public,
is not only an indictment of the UN security system, but
reading between the lines, raises the question as to
whether the UN secretariat has become a smug stilted
self-centered bureaucracy that has lost all touch with
reality in the field.
When the UN returned to
Iraq on May 1, it entered a minefield armed with an
ambiguous mandate. On one hand, the UN wanted to avoid
being assimilated with the coalition. On the other, it
could not but work with the coalition. And while it can
be argued that a UN presence was good for Iraq, it was
also a plus for the US in the sense that it provided a
semblance of international endorsement to the invasion.
Ultimately it was under US pressure that Annan ordered
the UN back to Iraq.
There are four structures
within the UN to address security issues: UNSECOR (the
UN security coordinator), the Department of Peace
Keeping Operations, the Safety and Security Service and
the Security Offices of the various UN agencies. This
structure was defined by the panel as "dysfunctional" in
the sense that it lacked both coordination and
professionalism. Thus, the head of UNSECOM previously
worked for the World Food Program (WFP). His deputy has
never served in the field. Neither have any security
background.
By June, the UN had established a
staff ceiling of 200 officers in Baghdad. This was
flagrantly disregarded as practically every UN agency
started pouring staff in the country with the
expectation of receiving lucrative assistance donations.
The staff inflow was uncoordinated and unmonitored, and
the UN itself did not know how many officers it had in
country at a given time. By early July, there were an
estimated 550 UN staff in the country and the 15 UN
security officers present, not one of whom spoke Arabic,
were overwhelmed and had to spend their time
distributing flak vests and helmets to the newcomers
rather than planning a security policy.
Under
the Saddam Hussein regime, security for the Canal hotel,
which already housed the UN in Baghdad, was provided
both by the police and by local guards hired by the UN.
When the UN returned to Baghdad, the police had ceased
to exist and security was provided by a US platoon and
the unarmed local guards that the UN had retained.
Initially, the US army, which never had the authority to
search vehicles entering the UN compound - a task that
was left to the Iraqi guards - had blocked the access
roads to the hotel.
The panel confirms that in
June the UN asked the Americans to open the access roads
to traffic and to cut back their presence around the
Canal hotel. That such a move would entail an increased
security risk probably did not escape the local UN
staff. In June, the UN in Baghdad made plans to fit
glass fragmentation retention films to the windows of
the hotel; a measure which, according to the panel,
would have considerably reduced the number of casualties
of the bombing.
As UN Baghdad did not have the
cash on hand to purchase the film, the WFP offered to
advance the cost of the purchase. The offer was turned
down by the UN administration in New York on the grounds
that no exception could be made to the UN procurement
system and that tenders had to be put out.
On
August 10, the UN was provided with intelligence reports
indicating that an attack on the Canal hotel was
imminent. Not only was the warning disregarded, but also
no contingency plans were made in case an attack did
materialize. Thus, when the attack occurred on August
19, it took the UN totally off guard. Indeed, the degree
of unpreparedness was such that on the day of the
bombing the organization did not even have an up-to-date
list of its staff in Baghdad, and in the days that
followed staff members who were reported killed emerged
unscathed.
In the wake of the attack, there was
an increased demand within the UN staff for Baghdad
being declared step five, known as evacuation status.
Until the attack, on a threat scale of one to five,
Baghdad had been classified as step four, namely a
program suspension status. For reasons never fully
explained, Annan repeatedly refused to re-classify
Baghdad as step five. It was a decision that did not
endear him to his staff.
Complacency, lack of
threat assessment, lack of responsiveness to warnings,
lack of qualified professionals, lack of supervision, no
internal coordination, lack of accountability and lack
of discipline are the expressions used by the panel to
qualify the disfunctionalities of the UN in relation to
the Baghdad bombing. More to the point, however, the
panel has put its finger on a failing bureaucracy of
which the incident in Baghdad is only the tip of the
iceberg.
Conceptually, the UN is actually made
up of three components. The specialized agencies such as
the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the WFP, with
the Security Council/General Assembly mechanism and the
Secretariat. Ultimately, the purpose of the secretariat
is to provide the necessary administrative support to
the Security Council/General Assembly mechanism. To run
the secretariat, the member states elect a secretary
general whose official title, according to the UN
charter, is "chief administrative officer of the
organization". The function of the secretary general is
not to represent the conscience of mankind, or even the
principals embodied in the charter, but to administer.
Granted, interference by governments, or simply their
conflicting requirements, do not make the task an easy
one. But there was no such interference in Baghdad with
regards to the management of a difficult security
situation.
Ultimately what failed in Baghdad was
not the UN, but the secretariat, and what the panel
identified as its weaknesses are those of a
dysfunctional bureaucracy, including its recruitment,
assignment, promotion and assessment policy.
At
a time when there are increased demands for reform of
the UN, namely of the Security Council/General Assembly
mechanism, the panel has opened the door to another
avenue, namely, reform of the secretariat as a more
urgent, and more realistic endeavor.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
