by Kofi Annan
As we made plans for my immediate return to New York, Riza urged me to be careful and to travel with only the greatest discretion, not knowing if a wider campaign against the UN was under way. Al Qaeda had long before named me as one of their targets for my role in what it saw as the dismemberment of Indonesia, Asia’s largest Muslim nation, following the independence of East Timor, and they had singled out Sergio for the same reason. After I asked Sergio to lead the UN return to Iraq, Riza and I had spent a great deal of time with him discussing the complexity of a role that was in equal parts necessary and poisoned from the outset.
As we knew he would, Sergio had tackled the challenge with his unique mix of courage, energy, sensitivity, shrewdness, and commitment to the UN’s highest principles of civilian protection. A broken Iraqi society, on the one hand, and an ignorant and high-handed American occupation unaware of Iraq’s complexities, on the other, was the welcome that had greeted him on arrival three months earlier. The day before the bombing, I called Sergio from Finland. During my holiday, I had decided that he needed to come out of Iraq for consultations at UN headquarters so we could make a sober assessment of our role in Iraq. He cheerfully agreed but insisted that from New York he travel on to Rio to visit his mother and also get a few weeks’ break from the burdens of leading our efforts in Iraq. I said fine, and we ended our call joking and laughing, and signed off with our usual greeting: “Courage!”
When I arrived in New York at the end of what felt like an endless journey, Riza picked me up at the airport and confirmed our worst fears: Sergio, Nadia Younes—his chief of staff and my former chief of protocol—and nearly two dozen other colleagues were considered to have perished. I had spent the flight asking myself: Why did this have to happen? Could it have been avoided? Could I have done something different to protect them? Should they have gone in, should they have stayed? I rehashed the arguments over and over again—and I thought of my colleagues and the families they left behind.
A war that I had tried to stop with every fiber of my being had now taken the lives of two of my closest colleagues, along with some of the most brilliant and dedicated UN staff ever to serve the organization. None of them had believed in the war itself but saw it as their personal and professional duty to come to the aid of the Iraqi people already being convulsed by the beginnings of what would turn out to be a decade of civil war. And now they had been murdered—in an act of terror that forever changed the UN’s sense of risk and vulnerability for our missions in the field. Of course, UN diplomats, peacekeepers, and humanitarian workers had lost their lives in the line of duty before, but to be targeted, in this way, in this country, by the enemies of an occupation that we had sought in every way to prevent, was the cruelest of fates.
On the day of the bombing, I had to respond by reminding the world of our larger mission in Iraq. I could not allow the United Nations to be intimidated by terrorists, and I issued a statement denouncing the attack and recommitting the organization to helping the Iraqi people emerge from war and occupation. Within weeks, it became clear that Iraq was being plunged into an indiscriminate and unspeakably brutal war zone, without room for those not engaged in armed combat. By the last week of September it was clear the risks to our people could no longer be justified, and I ordered the evacuation of all remaining UN staff from Iraq. An epitaph written for Sergio and Nadia in the days after their death captures the sense of loss, anger, and their enduring commitment to the mission of the United Nations that will always stay with those of us fortunate to have served with them:
Sergio and Nadia lived lives of sacrifice and substance. Their deaths both shame and mock the armchair warriors, the television talk-show mudwrestlers, the pontificators, the manipulators and the simplifiers. Their deaths are a reminder that imperium, no matter how benign its intent, is never altruistic, and calls forth its own responses. And their lives are a reminder that it is just possible to do some small good in this rank, sorry, blood-drenched world.
