Interventions

by Kofi Annan

  Unfortunately, Powell could not sell this idea to Washington, and in the end I went to the region on my own, while emphasizing that I was working closely with the other three. It was a depressing trip, with Sharon insisting that there should be total calm from the West Bank before he lifted a finger himself to ease up on his army’s actions, while Arafat remained maddeningly evasive when I pleaded with him to rein in Palestinian attacks. In Cairo, Mubarak declined my suggestion that he meet with the Israeli leader, joking that Sharon was “too busy eating.”

  I kept pressing for a meeting of the four key outside players in the region—Russia, the United States, the EU, and the UN—ultimately writing to them in October 2001, and bringing them together in New York for a first official meeting on the Middle East in November. I proposed that we work together and call ourselves the Quartet. Everyone agreed.

  I hoped that, through the Quartet, we could help achieve in practice what the UN had so far not been able to do through its own institutions—forge and implement an international strategy for Middle East peace, and help the parties overcome the chasm of mistrust that separated them and the political constraints that held them back. The Quartet was a vehicle with four wheels, but the engine was inevitably “Made in America.” This carried risks for my position in particular. But I hoped at least that I could have a hand on the steering wheel, and quite often I did.

  At public briefings, the Quartet issued consensus statements, which were primarily driven by requirements of the United States, but I was not shy when speaking at Quartet press conferences in also emphasizing my own independent positions as secretary-general and expressing my own separate opinions. It was a credit to Powell that he was open to working in this way. Others in his position might have balked at the whole idea of the Quartet. Truth be told, Powell probably pointed to the expectations of the Quartet, and the ambitions of other players to get involved in his internal Washington battles, in order to push for a more active U.S. role in the diplomacy.

  ARAB PEACE INITIATIVE, PASSOVER BOMBING, DEFENSIVE SHIELD

  It was March 2002, and I was in Beirut attending the Arab League Summit. All the attendees were waiting expectantly for Arafat to address them by video link from a besieged Ramallah. There was fear among Arab leaders that Sharon might soon kill or expel him. Suddenly, the screen went blank. No Arafat. No speech. Had the Israelis suddenly attacked his compound, some wondered? Nothing of the sort. Afterward, President Lahoud proudly informed Terje Roed-Larsen that he had personally cut the line. The hatred of Arafat still prevailed in Lebanon, two decades after his expulsion by Israel from Beirut.

  If this tragicomic moment reminded me of the many divisions within the Arab world, including the history of enmity between Arafat and a number of Arab leaders, the fact was that the Arabs found rare unity at the Beirut summit. They embraced the peace proposal of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, promising full normalization of relations by all members of the Arab League with Israel in exchange for a return of the 1967 territories and a just and agreed solution for the refugees on the basis of UN General Assembly resolution 194 adopted in 1948. The same group that had famously passed the three noes at its summit in Khartoum in 1967—no to peace with Israel, no to recognition of Israel, no to negotiations with Israel—had come a very long way. If Israel reached genuine peace with the Palestinians, Syria, and Lebanon, the Arab peace initiative meant that Israel’s flag would fly in twenty-two Arab countries, and twenty-two Arab countries would fly their flags in Israel. As others have said: the two-state solution could become the twenty-two-state solution. To this day, the Abdullah proposal remains the most compelling Arab offer on the table, offering the Israelis something far larger than a bilateral agreement with the PLO.

  But Sharon completely ignored it. Later, when pressed on why they rebuffed this historic opening, the Israelis would cite the reference to General Assembly resolution 194 on refugees—a reference to the “right of return”—as posing unacceptable conditions. This referred to the Arab claim of the right of all refugees to return to their homes, abandoned in the war of 1948 at the creation of Israel—a policy, if enacted, that would swamp Israel with returning Arab refugees and their descendents. Yet the Arab initiative makes clear that there must be an “agreed”-upon solution on this issue. The least the Israelis might have done was make a counteropening of their own. To this day they have not.

  —

  The same day that the Arab League reached this historic decision, Hamas decided to send a bloody message about where it stood. A suicide bomber killed 29 Israelis and wounded about 150 others in an attack on a Passover feast. It was a shocking, deeply destructive act that required the strongest condemnation from Arafat if we were not to lose the momentum from the Abdullah proposal. From Beirut that night, I called Arafat four times—the line kept being broken—to urge him to condemn the bombing and show the Israeli public that he truly sought a different path to achieving the Palestinians’ aspirations.

  This atrocity was the proximate cause of Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002. Sharon launched massive military incursions with the stated purpose of pursuing those responsible for attacks against Israel. Israel proceeded to fully reoccupy six of the largest cities in the West Bank, imposing around-the-clock curfews, and destroying Palestinian security infrastructure that then left the field even more open for militants to launch attacks.

