Monday, May 4, 2020
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
US Used UN to Spy on Iraq
The Boston Globe
US used UN to spy on Iraq, aides say
Focus on Hussein seen
By Colum Lynch, Globe Correspondent, 01/06/99
UNITED NATIONS - US intelligence agencies, working under the cover of the United Nations, carried out an ambitious spying operation designed to penetrate Iraq's intelligence apparatus and track the movement of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, according to US and UN sources.
The operation, which is believed to be ongoing, allowed US intelligence agents to listen in on secret communications between elite military units responsible for Hussein's security, the sources said. It remains unclear if the plan was designed to topple the regime.
The Clinton administration yesterday declined publicly to address the charges. ''I can't comment on intelligence matters,'' said David Leavy, the spokesman for the US national security adviser. ''The relevant UN resolutions mandate all member states to cooperate with UNSCOM in its mission to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program and the United States fulfilled its obligations.''
But US officials privately acknowledged that they were engaged in the operation.
Sources said US infiltration of Iraq's internal security infrastructure is far more extensive than has been made public. And it has been largely facilitated, although sometimes unwittingly, by the UN Special Commission, created by the Security Council in 1991 to make sure Iraq got rid of its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the sources said.
The top-secret operation began in February 1996, they said. The electronic surveillance team, which is operated by international UN inspectors and run out of UNSCOM headquarters in Baghdad, was part of a special UN inspection unit that tracked Iraq's ''concealment mechanism'' - an intelligence scheme that enabled Iraq to anticipate UNSCOM's every move and hide evidence of its weapons programs on a moment's notice. UN officials suspect Iraq received information on UNSCOM personnel movements from Iraqi officials assigned to the United Nations.
Frustrated by Iraq's ability to evade UN weapons probes, the United States supplied UNSCOM with eavesdropping equipment, including commercial scanners and U2 spy photographs to monitor the activities of the elite intelligence apparatus responsible for hiding Iraq's prohibited weapons and securing Hussein's safety, according to sources.
The surveillance equipment, among other things, allowed UN inspectors, sitting in their Baghdad headquarters, to listen in on radio, cell phone, and walkie-talkie communications by members of the Iraqi security network, the sources said. British and Israeli intelligence analysts helped the UN inspectors interpret the information. The United States also played a major role in interpreting the data.
''We knew a hell of a lot of information about presidential security,'' Scott Ritter, former team leader of the UN program to counter Iraq's concealment mechanism, said in a recent interview. But he said if his team found any information related to Hussein's personal safety, ''we would dump it.''
Rolf Ekeus, former executive chairman of UNSCOM, who declined to discuss the operational elements of the surveillance system, said the program was run and controlled by the United Nations inspectors, not the United States.
''Was it run by the US?'' said Ritter. ''Hell, no.''
But Ritter said that changed in March 1998, when the United States pressured British and Israeli intelligence to stop supporting the UN eavesdropping operation, and took it over itself.
With the approval of the new chief UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler of Australia, the United States took control in April, according to Ritter. By July, the system had been largely automated, allowing the United States to listen in on Iraqi communications from a remote location after the UN inspectors left the country before the US-British bombing campaign.
Ritter said the United States had yet to provide the UN operation with a single briefing on the information by the time he resigned in August.
''The US decided this system is too sensitive to be run by UNSCOM. They bullied their way in and took it over,'' Ritter said. ''Now any data collected by this activity is not being assessed by UNSCOM. Now, the US gained 100 percent access and is not feeding any of it back.''
A US official warned that the public disclosure of the report would compromise US intelligence activities in Iraq, and he asked the Globe to withhold certain operational details.
Butler denied that he had allowed the United States to take charge of a United Nations intelligence gathering operation. He said UNSCOM is permitted by Security Council resolutions to accept assistance from all member countries. But he denied he used that information to help the United States.
''Those charges are utterly without foundation. That is completely false,'' Butler said. ''That I handed over such a function to the Americans to operate within our organization is completely false.''
Ekeus said that he had agreed to accept the support of US intelligence agencies in the hope it would help him get to the bottom of Iraq's prohibited weapons.
And he said the system helped UNSCOM counter Iraq's efforts to hide its weapons of mass destruction.
