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Gunfight at the UN
corral
By Alexander Casella
The sudden resignation of UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Ruud Lubbers is
only the tip of the iceberg of a brutal
bureaucratic war currently being fought in New
York within the upper reaches of the United
Nations to ensure the survival of Kofi Annan for
the remaining two years of his mandate.
While Annan's first five-year term was
perceived as an unqualified success, his image,
and with that the image of the UN secretariat,
started to unravel in the wake of the Iraqi
crisis.
When Annan assumed office in 1997
he inherited a demoralized organization at
loggerheads with the Bill Clinton administration.
Not only did he repair his relationship with
Washington, but he also gave both the organization
and his own function a visibility and a status
unequaled in its 60-year history, culminating in a
Nobel Peace Prize.
Ultimately, however it
was a castle built on sand. And while the UN
website was projecting an image of the secretary
general as the "symbol of UN ideals", the
"spokesman for the poor" and the upholder of the
"moral authority" of the UN, he was still, the
hype notwithstanding, in the words of the charter,
nothing more and nothing less than the "chief
administrative officer" of the organization.
The Iraqi crisis was to be the reality
check that brought this house of hyperbole to
ruin. As US pressure on the Security Council to
endorse an American armed intervention increased,
Annan, in his various pronouncements, made it
clear that he favored continued negotiation and
thus was opposed to the use of force. While this
reflected the position of the majority of the UN
members, it left unanswered the question as to
whether the UN secretary general should reflect
any position at all. The message, however, was not
lost on the Bush administration.
Following
the US invasion, the return of the UN to Baghdad
proved both a political and an administrative
catastrophe. Granted the August 19, 2003 bombing
of the UN office in the Iraqi capital could
probably not have been totally avoided, casualties
would have been greatly reduced if the UN had
taken the same precautions as in Irbid, where a
security perimeter preempted any vehicle from
approaching the UN compound.
The
subsequent inquiry into the attack concluding
that, after years of UN "reform" trumpeted by
Annan, the UN security system was "dysfunctional"
added insult to injury. But what compounded the
effects was the decision by Annan to circumvent
internal monitoring procedure and hire a retired
UN staff member of no personal standing to
undertake an accountability assessment of the
incident.
Predictably, the assessment,
which was never fully publicized, concluded that,
while all those associated with Iraq bore some
degree of guilt, the secretary general was
innocent on all counts. The report marked a
turning point in relations between Annan and his
staff. Previously, he was viewed as one of them.
Henceforth, he was perceived as someone for whom
staff security came after personal ambition. "If
only he had conceded that he also was
responsible," commented a UN staff member, "we
would have understood, but his refusal to accept
any responsibility and his placing all the blame
on others was just too much."
While the
enmity of the rank and file staff carried in
itself no political consequences for Annan, it
ushered in an era of ongoing leaks, which
compounded his predicament in the Iraqi crisis.
It was common knowledge for years that
there were many loose ends in the oil-for-food
program. Governments, more by neglect than by
design, had chosen to overlook the issue and Annan
never saw fit, as the charter authorizes him, to
"draw the attention" of member states to the
problem.
After the fall of Baghdad,
corruption within the oil-for-food program
suddenly emerged as a major liability for Annan's
administration, and the ongoing investigation,
with its steady flow of leaks, further eroded the
credibility of the UN secretariat. Annan's
problems were compounded by the allegations of
sexual harassment that bedeviled the organization
since spring 1994.
It started when a staff
member accused Lubbers of sexual harassment. On
June 2, 2004 the UN Office of Internal Oversight
confidentially informed Annan that the allegations
were "substantiated". After reviewing the
evidence, Annan, however publicly announced that,
in his opinion, the case was not "sustainable"
and, for all practical purposes, declared the
subject closed.
It might well have been so
had not a series of leaks kept the issue on the
front burner. While the leaks sought to
demonstrate that Lubbers was guilty, the real
target was Annan, who was implicitly accused of
having engineered a coverup. Already under heavy
pressure, Annan compounded his predicament by
taking the unprecedented step, in September 2004,
of stating on the BBC that the US invasion of Iraq
was "illegal".