  The scenes of horror mounted: the twisted metal and bloodstained wreckage of the Passover hotel attack; Arafat’s presidential compound in Ramallah heavily damaged and surrounded by Israeli tanks; Palestinian militants holed up in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem encircled by Israeli forces; and the near-total destruction of a Palestinian refugee camp in the center of Jenin. I was appalled at the atrocities that Palestinian militants had perpetrated, with sixteen bombings between March and early May killing more than one hundred Israelis. But the humanitarian impact and the scale of the killing that Israel was inflicting were excessive, leaving nearly five hundred Palestinians dead and nearly fifteen hundred wounded in the same period.

  As the violence mounted, the Security Council met almost nonstop. We kept thinking the situation could not get worse, but every day it did. In my addresses to the Council, I condemned terrorism unreservedly but also Israel’s excessive use of force and prevention of basic humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians. I sought to apply public pressure on the parties by reminding them not to be carried away by fantasies. I warned Israel that it would be a “miscalculation of monumental proportions to believe that removing Chairman Arafat from the political scene and dismantling the Palestinian Authority would create conditions where Israel can achieve security for itself,” and I lamented that the Palestinian Authority “seems to believe that failing to act against terrorism, and inducing turmoil, chaos, and instability, will cause the government and the people of Israel to buckle. They will not.”

  —

  It was clear that the international community could not break the cycle of violence with cease-fire proposals devoid of any larger political framework—we needed security and politics to go hand in hand. Until that time, in line with Sharon’s wishes, the United States had focused only on a cease-fire, through the efforts of CIA director George Tenet and General Anthony Zinni. They were so overconditioning the development of a political horizon that it would never be reached, playing into the hands of those who wanted to intensify the violence and hold back the peace process. My spokesman Fred Eckhard inadvertently summarized the absurdity when he said in response to a journalist’s question (on April Fool’s Day, 2002, no less):

  The U.S. mediator, General Anthony Zinni, has been trying to get the two sides to begin the Tenet process; which is to lead back to the Mitchell understandings; which is to lead back to the negotiating table. But they’re still stuck in the pre-Tenet stage while the violence goes on.

  Even George Bush seemed to appreciate that things could not go on as the
y were, telling me in a telephone call on March 30:

  We’ve got to understand Israel’s right to defend itself. On the other hand, security must lead to peace. So far security is not even leading to security. We are exploring the fundamental nature of Zinni’s mission. The situation has overpowered Zinni.

  The United States enabled the Council to pass two resolutions—1397, on a two-state solution, which at least noted the Arab Peace Initiative; and 1402, reacting to the violence on the ground, though with nothing binding on either party.

  Bush soon publicly called on Sharon to withdraw from Palestinian cities. The Quartet met in Madrid on April 8, 2002. I knew this would be a test for my fledgling foursome, and I was worried we would not be able to find common ground. But the envoys worked through the night before the meeting to agree to a statement, which sent tough and clear messages to both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and gave our full support to Powell before he visited the region—a position subsequently backed by the Security Council.

  To my relief and satisfaction, the international community was now at least pulling together, and there was the prospect of a serious political discussion on the way forward. But I had a more immediate concern on my mind: Jenin.

  JENIN

  Worrying reports were coming in that civilians in the northern West Bank city of Jenin had been killed in large numbers. A Palestinian negotiator claimed that hundreds had been massacred—a claim that later turned out to be false. There were also independent reports that civilians were being denied access to aid supplies and medical treatment by the Israelis, and that the refugee camp had been largely destroyed. Meanwhile, Arafat was hailing the glorious resistance of the people of “Jeningrad.”

  I did not want to rely on rumors or to condemn anyone until I knew the facts, but I did not want to take a let’s-wait-and-see attitude, either.

  When the Israelis turned down my request to send an immediate search-and-rescue mission, I instructed my envoy, Roed-Larsen, to take the UNRWA commissioner-general Peter Hansen with him and go directly to Jenin with the media. Roed-Larsen was hesitant: “Jenin is closed. This will blow me out of the political water forever, even if I understand why you think it is the right thing to do,” he told me on the phone from his car.

  “Yes, I know there is that risk,” I replied. “But we have to make choices and there are costs. I’m sorry, Terje, you may have to pay a price. But I will back you.” I wanted him to shine a light on what had hitherto been in the dark.

  So Roed-Larsen went. He avoided speculation as to whether there had been a “massacre,” a word he never used. But he described to the press what he saw, which was “horrific beyond belief . . . It is totally destroyed. It looks like an earthquake has hit it. I am watching two brothers pull their father from the ruins, the stench of death is horrible. We are seeing a twelve-year-old boy being dug out, totally burned.”

  The same day, I told the Security Council that I believed it should consider authorizing a multinational force in the Palestinian territory, for the benefit of the security and protection of both parties—a suggestion dismissed by the Israelis. I remain convinced that such a force will one day form part of the peace and security solution to the conflict.

  Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer now welcomed the idea that I should send a fact-finding mission, and the Security Council backed this in resolution 1405. I turned to Martti Ahtisaari—an impeccable Finn with what the Finns call “sisu,” an untranslatable word combining guts and staying power. The Israelis started to get cold feet when it became evident that he would lead a team that included human rights, humanitarian, military, and police experts. Eventually, it became clear the Israelis would not allow the team in, and I had to disband it.