Ekeus, now Sweden's ambassador to the United States, said Iraq had developed a system of moving key defense assets during the Gulf War. It had shielded its missile launchers by creating decoy missiles and putting their real ones on trucks and driving them around the country.
The strategy was later employed to outfox the UN inspectors, he said.
In 1991, an American inspector, David Kay, was led on a chase through Baghdad by an Iraqi truck seeking to hide nuclear weapons material.
The defection of Brigadier General Hassan Kamal in 1995 produced greater details on the extent of the Iraqi concealment, Ekeus said.
''We learned heaps more about Iraqi techniques for hiding'' their weapons, Ekeus said. ''Our task was clear; to find prohibited weapons. We started to design a system to catch'' them in the act.
He said UN inspectors, selected from around the world, were ordered to sign a contract pledging never to reveal data they found to their governments or to the public.
It remains unclear whether the United States used the intelligence it gathered from the operation to select its targeting during Operation Desert Fox, the four-day bombing campaign that ended Dec. 19. But key figures and organizations under scrutiny by the United Nations - the Special Security Organization, the Republican Guard Headquarters, and the Iraqi Intelligence headqarters - were blown up during the operation. So was the home of Abid Hamid Makhmoud, the head of the concealment mechanism and Hussein's personal safety operation.
''He is one of only three people who know where Saddam spends the night,'' Ritter said.
''If there is an ongoing covert operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein, it seems to me that Desert Fox has undermined it,'' said Bill Arkin, a Washington-based specialist on the Iraqi military. ''The bombing and evacuation of UNSCOM has heightened security and makes a coup or uprising more difficult to pull off.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 01/06/99.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Architectural Diplomacy
Hardened U.S. Embassies Symbolic of Old Fears, Critics Say
Published on: Monday, 8/30/2004, A section,
edition, zone, A21
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 28 Words: 1095 Slug:
Washington Post Staff Writer
UNITED NATIONS -- For more than 40 years, it has been the workplace of America's most famous ambassadors, including George H.W. Bush and Madeleine K. Albright. It has also served as a key staging ground for some of the country's most important diplomatic initiatives, including U.S. efforts to sell the world on its invasion of Iraq and to defuse a potential nuclear war with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis.
But the headquarters of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations doesn't generate much respect among the world's diplomatic set, whose members have derided the gray 12-story structure as an architectural eyesore that is unfit to house the world's lone superpower.
"It's ugly," said Germany's U.N. ambassador, Gunter Pleuger. "And inside it's not very modern. I think the United States delegation deserves a better one."
The United States is set to get an upgrade. Construction workers will demolish the building on 45th Street and First Avenue over the next four months to make way for a heavily reinforced, 23-story high-rise that is designed to accommodate nearly twice the staff and survive a car bomb explosion.
The $4.4 million demolition has forced more than 160 American diplomats and support staff into a commercial building several blocks from U.N. headquarters, on 45th Street near Lexington Avenue, until the new building is completed in 2008.
The passing of the storied building, whose concrete, honeycombed facade once stirred fans of Modernist architecture, has generated little protest from the city's preservationists. Even former occupants are glad to see it go.
"It's lived its life," former U.S. ambassador John D. Negroponte said in a formal ceremony convened to shutter the old building. "It's kind of worn out."
"I've been in it once," said his successor, John C. Danforth. "When I see it in passing, my heart does not skip a beat."
Another senior U.S. diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, put it more bluntly: "They should have blown up the architect."
The building, which opened its doors in the spring of 1961, was not always so despised. For a country that had been ambivalent about the United Nations, the decision to erect a permanent mission across the street from U.N. headquarters was seen as a symbol of America's commitment to working with others to pursue peace. A New York Times editorial in March 1956 hailed U.S. plans to build "our own U.N. monument" as a powerful rebuke to "a few antediluvian isolationists in Congress who would like to have us pull out of this often annoying company and go it alone."
The effort faced bureaucratic, financial and political hurdles from the beginning, when American officials began looking for a site in 1947. The late U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. overcame the forces of Washington bureaucracy and American isolationism to make it happen, invoking fears that the Soviets were considering purchasing the site for their own mission. That, he warned, would constitute a "diplomatic Sputnik for them," a reference to the first man-made craft sent into space.