Technically speaking the UN
secretary general might have been right. Except
for two wars, the Korean in the early 1950s and
the first Gulf War of 1991, which were endorsed by
the UN Security Council, all others wars were, by
UN standards, if not illegal, at lest not legal.
By using, however, two months before a
presidential election, the word "illegal" to
qualify a decision taken by the Bush
administration, Annan, in the eyes of a good
number of observers, had stepped into the arena of
American interior politics.
This, at
least, was the view from the Bush administration,
where some sources suspected that Annan was hoping
for a victory by the Democrats, who in turn would
ensure his reelection for a third term. In the
process he had also alienated himself from a good
number of supporters throughout the world who felt
that he should have spoken up against the American
invasion of Iraq at the time it happened and not
16 months later.
The end result was that,
by the time Bush was reelected, Annan was reeling
from the oil-for-food scandal, was under attack
for not having dealt with allegations of sexual
harassment and was at loggerheads with the Bush
administration over Iraq. Three years into his
second mandate the man who previously could do no
wrong now could do no right.
On December 5
last year, former US ambassador to the UN, Richard
Holbrooke, the man who had engineered Annan's
first election as secretary general, called on him
to attend a secret meeting to be held in
Holbrooke's apartment in New York.
During
the meeting, which lasted several hours, Holbrooke
read Annan the riot act. In no uncertain terms he
impressed on him the imperative need to renovate
his cabinet, to improve his communications, to
repair his relations with Washington, and last but
not least, to implement a policy of zero tolerance
as regards the various allegations of sexual
harassment within the UN bureaucracy.
By
early January it appeared that Holbrooke's
admonitions would be acted on. In one sweep,
Annan's longstanding chief of cabinet was replaced
by the current administrator of the UN Development
Program, Mark Malloch-Brown, and two other of his
close aides, namely his executive assistant and
his spokesman, were shown the door.
The
Cambridge-educated Malloch-Brown had joined UNHCR
as a junior officer in 1979 and, after an
unsuccessful bid at parliament, joined the
Economist in 1983, where he created and edited the
Economist Development Report. The venture was not
a success and in 1986 the Economist suspended
publication of the money-losing publication.
Having failed in the old world, Malloch
Brown moved to the new one, where he joined the
political lobbying firm of Sawyer Miller group.
Here his political acumen and talents as a
communicator found their full scope and, over the
years as head of international practice, he
brought to his firm and managed the communications
strategies of personalities as diverse as Corazon
Aquino of the Philippines and Peru's strongman
Alberto Fujimori.
After a subsequent stint
at the World Bank as vice president for external
affairs, he was appointed by Annan, in the spring
of 1999, as administrator of UNDP.
A close
friend of Annan, who is reported as being the
godfather of one of his children, Malloch-Brown is
acknowledged as a master communicator who would
bring to his new post a degree of decisiveness not
common in the UN system. Enjoying the full trust
of Annan, one of his first missions was to proceed
to Washington to try and mollify members of the
Senate who had Annan in their cross-sights over
the oil-for-food program.
Some UN sources
see a disturbing coincidence between his
nomination and the leaking to the British daily
the Independent of a report on an internal
investigation on Lubbers, which did consider him
guilty of sexual harassment. The leak, which led
to Lubber's resignation, was unprecedented and
induced the UN to formally release the equally
confidential rebuttal of the report by Lubbers.
The fact that Lubbers resigned while denying his
guilt and that Annan accepted his resignation by
acknowledging that he did not consider him guilty
gave to the whole episode a surreal dimension.
With Malloch-Brown now considered the
second-most powerful person in the UN system and,
some surmise, the real power behind the throne, it
will take more than the art of communication to
address the fundamental flaws that are the root
cause for the battering that the UN secretariat is
currently enduring.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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