  —

  This kind of episode is played out with some regularity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—we saw something similar with the Goldstone report on Israel’s and Hamas’ conduct during the 2008–9 conflict in Gaza, which occurred after I had departed as secretary-general. There was an important difference—Richard Goldstone was commissioned by the Human Rights Council, not the secretary-general, and the Israelis refused to cooperate with him, citing the bias of the Human Rights Council mandate. But as the Jenin episode illustrated, Israel often also refuses to cooperate with a person with an entirely impartial mandate. The refusal to cooperate with a sober and experienced professional like Ahtisaari was all the more frustrating, because when the dust settled, and I reported later in the year to the General Assembly based on publicly available sources (but not visiting Jenin itself), there were serious violations by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but the most extreme claims that there had been a “massacre” turned out to be false.

  In the debates over UN fact-finding following certain incidents, there are patterns that recur. When Palestinian civilians are killed in IDF operations, the Israelis say it is a good-faith mistake by an army applying high standards of restraint and care but facing the difficult task of fighting militants in densely populated cities. For their part, the Palestinians and Arabs feel that Israel uses excessive force to maintain the occupation and gets away with it. The Israelis claim they are singled out; the Palestinians claim the Israelis are let off the hook. The secretary-general must consistently and impartially uphold international humanitarian law as it applies to all parties.

  There was another situation, a year earlier, in which the Israelis had real and serious grounds for complaint against the UN. In mid-2001, the Israelis gained information that UNIFIL was in possession of a videotape showing the aftermath of the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah. I did not know about the tape, nor did my most senior advisors. Indeed, when we asked, we were positively and absolutely informed by officials in DPKO and UNIFIL that there was no tape. We told the Israelis so, and even took strong exception to their allegations to the contrary.

  When the Israelis stuck to their guns, we checked again—and to my dismay it turned out that a director in DPKO knew of the tape, had it in his possession, and had failed to disclose its existence to his superiors. We eventually allowed Israel to view the tape, but the whole sorry episode was a setback in our efforts to build trust with the Israelis. I appointed an independent committee to investigate, which produced a harsh report exposing serious mistakes of judgment and ethics on the matter within UNIFIL and DPKO.

  This crisis in our relations occurred around the same time as the 2001 Durban Conference on Racism—a matter largely out of my hands but which Israel viewed as an Israel-bashing spectacle under UN sponsorship, a narrative that clouded the many important achievements of Durban. All this was a millstone around the neck of a UN secretary-general in trying to help mediate in the Middle East.

  THE ROADMAP

  By June 2002, George Bush had delivered a speech formally committing his administration to a vision of two states. Despite the wreckage of the intifada, both the Arabs (in Beirut) and the United States had now, for the first time, formally signed on not just to peace but to a clear end goal. However, apart from calling for a new Palestinian leadership not compromised by terror, Bush’s speech laid out no path to the vision. I had said to Powell a year earlier: “We don’t just need a cease-fire, but a timetable for economics and politics, a roadmap, and with monitoring.” Many others had similar ideas. After Bush’s speech, the view quickly took hold—including with the help of the Jordanians—that we needed a roadmap to achieve it.

  The roadmap was not designed to replace a negotiated agreement between the parties. Its purpose was to create the context for those negotiations by rebuilding the confidence shattered by Oslo’s failure, while repairing some of Oslo’s defects. It is sometimes referred to as President Bush’s Roadmap. But it was genuinely a product of negotiation among the Quartet members. Five features gave rise to debate in the group.

  The first and most fundamental feature was parallelism. This was my
mantra, shared by the EU and the Russians: we believed we would get nowhere if all Israeli actions were contingent on the Palestinians first meeting security benchmarks, and we cited the Mitchell Report in this regard. We sensed that the State Department agreed but the White House did not. Nevertheless, with the UN team making a significant contribution, and after plenty of haggling and difficult moments, the roadmap eventually embodied this principle. In phase 1, the Palestinians were expected to act decisively against terrorism, once and for all, and reform corrupt institutions. But the Israelis also had clear obligations: to freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth, remove the so-called settlement outposts—illegal even under Israeli law—that had mushroomed all over the West Bank under Sharon, and allow the Palestinians to reopen their institutions in East Jerusalem. One obligation was not contingent on the other.

  A second key concept was that the roadmap was performance-driven. While timelines were laid down for when the process should move to subsequent phases—including final status negotiations—actually doing so would be dependent on the parties performing. This was important, particularly to the Israelis, since they doubted Arafat’s readiness to live up to his roadmap obligations to act against terrorism. But its logical handmaiden was monitoring—the third innovation. A structure was meant to be put in place through which the international community would closely follow each party’s action or inaction on its obligations. However, this was always a heavily contested aspect of the roadmap. Despite constant pushing from the EU and the UN, the United States never consented to forming a joint, formal mechanism that could call the parties to account for their failure to act on their obligations. The United States’ unwillingness to contemplate empowering a joint platform that could criticize not just the Palestinians but Israel too undid much of the potential of the roadmap.