During Lodge's tenure, Congress appropriated about $3.7 million in March 1958 to begin construction. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose golden bust is displayed in the main conference room at the mission's transitional headquarters, vetoed the bill because of an unrelated dispute over civil servants' retirement funds. The bill was ultimately signed into law months later.
Inspired by Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who helped design the U.N. headquarters, the firms Kahn & Jacobs and Kelly & Gruzen conceived the building in the Brutalist style, a form of architecture popular in the 1960s and 1970s that relied on sculpted, rough concrete surfaces.
"It was an expression by the U.S. government that we were to be associated with the same kind of modern values that shaped the creation of the United Nations," said Matt Postal, who once led walking tours of Modernist architectural buildings in Manhattan. Postal said that the building has since fallen on hard times. Its concrete facade is cracked and in need of a scrub. Inside, the mission is cramped and cluttered. The wiring is too old to accommodate modern electrical, security and computer networks, U.S. officials said.
Like its predecessor, the new building has taken more than a decade to finance and has faced intense resistance from the United Nations' toughest critics. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) pledged in 1998 to fight it, saying, "I intend to do all I can to make sure that hardworking Americans don't pay for a State Department palace in New York."
The building's shell, which will be constructed by the General Services Administration, will cost $50 million to $60 million. The State Department will pay more than $12 million for renting the two spaces. To save money, the government scrapped plans for a permanent residence for the ambassador.
U.S. officials declined to discuss the cost or the practical impact the move will have on U.S. intelligence agencies that have long used the United Nations as a prime post for listening in on foreign diplomats.
The mission's transition to temporary quarters, meanwhile, has irritated some diplomats, who complained they have been squeezed into smaller cubicles while the mission's top three ambassadors have been given equal space. Still, many diplomats are grateful to flee a building that provided an inviting target for car bombers. Indeed, the design for the new mission has been influenced as much by terrorists as by the aesthetics of architecture or the principles of international cooperation.
The new building will be set back from the street, and the first six floors will be windowless, in an effort to prevent injury from exploding glass from a car bomb. Former New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp described the new mission as a "high-rise bomb shelter."
"The form and material gesture diplomatically toward friendship and transparency," he wrote. "Otherwise this is black helicopter stuff: a crisp but hulking tower of power."
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 13, 2009; A05
UNITED NATIONS, March 12 -- Across the Manhattan street from the landmark buildings of the United Nations, a new architectural symbol of American outreach to the world is rising: an impenetrable concrete tower with 30-inch-thick concrete walls and no windows on its first seven floors.
Built to endure a chemical- or biological-weapon attack or an explosives-laden truck careening up Manhattan's First Avenue, the new U.S. mission to the United Nations will offer the most secure diplomatic quarters in history when it is completed next year.
The 26-story building is one of a new generation of hardened U.S. diplomatic outposts. More than 60 high-security embassies and consulates have been constructed in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa over the past eight years.
The primary goal is greater protection for the 20,000 American officials serving in those facilities, but the buildings have also been criticized as enduring symbols of the fears and anxieties that gripped the United States in the wake of the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"The attacks of 9/11 are not a sufficient excuse for this bizarre edifice. I think the building sends an entirely wrong signal to the United Nations, and the world," said Stephen Schlesinger, an author who has written extensively on the United Nations. "Rather than being an approachable, beckoning embassy -- emphasizing America's desire to open up to the rest of the globe and convey our historically optimistic and progressive values -- it sits across from the U.N. headquarters like a dark, forbidding fortress, saying, 'Go away.' "
The latest quest to better guard America's diplomats began in 1998, when members of al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring more than 5,000. A review of U.S. diplomatic security in the wake of the bombings concluded that more than 180 U.S. embassies and consulates were vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and Congress mandated an unprecedented construction spree to replace those structures. The 9/11 attacks, which felled two Manhattan skyscrapers, only reinforced the need for safer buildings.
The Bush administration appointed Charles E. Williams, a retired major general from the Army Corps of Engineers, to lead the construction. Williams's Bureau of Overseas Building Operations developed a Standard Embassy Design, a one-size-fits-all blueprint that has produced dozens of high-security look-alike embassies and consulates for the State Department. Williams won praise for the speed with which the buildings went up, but also criticism that his approach sometimes resulted in shoddy work and, in the building of the $730 million embassy in Baghdad, contracting irregularities.