Steven Erlanger, journalist and friend of Sergio and Nadia, New York Times, August 24, 2003
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The shattering damage done by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was of course not limited to the loss of 22 UN officers on August 19, 2003. In the course of the decade following the invasion an estimated 115,000 Iraqi civilians died in the ensuing anarchy and civil war; more than 10,000 coalition soldiers were killed or wounded; some 4 million people were made refugees or were internally displaced; social, economic, and environmental devastation; the standing of the United Nations as an institution and an agent of global security gravely harmed; the promise of multilateralism so ardently sought in the aftermath of the end of Communism blighted; the Middle East peace process set back another decade or more; the vital priority of creating a stable Afghanistan unable to foster terror and instability blithely discarded; Al Qaeda strengthened rather than weakened; Sunni-Shia differences in the Arab world transformed into a murderous schism; the vital and noble principle of humanitarian intervention tainted by its association with aggression and domination; and last, the global standing of the United States, a founding member of the United Nations and long-standing pillar of international order, tarnished by identification with the worst of the abuses, tragedies, and chaos that war brings in its wake.
IRAQ AND THE UNITED NATIONS
In the six years from the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 until my election as secretary-general, Iraq became transformed from an example of the international community’s acting lawfully in pursuit of the highest aims of the UN’s founders to an albatross around the organization’s neck. The sense of global accomplishment following the liberation of Kuwait by a multinational alliance formed to defeat an aggressor state was soon replaced by exasperation over Baghdad’s evasion of its cease-fire obligations and deepening concern about the plight of the Iraqi people.
The UN mandate had been to reverse the invasion of Kuwait, nothing more, and the prudence, discipline, and judicious assessment of the risks of war had led the administration of President George H. W. Bush to stick to that mandate. At the same time, this left Saddam Hussein in power, the predatory leader of a brutal, tyrannical regime that demonstrated little evidence of intending to comply fully with the demands of the international community. My predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, offered me only one piece of advice as he left office at the end of 1996, and it was prophetic: “Watch out for the question of Iraq,” he said. “It will become very important.”
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Given its twenty-year record of aggression abroad and repression within, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a familiar issue for the United Nations by the time I took office in 1997, and a number of my senior team had long been directly involved in managing the international consequences of Baghdad’s policies. None of us had any illusions about the nature of the regime. Iqbal Riza, my chef de cabinet and closest advisor, had served as deputy to Olof Palme, the UN’s envoy during the vicious and devastating Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988. He had witnessed firsthand the effects of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons on civilians and earned the lasting enmity of the regime leadership by insisting to the then secretary-general, Javier Peres de Cuellar, that Iraq’s use of these weapons be exposed to the world. My senior Arab advisor, Lakhdar Brahimi, a former foreign minister of Algeria, had negotiated the Taif Agreement to end Lebanon’s civil war, and had also dealt with the Iraqis in various other negotiations. Contrary to the perceptions and prejudices of some member states, my team was well versed in dealing with the intransigence and venality of the Saddam regime.
My own experience with Iraq dated back to the days immediately following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, when I was asked by Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar to travel to Baghdad with my friend Viru Dayal and negotiate the safe passage of the nine hundred UN staff then based in Iraq and Kuwait. This turned out to be the easy part. In addition, there were some twenty-two hundred Westerners in Iraq whom the regime began to deploy as
human shields, and my team began working closely with Western ambassadors to secure their release. What few people realized was that in addition to the UN and Western civilians, some five hundred thousand Asian and African nationals were also stranded in Iraq and Kuwait—people who were free to leave but had neither the means nor the organization to do so. Going beyond the original purpose of our mission, this became our main focus and, working with the UN Disaster Relief Organization, we eventually negotiated passage to Amman, Jordan, and then an air-bridge from Amman to Asia by which the majority were able to go home.
Following the liberation of Kuwait, the Security Council, determined to ensure that Saddam would never again be able to threaten the region or the world, passed a series of resolutions that would impose on Iraq the most draconian disarmament and sanctions regime in the history of the United Nations. The Council made clear that Iraq would have to verifiably disarm itself of its weapons of mass destruction, and implemented a dual policy of extensive economic sanctions and intrusive weapons inspections. While the main objective was to ensure that Iraq was disarmed of all weapons of mass destruction, the sanctions mostly hurt the people as opposed to the regime. Few at the time imagined that twelve years later, the sanctions would still be in place, with Iraq still defiant and the world still focused on the threat Saddam posed. The expectation was that Saddam would acquiesce rather than endure the misery and suffering of his own people. The sheer obstinacy—and enduring survival instincts—of Saddam’s regime had been grossly underestimated.
