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North Korea plays on
watchdogs' impotence
By Martin
Schwarz
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
US President George W Bush's new doctrine of
preventive war and preemptive strikes is turning the
United Nations' nuclear watchdog into a lapdog.
After decades of low-profile work to promote
cooperation on the peaceful use of nuclear energy, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is being
forced to mediate between the US and certain members of
what the Bush administration terms the "axis of evil" -
Iraq, Iran, and North Korea - with the unfortunate
outcome of a likely increase in nuclear weapons.
Until the crisis over Iraq, the 2,200 employees
and diplomats at the IAEA in Vienna led a relatively
relaxed life, carrying out their duties to inspect and
enforce the UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
and encourage disarmament of atomic weapons of mass
destruction.
But something changed for them when
they didn't find what Bush wanted them to find in their
inspections of Iraq: nuclear weapons, or at least a
clandestine nuclear program. That seriously damaged
relations between Washington and the IAEA. "The US was
very angry with the way we presented our findings at the
UN Security Council," one IAEA diplomat said. Since then
the IAEA has found itself in both the US and world
spotlight. Mohamed El-Baradei, director general of the
IAEA, has come under "immense pressure from the US", as
one diplomat at the UN in Vienna told this author.
There has been no time for a diplomatic
reconciliation between the US government and the IAEA,
as the Bush administration has hastened to frame Iran
and North Korea as the new nuclear threats to justify
its doctrine.
At the moment, the IAEA is the
uneasy mediator between Tehran and Washington. "We have
to find a compromise between them," one IAEA diplomat
said, after the board of governors of the IAEA decided
not to follow the US recommendation to refer the problem
with Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council. The
Bush administration wanted to see Iran as a defendant at
the Security Council. But this idea was rejected by the
other board members, who opted to try to convince Tehran
to agree to a stricter inspection regime.
Concretely, Washington wanted Iran to sign an
additional protocol to the NPT, allegedly to improve
IAEA inspectors' effectiveness. But Washington refuses
to let IAEA inspectors work in the US, and its main
allies in its "war on terrorism" haven't signed this
protocol, raising doubts about Bush's commitment to
non-proliferation.
Bush's use of the specter of
nuclear threat to legitimate his intimidation policy can
also been seen as just another excuse if reports from
occupied post-war Iraq are taken into account. When the
reports about massive looting in Iraq's biggest nuclear
facility al-Tuwaitha emerged after the war, the US
administration rejected the IAEA's request to send
inspectors to that facility for more than a month.
El-Baradei didn't even get an answer to his letters to
US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Meanwhile, strange
things must have happened in al-Tuwaitha: The IAEA in
Vienna received several phone calls from US soldiers
based at the facility to secure it, who didn't know what
to do with nuclear material they had found.
In
North Korea, where good reasons exist to believe nuclear
weapons are being developed, the IAEA inspectors were
thrown out at the end of last year, prompting agency
officials to surmise that their organization is in the
middle of a bilateral game between the Asian nation and
the US. Saddled with the duty to resolve the conflict
between the two over North Korea's nuclear program, but
without the power to do so, the IAEA is facing the best
example to date of problems it may face in the future.
North Korea seized on its international
obligations under the NPT only to provoke the US to
restart financial and humanitarian aid. For North Korea,
bankrupt in every sense, nuclear weapons seem to be the
only way to put pressure on the US superpower. Pyongyang
banished IAEA inspectors, not because of its
dissatisfaction with the inspection regime, but due to
fear of Bush and a possible pre-emptive strike. So North
Korea is the first regime to learn this lesson from the
standoff over Iraq: If you represent a real nuclear
threat to the US, it may have the will to solve
bilateral problems not by force, but by negotiations.
"The US has destroyed our work," an IAEA
official said. In other words: Washington's policy will
not support non-proliferation efforts, but rather will
lead into a new era of nuclear armament.
Martin Schwarz martin_schwarz@stories-texte.tk
is author of the forthcoming book (in
German)
Saddams blutiges Erbe: Der wirkliche Krieg steht uns
noch bevor on the consequences of the Iraq war. He's
a regular contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus.
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
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