State Department officials defend the program, saying that a car bomb attack against the U.S. Embassy in Yemen last August underscored the threats still facing American personnel.
"We wish the world was a safer place," said Jonathan Blyth, a spokesman for the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations. "However, in the last 10 years since the bombings in East Africa, the world is a more dangerous place. We need to construct facilities to put American diplomats in safe and functional facilities for them to advance foreign policy and ultimately, hopefully, make the world better, safer and more secure for all citizens of the world."
Blyth said that State has drawn on some of the world's best architects to build high-profile U.S. embassies in cities like Berlin and Beijing. The architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was recently awarded the American Institute of Architects' Excellence in Architecture Design Citation Award for the Beijing complex, perhaps the most elegant embassy.
But Richard J. Shinnick, who replaced Williams, has conceded that many of the U.S. buildings lack grace. In a talk to industry advisers in September, Shinnick described the past eight years as "the dark ages as far as the design culture was concerned."
Foreign critics have been hostile to the Standard Embassy Design. "There is hardly a modern building in existence -- with the exception of nuclear bunkers and pesticide-testing centers -- that is so hysterically closed off from public space as this embassy," Germany's conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said of the Berlin building.
John Rubell, whose firm Moore Ruble Yudell Architects built that embassy, was taken aback by the lashing it received in the German news media, which he thought was unfair. But he said that it may be time for embassy architects to address the critics.
"We have to deal with certain realities," Rubell said. "The security issues are real, but at the same time we need to design buildings that don't primarily express that fact."
A glance at the U.N. mission makes it hard to think of anything else. Its rough concrete exterior contrasts with gleaming glass luxury towers that sprang up around Manhattan in the boom years that followed Sept. 11.
Charles Gwathmey, whose firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects designed the mission for the General Services Administration, said the building will feature an inviting glass entryway, set off by an Alexander Calder stabile, to passersby and visitors once the project is completed.
But the transparency ends at the lobby elevators. The windowless floors at the base of the building will be filled with computers and other high-tech equipment that cannot be described to the public.
Gwathmey was most proud of the building's concrete skin, noting that he had received a call from the renowned architect I.M. Pei, who asked him, " 'How did you get that beautiful concrete?' He thought it looked fantastic."
Here's a piece I wrote on the orginal building.
Published on: Monday, 8/30/2004, A section,
edition, zone, A21
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 28 Words: 1095 Slug:
'Ugly' U.S. Mission Building To Get Roomier Replacement New Headquarters at U.N. Designed to Withstand Terrorism
By Colum LynchWashington Post Staff Writer
UNITED NATIONS -- For more than 40 years, it has been the workplace of America's most famous ambassadors, including George H.W. Bush and Madeleine K. Albright. It has also served as a key staging ground for some of the country's most important diplomatic initiatives, including U.S. efforts to sell the world on its invasion of Iraq and to defuse a potential nuclear war with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis.
But the headquarters of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations doesn't generate much respect among the world's diplomatic set, whose members have derided the gray 12-story structure as an architectural eyesore that is unfit to house the world's lone superpower.
"It's ugly," said Germany's U.N. ambassador, Gunter Pleuger. "And inside it's not very modern. I think the United States delegation deserves a better one."
The United States is set to get an upgrade. Construction workers will demolish the building on 45th Street and First Avenue over the next four months to make way for a heavily reinforced, 23-story high-rise that is designed to accommodate nearly twice the staff and survive a car bomb explosion.
The $4.4 million demolition has forced more than 160 American diplomats and support staff into a commercial building several blocks from U.N. headquarters, on 45th Street near Lexington Avenue, until the new building is completed in 2008.
The passing of the storied building, whose concrete, honeycombed facade once stirred fans of Modernist architecture, has generated little protest from the city's preservationists. Even former occupants are glad to see it go.
"It's lived its life," former U.S. ambassador John D. Negroponte said in a formal ceremony convened to shutter the old building. "It's kind of worn out."
"I've been in it once," said his successor, John C. Danforth. "When I see it in passing, my heart does not skip a beat."
Another senior U.S. diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, put it more bluntly: "They should have blown up the architect."
