Toward a new UN security role in
Iraq By Kaveh Afrasiabi
"The true measure of the success of the
UN is how much we deliver for those who need us
most." - UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon
"In Iraq, multinational
forces are operating under a mandate from the
United Nations." This statement by President
George W Bush in his State of Union speech must
have come as a surprise to many of his listeners,
given the sheer absence of any UN oversight of the
US-led occupation forces and the after-the-fact UN
rubber
stamp on an invasion deemed "illegal" by the past
secretary general, Kofi Annan.
But the UN
has a new chief, Ban Ki-moon, who has declared
Iraq a "problem for the whole world" and has
pledged a more active UN role in "assisting in
building an inclusive political process, helping
to cultivate a regional environment supportive of
a transition to stability, and pursuing
reconstruction through the International Compact".
The latter refers to a framework for
providing international assistance, harking back
to UN Security Council Resolution 1483, dated May
2003, which set up a UN special representative on
Iraq with a mandate to oversee the UN's work there
and give reports on "post-conflict processes".
With the naive expectations of a
"post-conflict" Iraq blasted away by the horrific
destruction of UN offices in Iraq on August 19,
2003, killing 22 UN workers including Sergio
Vieira de Mello, the secretary general's special
representative, the UN has since then
understandably adopted a low profile without,
however, vacating the scene altogether.
In
October 2003, the Security Council adopted
Resolution 1511, putting the new special
representative, Pakistan's former envoy to the US,
Ashraf Qazi, in charge of helping the political
process, eg, the drafting of the new constitution
and the elections and, again optimistically,
predicting Iraq's "movement to the full exercise
of sovereignty". This was followed by a subsequent
resolution, 1546, which set up the UN Assistance
Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), a political and
humanitarian focus.
The UNAMI has probably
had its biggest success with respect to the
elections, reflected in a recent report that the
UN provided expert advice to Iraq's Independent
Electoral Commission, established 6,000 polling
stations, trained more than 150,000 election
workers, and accredited more than 200,000 election
observers. On the political front, Qazi has taken
credit for persuading the Shi'ite alliance to
review its nomination of Ibrahim al-Jaafari as
prime minister, and for his continuing effort to
bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the
Shi'ites and Sunnis.
However, the
worsening sectarian strife has dissipated some of
Qazi's initial optimism, and this week he warned
of the dire need to "save the country from sliding
further into the abyss of sectarianism".
The UN and Iraq: The road ahead So far, Ban's most important step on Iraq may
have been his bifurcation of the role of special
representative by appointing deputy secretary
general Mark Malloch Brown as the focal point on
Iraq at the UN headquarters in New York and Qazi
on the ground in Iraq.
Malloch Brown has a
tumultuous history with the United States,
however, and it remains to be seen how the UN's
Iraq team in New York can or cannot work with US
officials, some of whom have branded the outspoken
Malloch Brown of being outright anti-American.
Amplifying a point about the independence of the
secretary general from all founts of global power,
Malloch Brown's selection serves that symbolic
purpose as well.
On the other hand, given
Bush's new offensive strategy in Iraq, which
promises more tension with the Shi'ite-led
government and, definitely, more confrontation
with the militias controlling Baghdad's
neighborhoods along sectarian lines, the UN may
have a new role to play as the interlocutor
between the US and Baghdad officials and, perhaps,
even the militia leaders.
On the regional
level too, the UN, which has to its credit the
past initiative of "Iraq and its neighbors" - a
grouping that brought US, Iranian, Syrian,
Jordanian and Egyptian officials under the same
roof on several occasions - can potentially
mediate between US and Iran and Syria by
sponsoring a new multilateral forum on Iraq.
Also, the UN may pick up an unimplemented
aspect of Resolution 1483, that is, helping the
efforts to build the capacity of the Iraqi police.
Instead of the UN, US advisers and combat forces
are being embedded with the Iraqi army and
security forces, a development that is bound to
escalate insurgency passions, aggravate tensions
with the Iraqi military and political command, and
perhaps even backfire altogether in light of the
heavy infiltration of the Iraqi forces by militant
Shi'ites.
A wholesale purge of those
Shi'ites may actually ensue as an integrated part
of the new US strategy that aims to "clear the
neighborhoods", to paraphrase Bush.
Yet
the comparative advantage of the UN, at least in
the area of police, deserves scrutiny. Already, as
part of its reform process, the UN's Department of
Peacekeeping Operations has been building its
rapid-reaction capability, in part by setting up a
standing police force that, in the words of the
head of that department, veteran peacekeeper
Jean-Marie Guehenno, consists of "a team of
experienced police officers in a number of areas"
that would be deployable quickly.
According undersecretary general Guehenno
in his recent conversation with the author, the
diversity and ambition of peacekeeping missions
have evolved following the parameters of an
integrated approach that combines military,
police, political and humanitarian components.
Thus the question: Why shouldn't the UN
extend its new, more energetic approach toward the
crisis in Iraq to peacekeeping, by getting its
experienced and uniquely competent peacekeeping
agency involved with training the Iraqi police
and, even further, the reform of the Iraqi
security sector, another area of its strength?.
The UN could bring its extensive, valuable
experience and knowledge drawn from its various
peacekeeping missions (eg, Sierra Leone and the
Democratic Republic of Congo) to bear on the Iraqi
context,
Logically speaking, outside the
US opposition over a turf issue, there is no
compelling reason to neglect this option. But then
again, US policy in Iraq is in dire straits, and a
measure of burden sharing with the UN, requiring
ceding some operational authority, is called for.
In this scenario, the European Union,
which has set up a similar program on security and
police reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
can join hands with the UN Peacekeeping Office,
thereby replicating the UN-EU success story in
Congo, which recently held its first democratic
elections in many years and is now in the
"post-transition" period.
For Iraq to
transit beyond its current chaos, new global
initiatives are necessary, dictating qualitatively
new moves by the UN beyond and above political and
life-support activities. In addition to police and
security reform, the UN must also contemplate the
feasibility of incremental substitution of the
multinational forces in the less volatile and more
manageable parts of Iraq, not to mention a stake
in the management of the current foreign forces
stationed in Iraq under its "mandate". Only then
will the phrase "UN mandate" assume real
significance and, one may hope, translate into
tangible benefits that will reduce the current
plight of the Iraqi people.
Kaveh
Afrasiabi is a former consultant to the UN's
"Dialogue Among Civilizations" and occasional
contributor to the UN Chronicle. He is director
and founder of the non-governmental organization
Global Interfaith Peace.
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