A fundamental gulf was revealed, however slowly and painfully, between the instruments of the international community and the realities of power in Iraq. Even as sanctions crippled the economy of Iraq and resulted in widespread malnutrition among its children, Saddam’s grip on the country was strengthened—as any opposition was weakened, and the limited sources of wealth increasingly became concentrated in the hands of regime loyalists. A “Republic of Fear” was enabled inadvertently, but relentlessly, by the regime’s most fervent enemies—the Western members of the Security Council.
As the sanctions persisted year in and year out and misery spread throughout Iraq, the Security Council realized that unless it did something to alleviate the suffering of ordinary Iraqis, the sanctions regime—already leaky and undermined by smuggling condoned by Western powers wishing to limit the damage to Iraq’s neighbors—would collapse entirely. This was the rationale behind the creation of the Oil-for-Food Programme that was established by resolution 986 in 1995 after five years of negotiations by my predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali with Baghdad, and which for eight years provided food and medical supplies for some 26 million Iraqi civilians. All the while, however, a cat-and-mouse game had been playing out between Iraq’s leadership and the United Nations about how and when to secure the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
In resolution 687 of April 1991, which established the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire, the Security Council demanded that “Iraq shall unconditionally accept, under international supervision, the destruction, removal or rendering harmless of its weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missiles with a range over 150 kilometers, and related production facilities and equipment.” It also required Iraq to make a declaration, within fifteen days, of the location, amounts, and types of all such items.
To run the new inspection and disarmament programs, the Council turned to Rolf Ekeus to head the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM)—responsible for inspection operations inside Iraq—and also to Hans Blix, then the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). They were two experienced and scrupulous Swedish diplomats and disarmament experts. With great persistence and discipline, these two men succeeded in destroying an extraordinary amount of prohibited weapons, all the while retaining the trust and confidence of the entire Security Council—not an easy task. Just how exceptional they were soon became clear when Ekeus retired and recommended to me an Australian diplomat, Richard Butler, as his successor.
Despite reservations about Butler on the part of friends such as Madeleine Albright and Nabil El-Arabi, the Egyptian ambassador to the UN, I decided to appoint him. That was a colossal mistake and one of the worst appointments I ever made. The Iraqis, of course, continued to maneuver and manipulate and with Butler, alas, they found the perfect foil. Despite a record of expertise and experience in disarmament, he soon appeared to prefer diplomatic bluster and television appearances to the hard and painstaking work of steering the Iraqis to compliance. His increasingly evident bias against both the Iraqis and key members of the Security Council, including Russia and China, soon turned him into the Achilles’ heel of the UN’s attempts to disarm Iraq through peaceful means.
Even though it was my appointment, the chairman of the UNSCOM formally reported directly to the Security Council. But Butler’s mistake was to view the United States, and not the UN, as the overseer of the disarmament process. After one particularly egregious session in the Security Council, with Butler treating the other members of the Council like small-time mayors, I called him into my office and warned him that any senior UN official who chooses to serve just one member of the permanent five members of the Council soon loses the support of the others. Worse, I warned, such an approach would undermine the Council’s cohesion, hindering its ability to function as a decision-making body. On a more personal note, I also added that once his credibility with the other members of the permanent five was shredded, the United States would then have little use for him, and they would withdraw their support for him as well.