The building, which opened its doors in the spring of 1961, was not always so despised. For a country that had been ambivalent about the United Nations, the decision to erect a permanent mission across the street from U.N. headquarters was seen as a symbol of America's commitment to working with others to pursue peace. A New York Times editorial in March 1956 hailed U.S. plans to build "our own U.N. monument" as a powerful rebuke to "a few antediluvian isolationists in Congress who would like to have us pull out of this often annoying company and go it alone."
The effort faced bureaucratic, financial and political hurdles from the beginning, when American officials began looking for a site in 1947. The late U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. overcame the forces of Washington bureaucracy and American isolationism to make it happen, invoking fears that the Soviets were considering purchasing the site for their own mission. That, he warned, would constitute a "diplomatic Sputnik for them," a reference to the first man-made craft sent into space.
During Lodge's tenure, Congress appropriated about $3.7 million in March 1958 to begin construction. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose golden bust is displayed in the main conference room at the mission's transitional headquarters, vetoed the bill because of an unrelated dispute over civil servants' retirement funds. The bill was ultimately signed into law months later.
Inspired by Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who helped design the U.N. headquarters, the firms Kahn & Jacobs and Kelly & Gruzen conceived the building in the Brutalist style, a form of architecture popular in the 1960s and 1970s that relied on sculpted, rough concrete surfaces.
"It was an expression by the U.S. government that we were to be associated with the same kind of modern values that shaped the creation of the United Nations," said Matt Postal, who once led walking tours of Modernist architectural buildings in Manhattan. Postal said that the building has since fallen on hard times. Its concrete facade is cracked and in need of a scrub. Inside, the mission is cramped and cluttered. The wiring is too old to accommodate modern electrical, security and computer networks, U.S. officials said.
Like its predecessor, the new building has taken more than a decade to finance and has faced intense resistance from the United Nations' toughest critics. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) pledged in 1998 to fight it, saying, "I intend to do all I can to make sure that hardworking Americans don't pay for a State Department palace in New York."
The building's shell, which will be constructed by the General Services Administration, will cost $50 million to $60 million. The State Department will pay more than $12 million for renting the two spaces. To save money, the government scrapped plans for a permanent residence for the ambassador.
U.S. officials declined to discuss the cost or the practical impact the move will have on U.S. intelligence agencies that have long used the United Nations as a prime post for listening in on foreign diplomats.
The mission's transition to temporary quarters, meanwhile, has irritated some diplomats, who complained they have been squeezed into smaller cubicles while the mission's top three ambassadors have been given equal space. Still, many diplomats are grateful to flee a building that provided an inviting target for car bombers. Indeed, the design for the new mission has been influenced as much by terrorists as by the aesthetics of architecture or the principles of international cooperation.
The new building will be set back from the street, and the first six floors will be windowless, in an effort to prevent injury from exploding glass from a car bomb. Former New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp described the new mission as a "high-rise bomb shelter."
"The form and material gesture diplomatically toward friendship and transparency," he wrote. "Otherwise this is black helicopter stuff: a crisp but hulking tower of power."
Crime Goes Unsolved As UN Agencies Spar
Published on: Tuesday, 5/12/2009, A section,
Washington Post Staff Writer
UNITED NATIONS -- It was 10:30 p.m. in Kabul, and Shkelquim Sina had just e-mailed his wife goodnight when an explosion ripped through his hotel bedroom, obliterating a wall, scorching nearly half his body and leaving the United Nations weapons expert barely clinging to life.
The alleged culprit was not a terrorist attacker but a U.N. colleague: Within 24 hours, Robert Shaw, a former weapons specialist for British intelligence, had been turned over to Afghan authorities by U.N. officials on suspicion of attempting to murder his Albanian colleague.
Robert Shaw(courtesy of a friend)
The October 2006 incident is one of the most egregious alleged crimes to have occurred within the U.N.'s ranks, but the ensuing investigation unraveled, leaving both men with shattered lives and damaged reputations with virtually no hope of having their names cleared.
Hundreds of pages of confidential U.N. documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with those involved in the incident, demonstrate how U.N. agencies turned against each other as they struggled to determine who was responsible for the explosion. The case highlights the challenges the United Nations faces in policing the conduct of more than 150,000 U.N. civilian officials and uniformed peacekeepers around the world.
