DISARMAMENT: Biological Weapons Talks End in Failure

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Aug 25 2001 (IPS) - The failure of a verification initiative for biological weapons control, drafted by a special United Nations group, has put an end to the short-lived climate of understanding that had been achieved after seven years of negotiations in this Swiss city.

The Ad Hoc group, created in 1995 to draw up a protocol to reinforce the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), has ended its efforts, for now, without regrets or glory.

Washington’s rejection of the draft protocol, announced July 25 when the group was just beginning its final sessions, sealed the fate of the text that had been painstakingly debated by negotiators from 60 countries.

The opposition of the United States, home to nearly half of the world’s biotech industry, was the coup de grace for the document presented by Hungary’s Tibor Toth, chairman of the Ad Hoc Group.

US representative to the talks, Donald Mahley, stated that Toth’s protocol was “incapable of achieving the mandate set forth for the Ad Hoc Group” – to set up an international system to enforce a 30-year-old ban on the use of biological weapons in war.

Washington charged that the text adds nothing new to US verification capabilities and could cause problems for its biological weapons defence programme.

The United States also claimed that the draft document opened the door for intellectual property conflicts, particularly industrial secrets of the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors.

The rest of the countries represented in the Ad Hoc Group, though with different levels of enthusiasm, said the text serves as an acceptable basis for the protocol that should be debated at the Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention, slated to meet in Geneva Nov 19-Dec 7.

Most of the delegates and chairman Toth, with the already hopeless protocol in hand, made an effort to rise above the failure in the negotiations by approving a final report that ratifies the validity of the Ad Hoc Group’s original mandate.

But even in drawing up the final report there were irreconcilable differences, once again originating from the US delegation, but this time with the support of the bloc of Western nations.

The United States pressed the group to omit any reference in the report to the limitations it had imposed on the rejected draft protocol.

In contrast, Iran and Cuba, along with other Non-Aligned Nations, demanded an explicit mention of Washington’s obstructionist efforts.

In the end, in a no-win negotiating environment, Toth closed the deliberations last week without approval of the report that includes a description of the negotiations that have been underway since 1995 and of the results achieved.

Debate on the matter will likely continue in September during the UN General Assembly, in the First Committee, which focuses on matters of disarmament and international security. The other scenario for discussion in the near future is the Review Conference here in November.

In either of the two cases, “discussions are likely to prove stormy,” predicted Jenni Rissanen, researcher for the London- based Acronym Institute, a pro-disarmament research and advocacy organisation.

Commenting on potential outcomes, Rissanen stressed that “the process is extremely vulnerable to being held hostage by a small number of countries.”

The ones who really lose out, she said, are the many “middle- ground” states that have expressed willingness for compromise and are “committed to the protocol and to finding collective mechanisms for strengthening the Convention.”

Meanwhile, the United States “may have gained diplomatically from the absence of a final report” from the Ad Hoc Group, said the disarmament expert.

The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was put to the test in 1979 when the United States denounced that a military manufacturer in Sverdlovsk (now known as Yekaterinburg), in the now-defunct Soviet Union, had suffered an accident that released anthrax spores, a banned biological weapon that causes an infectious, often fatal, disease in humans.

Cuba at one point alleged that the United States played a role in the supposed dissemination of dengue fever among the island’s pig-raising operations. The most recent accusations assert that Iraq is producing biological weapons masked by its pharmaceutical industry.

UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Terrorism, Kalliopi K. Koufa, maintained in her recent report that the use of biological weapons by terrorists worldwide caused two deaths and 725 injuries from 1975 to 2000.

In comparison, chemical weapons, which are regulated by a separate international convention, caused 150 deaths and 2,492 injuries in that same period.