Over the course of 1997 and 1998, a series of inspections led to confrontations with the Iraqi authorities. One of my concerns was the impact of the Iraq sanctions on the UN’s standing around the world. The international community’s engagement in Iraq was heavily militarized, given the no-fly zone, the periodic threats of bombings, and the intrusive inspectors. Also, Iraq was not allowed to develop its infrastructure and its oil resources were managed by the UN. However misplaced a view, this was widely seen—in the developing world in particular—as a case of the UN picking on a weak country with Security Council resolutions a cloak for great-power bullying. The question leaders across the Middle East and beyond continuously asked me throughout the years from 1997 to 2003 was simple: if the UN can impose such draconian measures on a government to force compliance with UN resolutions, why has it not done the same with Israel? One of the arguments the Americans were making was that Saddam had not implemented UN resolutions. But Israel was in similar noncompliance with UN resolutions over the territories it had occupied since 1967. This inconsistency incensed many parties.
In November 1997, I personally stepped into the Iraq quagmire for the first time. I knew full well that my interventions would be met with suspicion and maneuvering on all sides, but I was equally certain that there was a vital role to be played. I appointed three senior diplomats, Lakhdar Brahimi, Emilio Cardenas, and Jan Eliasson, to go to Baghdad to engage the Iraqis. Baghdad at this time was clearly determined to reengage the UN at a senior level, namely with me as secretary-general, and it had made its negotiating position clear: it was not seeking confrontation; it had implemented all Security Council resolutions without receiving adequate respect for its sovereignty, integrity, and security; and that one member state—the United States—was using UNSCOM for its own purposes.
Later in November, as pressure was growing on UNSCOM to amend its practices and possibly change the composition of its inspection teams, U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright called me to urge that all such appeals for the alteration of UNSCOM’s work be rejected and that all key decisions be left to the Council and UNSCOM. “It’s important for your stature that you do not bend,” she said, adding that she spoke as “a friend.” “We must retain the independence of UNSCOM.” With the latter point I agreed entirely, but I suspect we had different ideas on what “independence” meant in this case.
What became increasingly cl
ear was that Butler’s management and leadership of UNSCOM was, in fact, a gift to Saddam—allowing him, with a growing body of evidence—to claim that he was all for disarming and cooperating with the international community, but that UNSCOM’s approach made this impossible. This was entirely untrue, of course, but what Butler and his backers in Washington and London failed to understand was that the further they pushed him to do their bidding, the more he undermined his own position and that of his inspection organization.
In late 1997, it was clear the United States had lost patience with the inspections process and was agitating for military action or full Iraqi compliance. UN inspectors under Rolf Ekeus, a shrewd, meticulous, and persistent Swedish diplomat, had been in Iraq for some seven years and had in that period destroyed more weapons of mass destruction than the coalition had during the entire Gulf War. This record of success, however, was achieved despite—and not because of—the regime’s attitude toward the inspections. By this time, Iraq had identified a new reason to resist cooperation; namely, the national security and dignity of its presidential sites—vast complexes of buildings and parks designed for Saddam and the senior leadership of Iraq. Of course, this resistance flouted resolution 687, which had made clear that there could be no exceptions to the demand for immediate and unconditional access to all sites. I knew Saddam had to open these “presidential sites” and palaces, as stipulated by resolution 687, but I also felt deeply uneasy that the world could go to war over this issue—any deaths arising from this relatively trivial matter seemed utterly needless. I believed there was a way to win full compliance without unnecessary humiliation for the Iraqis.
On February 13, 1998, as consultations with the permanent five members continued and I decided to send a technical team led by Staffan de Mistura to Baghdad to map the presidential sites prior to my own arrival, I received a call from Albright. She was clearly getting worried about the idea of a special, high-level UN mission to Baghdad following the technical visit and pleaded with me not to travel before a permanent five consensus had been reached. As this had always been the basis for my trip, I stressed my agreement. But then she insisted that by sending a technical team to Baghdad I was somehow accommodating Iraqi demands. If anything, I corrected her, I was calling their bluff. If the Iraqis considered the presidential sites to be critically sensitive locations this was their chance to delineate where they began and where they ended, putting a stop to the games that were being played around them.