It’s amazing how hard it is for some people to get the message. Even after terrorists blew up the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, and with it the bizarre but widely held notion that the United Nations is beloved and respected in that part of the world, otherwise sensible people still claim it would be a more popular or more effective administrator of post-Saddam Iraq than the U.S.-led coalition.
The more we find out about the attack, the more obvious it is that the U.N. is unsuited for such a role. U.N. arrogance and ignorance of conditions in Iraq was made clear by its rejection of U.S. offers to provide security at its headquarters. And its insistence on using instead security personnel from the Saddam Hussein regime looks worse than foolish.
For some reason – perhaps they get their news from the BBC? – U.N. staffers suffer from the delusion that Iraqis feel great affection for the U.N. and would prefer “neutral” U.N. suzerainty to U.S. occupation.
Tragically, this assumption cost the life of Sergio de Mello, the one senior U.N. figure who seems to have realized that this is not the case and who had a real understanding of Iraq’s needs (and not a trace of nostalgia for the old regime.)
The truth is that many Iraqis distrust or even detest the U.N. And for good reason.
It’s not so much that they associate the U.N. with sanctions or weapons inspections. They associate it with incompetence, corruption and overfriendliness to dictators – most importantly, Saddam Hussein himself.
They haven’t forgotten that Kofi Annan returned from Baghdad in 1998 declaring that Saddam was a man he could work with.
That even now Annan cavils about the “legitimacy” of the Iraqi Governing Council when he and his organization had no problem with Saddam’s legitimacy, or that of any of the other despotic Arab regimes, furthers the perception that the U.N.’s advocacy of democracy in Iraq is a lie.
You can forgive Iraqis for being irritated with the U.N. when they heard that in the months after the war the U.N. withheld supplies already paid for by the oil-for-food program (a byword for mismanagement, graft and hypocrisy) until the coalition made such face-saving gestures as giving the U.N. envoy to Iraq a non-voting seat on the Governing Council.
And you can understand why the sight of all those shiny, underused U.N.-owned SUVs parked in the sun outside the Canal Hotel, or the expensively remodeled air-conditioned headquarters itself, inspired not love and gratitude, but resentment.
Many Iraqi politicians, especially secular moderates, are also disturbed by the way the U.N. is so strangely keen to let Iraq’s neighbors help reshape the country.
Ghassan Salameh, the assistant to the late Sergio de Mello, told a Paris Arabic newspaper that “The U.N. does not agree with the coalition..that the countries neighboring Iraq should not be involved…Their interest is legitimate.”
Of course, the very fact that Salameh, a former government official in Lebanon, was appointed to such a senior position set off alarm bells among Iraqi pols: The Iraqis know perfectly well that Lebanon is controlled by Syria and that Salameh may be discreetly working for Damascus.
Moreover, the presence of an Arab politician in such a key U.N. position reminds Iraqi Kurds, Turkmen and Assyrian Christians that the U.N. sees Iraq as an Arab country, not a multi-ethnic one.
And you can be sure that the Iraqi Kurds certainly haven’t forgotten that Kofi Annan and his staff never raised a peep about the genocidal Anfal campaign in 1988, or its most famous atrocity at Halabja.
The U.N. is particularly – and rightly – despised by the Kurds.
Half of the money allocated to Iraqi Kurdistan under the so-called oil-for-food program never reached its beneficiaries, because the U.N. went along with Baghdad’s efforts to divert or delay those funds.
Notoriously, the largely Kurdish city of Suleimaniya never received the hospital that was supposed to be built with oil-for-food funds, while the U.N. allowed oil-for-food cash to go to such pressing humanitarian projects as Uday Hussein’s Olympic Committee. (Some of the funds could even have gone to the torturers who disciplined unsuccessful athletes.)
The U.N. also went along with Saddam’s demands that Americans, Britons and eventually Scandinavians be excluded from the oil-for-food program.
Instead, it was staffed by Arabs from countries like Tunisia and Egypt – who turned out to be useful recruits for Saddam’s security services.
Worse still, the U.N. quietly went along with Baghdad’s racist demand that no Kurds be employed in the administration of the program. Even now, Kofi Annan and his staffers are oblivious to massive displacement of the Kurds (and Turkmen and Assyrian Christians) by Saddam’s Arabization campaign, but have complained about a few incidents in Kirkuk from which Kurds have expelled Arab settlers from previously Kurdish homes.
Before the U.N. can be allowed to have any say in the future of Iraq it has to show some genuine commitment to Iraqi democracy. As for the even more extreme notion that the U.N. take over from the coalition: Surely the Iraqi people have suffered enough.