Since 2006, more than 850 peacekeepers have been sent home after allegations of corruption, sexual misconduct, gold smuggling and arms trafficking. Last year, just seven of those cases had been resolved; the most serious punishments were dismissal or up to 40 days in a military jail. In a rare case of more severe punishment, Nigerian military authorities last month sentenced 27 Nigerian peacekeepers to life in prison for mutiny in Liberia after they protested the theft of their U.N. salaries by their own officers, news reports said. The officers were demoted.
"We don't know" how many perpetrators get punished, said Alan Doss, the U.N. special representative in Congo. "Clearly, the reporting system needs improvement. We don't get the kind of systematic feedback we should be getting."
Lacking its own police force, the United Nations relies on a combination of local law enforcement authorities, internal U.N. investigators and outside consultants with varying degrees of competence and limited power to enforce their findings.
Early last year, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proposed establishing a U.N. anti-crime squad to respond more aggressively to allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct in peacekeeping missions. But the initiative encountered broad opposition from member states, including the United States, whose governments feared it would place too much power in U.N. hands.
Even so, Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has said that improving U.N. management of humanitarian and peacekeeping operations is one of her top priorities.
Dueling Investigations Shaw was sipping a beer at the British Embassy in Kabul on Oct. 12, 2006, when he and his friends heard the explosion that injured Sina. Shaw quickly emerged as the prime suspect because he had been seen by a maid entering Sina's room several hours before the blast.
He was jailed for 24 hours and released into the custody of a former colleague in the British military. He was arrested a second time after U.N. lawyers furnished allegations that Shaw and Sina had been involved in a conspiracy to smuggle weapons and had quarreled. A U.N. crime scene analysis concluded that the explosive had been planted under Sina's bed.
Shaw's employer, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), launched its own investigation, led by a South African police investigator, Frank Dutton, who reconstructed the crime scene a month after the explosion. He concluded that a Russian 82mm mortar shell had detonated not under the bed but next to it, suggesting that Sina had brought it into the room himself.
"There is no evidence that Mr. Shaw detonated the explosion," Dutton wrote in a January 2007 report. "The evidence supports the conclusion that Mr. Sina had taken ammunition including a mortar shell into his room and that this had accidentally detonated -- probably by falling off his bed."
Dutton contended that U.N. officials had rushed to judgment, disseminated incriminating falsehoods and suppressing evidence that might have exonerated Shaw, including testimony from a colleague of Sina's who asserted that the Albanian had frequently kept munitions in his room. "I seriously doubt it was Shaw," the witness, Barbara Sihira, said in an interview with The Post.
Dutton also faulted the U.N. mission's lawyers for failing to ensure that Shaw had adequate legal counsel and for pressuring the Afghan police to arrest him after a preliminary police investigation established that there was not enough evidence to hold him. The lawyers' actions, he wrote in a June 2007 report, were "irresponsible and resulted in the wrongful detention of a staff member under horrendous circumstances." Shaw was held for more than 30 days in a detention center with suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.
Dutton's probe showed that Shaw had improperly transferred weapons, including two surface-to-air missiles, from U.N. custody to a British weapons depot where he previously worked. The transfer was authorized by Sina and two other U.N. officials. Still, Dutton did not conclude that the men were attempting to smuggle the weapons and said the allegations of a feud were overblown. Dutton also said Shaw had unknowingly entered Sina's room after asking a maid for a bathroom.
In the weeks following the explosion, Dutton and other UNDP officials helped Shaw get out of prison and out of the country, and a top UNDP official assured Afghan authorities that Shaw had not been involved in the incident.
The U.N. peacekeeping department -- which oversees U.N. operations in Afghanistan -- maintains that Dutton misinterpreted key facts and improperly acted as an advocate for Shaw in the course of his investigation. "There were real weaknesses in the investigation," said Phil Cooper, a former top U.N. peacekeeping official.
The head of the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, also rejected Dutton's findings in a July 2007 memo, concluding that the world body's failure to secure the original crime scene -- which was renovated and repainted before Dutton began his work -- made it impossible to "ascertain the origin of the explosion."
U.N. lawyers contend that Dutton naively accepted Shaw's word that he had inadvertently gone into Sina's room to use the bathroom. They also noted that Shaw had once been seen by a journalist stealing a key to room where Sina previously lived.
Shaw initially denied possessing the key. But in a Post interview he acknowledged that the key had turned up in his personal belongings, saying it had been planted there by someone seeking to frame him. He also said the smuggling allegations were concocted by his superiors in retaliation for having raised concerns about the safety record of a British de-mining organization that was later involved in the accidental deaths of Afghan minors.
