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UN smothers critical Baghdad
report
By Alexander Casella
Any hope that the report produced by an
independent panel headed by for Finnish President Martti
Ahtisaari on the August 19 bombing of the United Nations
headquarters in Baghdad would lead to some rethinking of
the way that the UN secretariat in New York operates is
now a thing of the past.
This is the opinion of
many diplomatic observers in New York, as well as of a
number of senior UN staff. In his report, Ahtisaari, a
no-nonsense administrator indebted to no one, not only
qualified the UN security system as "dysfunctional" but
also referred to major shortcomings regarding "qualified
professionals ... internal coordination ... threat
assessment .. discipline ... and accountability". It was
a damning indictment, not only of the way that security
threats were addressed in Baghdad, but even more so on
how Secretary General Kofi Annan runs his shop.
Many at the UN hoped that, confronted with this
indictment, the secretariat would rise to the challenge
and launch a process that would open the door to major
reforms of the institution. It was not to be. On
November 4, Annan decided to appoint a "team" to
determine "accountability at all managerial levels" as
it regards the Baghdad bombing. Many UN staff members,
well versed in the art of reading between the lines of
UN communiques, had one word to describe the decision:
whitewash.
What made the Ahtisaari panel
particularly relevant was the fact that it was
independent. Though nominated by the secretary general,
no restrictions were placed on its operation and it was
understood that the conclusions reached would be made
public unedited. By comparison, the "team" appointed by
the secretariat to follow up on Athisaari's observations
is a far more constrained entity.
First, it is
essentially an insiders' group, which will report
directly to the secretary general. Its head, Gerald
Walzer, a retired Austrian UN staff member, has been
described as the ultimate bureaucrat. Walzer joined the
UN refugee agency as a finance clerk at the age of 20.
Over the following 40 years he slowly wormed his way up
the bureaucratic ladder, a gnome laboring in the dark in
a labyrinth of budgets and financial rules,
administrative procedures and regulations.
In
1993, when the then High Commissioner for Refugees,
Sadako Ogata, was looking for a deputy, her choice fell
on Walzer. In him she found the person on whom she could
discharge the burden of administration and finance, for
which she had no affinity. For all practical purposes,
Walzer was deputy high commissioner only in name. In
practice, he remained the punctilious, hard working
finance clerk he had always been, the sort of person
who, is the words of one of his former colleagues, is
programmed not to find out what he should not find out.
Second, while the task of the team is to review
"accountability", it is clearly spelled out that this
applies only to "managerial levels". Thus the failings
identified by Ahtisaari in "internal coordination",
"threat assessment" and the like, in other words, the
disfunctioning of the crucial political process within
the secretariat, remains beyond scrutiny.
The
"managerial" shortcomings that preceded the bombing are
essentially known and are an endemic to the UN system.
One is procurement. According to UN regulations, all
procurement of equipment requires tenders and the
submission of competitive bids. On paper the rule makes
eminent sense. In an emergency situation, however,
abiding by the rule can result in fatal delays.
Thus, when the UN office in Baghdad requested
that special anti-fragmentation films be fitted to the
windows of its building, and had the funds available to
procure it at short notice, the UN in New York held up
the purchase by demanding bids. There is no doubt that
had the films been fitted to the windows, the number of
casualties in the August 19 bombing would have been
greatly reduced. However, it can be argued that had the
bombing not occurred, the UN staff who would have
authorized the purchase of the films without going
through a bidding process would have been liable for
infringing on UN procurement rules. Thus, ultimately, it
was the system more than individual staff members which
proved "dysfunctional" when confronted with an emergency
situation. And it is that very system that the Walzer
team has been tasked with not assessing.
The two
main departments of the UN secretariat are Peace Keeping
(DPKO) and Political Affairs (DPA). On paper, the UN
office in Baghdad reported to DPA, and to the secretary
general on political matters, while the administrative
support was provided by DPKO. In practice, lines of
control and communications were never formally
established and ultimately no one knew exactly who, at
the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, was responsible
for what.
Conversely, responsibility at the
lower levels was easier to pin down: as the Walzer team
went to work the UN announced that two officers, Tun
Myat, UN security coordinator, and Lopes da Silva,
officer in charge in Baghdad, had "asked to be relieved
of their responsibilities" while the team conducted its
work. Why they had "asked" to do so two-and-a-half
months after the bombing is unclear. What is clear is
that Tun Myat, who started his career with the World
Food Program, had no security background. "The real
issue" commented a UN staff member "is a system that
puts a person with no background in security in the
position of security coordinator".
How far up
the hierarchical ladder the inquiry will precede is a
moot point. Officially, both the heads of DPA and DPKO
are appointed by the UN secretary general. In practice,
both are political appointees. Governments submit a list
of candidates to the secretary general who then endorses
the choice.
Traditionally, the DPA has been a
British preserve, with the current incumbent, Kieran
Prendergast, being a former ambassador to Turkey. As for
the DPKO, it was given to France in exchange for its
lifting of its veto to the election of Annan as
secretary general in 1995.
Its current
incumbent, Jean-Marie Guehennot, is a graduate of
France's prestigious National Administration School and
was an auditor in the Defense Ministry before his
appointment. Both Prendergast and Guehennot have no
alternative but to operate within the bog of an
entrenched bureaucracy where tenure is the rule,
accountability a myth and promotions have more to do
with political correctness and "regional balance" than
performance.
The overall consensus among UN
staff is that, while Walzer might identify a few
scapegoats, the search for accountability at "managerial
levels" will not go very far. Alternatively, the search
for political responsibility, had it ever been
attempted, might well have gone too far for comfort.
Would it have implicated the secretary general,
the heads of the DPA and the DPKO, the heads of the UN
agencies who flooded Baghdad with their staff members to
show the flag? And who was responsible for "threat
assessment" in the system? "The bottom line," commented
a senior UN staff member, "is that all are guilty but
none are responsible. Ultimately it was the system that
did not work."
While "the system" shows no taste
for reforming itself, it can be argued that this is the
responsibility of the member states and not of the
secretariat. It can also be argued that, from the Bush
administration to the International Committee of the Red
Cross to the Italian police force, no party in Iraq can
claim success in either "threat assessment" or the
prevention of attack.
While the failure of
others is hardly a consolation for the UN secretariat,
its bureaucracy, which prides itself on being better
than the sum total of its members, should be sobered by
having been exposed as being not even the best of a bad
lot.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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