DISARMAMENT: U.S. Isolated in Biological Weapons Debate

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Nov 23 2001 (IPS) - The United States strategy of adopting bilateral accords to confront the threat of biological weapons attacks is alienating Washington from the many countries that would prefer a multilateral approach.

These differences, notorious in forums on weapons proliferation – like the United Nations Conference on Disarmament (CD) – are evident at the meeting to review the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), under way in Geneva through Dec 7.

In a summary of the first week of meetings, Tibor Toth, Hungarian diplomat and president of the BWC conference, commented that “many many countries” disagree with the U.S. approach.

Unlike Washington, said Toth, these nations “would like to continue the multilateral negotiating efforts” to establish an instrument that strengthens the BWC.

The United States came to the review conference with a series of alternative proposals that demonstrate Washington’s “continued allergy to multilaterally-negotiated, legally binding agreements,” said Jenni Rissanen, of the London-based Acronym Institute, a non-governmental group specialising in disarmament efforts.

In spite of its nearly 30-year history, the BWC lacks a system of obligatory verification to prevent the production and stockpiling of “bacteriological and toxin” weapons.

An attempt to fill in that gap with a protocol on powers to inspect suspicious sites was frustrated last July, after seven years of negotiations, by strong opposition from the United States.

Washington argued that the draft document opened the door for intellectual property conflicts, and particularly threatened the industrial secrets of the country’s powerful pharmaceutical and biotech sectors.

Other arms agreements, such as the treaty banning chemical weapons, establish strict verification mechanisms, but the BWC has no such legally binding inspection system.

The Sep 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and the anthrax cases that appeared later, which have claimed five lives so far in the United States, have not changed Washington’s stance on the matter.

After those incidents, disarmament negotiators from around the world expected the U.S. delegation to arrive in Geneva with a more flexible attitude, commented a Latin American diplomat who requested anonymity.

But the U.S. Under-Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, John Bolton, stated this week that the draft of the protocol “is dead, in our view.”

“Dead, and it is not going to be resurrected,” the secretary told a press conference in Geneva, where he heads the U.S. delegation to what is officially known as Fifth Review Conference of the States Parties to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction.

The United States “will not enter into agreements that allow rogue states or others to develop and deploy biological weapons,” Bolton said.

The U.S. official accused Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria of engaging in clandestine biological weapons production.

It is also believed that Sudan has shown increasing interest in developing a biological weapons programme, but that country is not party to the BWC, he said.

The list includes other states, but Washington will be contacting them privately about these concerns, according to Bolton.

Rissanen commented that the U.S. decision to “name names”, which is an unusual move in diplomatic circles, caught many diplomats off guard.

In place of the protocol it rejected, the United States offered the review conference a series of alternatives for beefing up the Convention.

The initiatives include fortifying national application of the Convention through legislation that would make it a crime for anyone to engage in activities prohibited by the BWC, and enhancing extradition agreements with respect to biological weapons offences.

Another U.S. proposal is to establish an international mechanism for investigating suspicious disease outbreaks and other alleged germ warfare incidents.

Bolton also urged the parties to the Convention to “adopt and implement strict bio-safety procedures, based on WHO (World Health Organisation) or equivalent national guidelines.”

Conference president Toth pointed out that the draft protocol, which the George W. Bush administration criticised so harshly in July, covers many of the proposals outlined by Bolton.

But the U.S. position came under fire from several delegations, including those from France and Chile, and from representatives of U.S. and European scientific institutions, as well as from non- governmental organisations that are following the review conference.

French Foreign Relations Minister Francois Rivasseau made it clear that his country does not agree with the positions the United States has taken with regard to the BWC.

Meanwhile, China’s representative before the conference, Sha Zukang, alluded to the conflict between unilateralism and multilateralism.

“At present, when the issue of security is becoming increasingly a cross-cutting and global issue, the inter- dependence among various countries in this field is augmenting, as are their common grounds,” Sha said.

Civil society groups at the conference called attention to the serious reality that diseases are being turned into weapons.

Jean Pascal Zanders, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), said the attacks with anthrax letters in the United States have underscored the vulnerability of societies to terrorist strikes that utilise biological agents.

“The ever-increasing pace of developments in biotechnology, genomics, proteomics and related fields raises concern that these technologies could be misused for hostile purposes,” Zanders warned.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, with the Federation of American Scientists (United States), criticised the approach Bolton has been promoting at the conference.

“If Secretary Bolton and other U.S. officials believe that Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and others have biological weapons programmes, then it should be obvious to those officials that the voluntary measures (proposed by Bolton) won’t work,” Rosenberg said.

She added that only an international agreement could “increase the available information about biological activities around the world, or bring the international community together to respond if a violation of the Convention should be suspected.”

The delegations at the conference will spend the next two weeks, in closed sessions, discussing the content of the final declaration. Toth declined to make any predictions about the outcome of the debates.