UN-OUTLOOK: Multiple Crises Make for a Challenging 1999

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 21 1998 (IPS) - In a perceptive moment, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned on his return from Europe and the Middle East this month that if the Kosovo and Iraq crises were not resolved soon, “we have reason to fear the worst by 1999.”

Two days later, the United States began bombing Iraq.

The chaotic state of world affairs in general indicates how challenging 1999 will be for the United Nations, with some of its most recent diplomatic efforts – in Iraq, Angola, Central Africa, Kosovo and Afghanistan – all foundering badly at year’s end.

More importantly, the U.S. and British strikes on Iraq point to the increasing divisions between the United States and the United Nations at a time when the latter strongly needs Washington’s support.

But from its more than one billion dollars in unpaid U.N. dues to its opposition to an International Criminal Court (ICC), the U.S. government is more inclined to go it alone and snub the United Nations than it has been for years.

With U.S. President Bill Clinton facing an impeachment drive – led by the harshly anti-U.N. Republicans – in the U.S. Senate, any turnaround in Washington’s stance on the world body is unlikely.

The immediate consequence is that the United Nations goes into 1999 with a full plate of world crises, but little U.S. backing to help take them on.

Particularly daunting is the fallout from the ongoing financial crisis which began in East Asia in 1997 and spread to Russia and parts of Latin America this past year. Annan cited the financial crisis as one of the main challenges of the coming year, and pledged that the United Nations will be involved in discussions on reforming the world’s “financial architecture”.

Yet for all the sincerity of U.N. officials’ desire to be involved in that debate, the main industrialised states, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund seem as unwilling to include the world body in international financial decision-making as ever.

Even in the areas where the United Nations has considerable authority – diplomacy and peacemaking – 1999 is already shaping up to be a difficult year.

Central Africa is in turmoil, with at least eight nations entangled in the inconclusive fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire. Supporting DRC President Laurent Kabila are the governments of Angola, Chad, Namibia and Zimbabwe. The rebels who have worked for his ouster, and who now threaten the country’s mineral-rich centre, are backed by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi.

U.N. diplomatic efforts earlier this month have brought all sides together in a commitment to ending the war and an informal cease-fire. But dozens of armed factions, from Rwanda’s former genocidal militias to anti-Uganda armed groups, are also snared in the fighting and U.N. officials believe that a peacekeeping force must eventually be deployed to monitor any lasting truce.

One senior U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, estimated recently that the world body would need to send in at least 15,000 troops to maintain any cease-fire.

Considering that the United Nations now fields fewer than 17,000 soldiers in all its peacekeeping operations worldwide, garnering support in the U.N. Security Council for such a large force could well prove an uphill battle in early 1999.

Yet that challenge almost pales in comparison to the need to rally international attention to the unfolding bloodbath in Angola, where for the second time this decade the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) has turned its back on a U.N.-sponsored peace plan.

Annan conceded that Angola has returned to war, following several years of peace after a 1994 pact was signed in Lusaka, Zambia. Experts here believe that UNITA has successfully kept some 30,000 fighters from turning in their arms in recent years, and is now ready to bring them back into action against Angola’s army, already stretched thin by its commitments in the DRC and Congo- Brazzaville.

The U.N. Observer Mission in Angola, or MONUA, has been forced by the recent fighting to redeploy to “safer” areas like the capital, Luanda, leaving central Angola a largely unmonitored battleground between the rival forces, who have fought with only a few interruptions since independence in 1975.

Some 400,000 Angolans have already been driven from their homes in recent fighting, causing U.N. officials to warn of an impending humanitarian crisis.

Like the collapsing Angolan peace process, the Iraq fiasco – which until the U.S. attack had seemed a major diplomatic triumph for Annan – demonstrates how little authority the world body has if it is not strongly supported by the major world powers.

For the past year, a majority of nations on the 15-member Security Council, including permanent members China, France and Russia, had resisted U.S. desires to attack Iraq and had urged a timetable for lifting the eight-year-old sanctions.

Annan carefully trod a middle path, promising Iraq that it would earn a “comprehensive review” of sanctions and other concerns in the Council if it cooperated with U.N. weapons monitors. In turn, Iraq occasionally sparked rows with the inspectors but always backed down in time to avoid U.S. attack and please its Council supporters.

That cycle of slow diplomacy and intermittent crisis was abruptly broken on Dec 16, when U.S. President Bill Clinton responded to a mildly critical report from chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler by immediately launching air strikes.

In an instant, months of Iraq diplomacy and the promise of a comprehensive review were thrown out the window, along with any hope for cooperation in the Council between the pro-Iraq bloc of Russia and China and the two attacking nations, Britain and the United States.

Chinese Ambassador Qin Huasun’s angry insistence that there was “no excuse or pretext to use force” and Russia’s recalling of its ambassadors in London and Washington herald a difficult time for the Security Council in coming months.