'My Name Is Mud'
The United Nations typically severs relations with suspects, and sometimes even victims, to limit the damage to the organization's reputation. Shaw and Sina, both highly regarded weapons technicians, saw their contracts terminated within months of the explosion, and they were forced out of the United Nations.
"My name is mud," said Shaw, who is suing the UNDP for $5 million, saying it suppressed evidence that he was innocent. He imagines the conversations prospective employers might have: "Have you not heard? He blew someone up."
Last year, the UNDP offered to pay $50,000 in compensation to Shaw with no acknowledgment of liability.
Sina said the UNDP ended his contract while he was recovering from the explosion. He is seeking unspecified financial compensation from the organization, saying his injuries and trauma have left him incapable of supporting his wife and two children.
"Never, never as an ex-ammunition technical officer, as an ex-major in the army, would I have made that stupid mistake to keep ammunition in my room," he said. "How can the U.N. leave this case orphaned?"
Washington Post Staff Writer
UNITED NATIONS -- It was 10:30 p.m. in Kabul, and Shkelquim Sina had just e-mailed his wife goodnight when an explosion ripped through his hotel bedroom, obliterating a wall, scorching nearly half his body and leaving the United Nations weapons expert barely clinging to life.
The alleged culprit was not a terrorist attacker but a U.N. colleague: Within 24 hours, Robert Shaw, a former weapons specialist for British intelligence, had been turned over to Afghan authorities by U.N. officials on suspicion of attempting to murder his Albanian colleague.
The October 2006 incident is one of the most egregious alleged crimes to have occurred within the U.N.'s ranks, but the ensuing investigation unraveled, leaving both men with shattered lives and damaged reputations with virtually no hope of having their names cleared.
Hundreds of pages of confidential U.N. documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with those involved in the incident, demonstrate how U.N. agencies turned against each other as they struggled to determine who was responsible for the explosion. The case highlights the challenges the United Nations faces in policing the conduct of more than 150,000 U.N. civilian officials and uniformed peacekeepers around the world.
Since 2006, more than 850 peacekeepers have been sent home after allegations of corruption, sexual misconduct, gold smuggling and arms trafficking. Last year, just seven of those cases had been resolved; the most serious punishments were dismissal or up to 40 days in a military jail. In a rare case of more severe punishment, Nigerian military authorities last month sentenced 27 Nigerian peacekeepers to life in prison for mutiny in Liberia after they protested the theft of their U.N. salaries by their own officers, news reports said. The officers were demoted.
"We don't know" how many perpetrators get punished, said Alan Doss, the U.N. special representative in Congo. "Clearly, the reporting system needs improvement. We don't get the kind of systematic feedback we should be getting."
Lacking its own police force, the United Nations relies on a combination of local law enforcement authorities, internal U.N. investigators and outside consultants with varying degrees of competence and limited power to enforce their findings.
Early last year, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proposed establishing a U.N. anti-crime squad to respond more aggressively to allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct in peacekeeping missions. But the initiative encountered broad opposition from member states, including the United States, whose governments feared it would place too much power in U.N. hands.
Even so, Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has said that improving U.N. management of humanitarian and peacekeeping operations is one of her top priorities.
Dueling Investigations Shaw was sipping a beer at the British Embassy in Kabul on Oct. 12, 2006, when he and his friends heard the explosion that injured Sina. Shaw quickly emerged as the prime suspect because he had been seen by a maid entering Sina's room several hours before the blast.
He was jailed for 24 hours and released into the custody of a former colleague in the British military. He was arrested a second time after U.N. lawyers furnished allegations that Shaw and Sina had been involved in a conspiracy to smuggle weapons and had quarreled. A U.N. crime scene analysis concluded that the explosive had been planted under Sina's bed.
Shaw's employer, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), launched its own investigation, led by a South African police investigator, Frank Dutton, who reconstructed the crime scene a month after the explosion. He concluded that a Russian 82mm mortar shell had detonated not under the bed but next to it, suggesting that Sina had brought it into the room himself.
"There is no evidence that Mr. Shaw detonated the explosion," Dutton wrote in a January 2007 report. "The evidence supports the conclusion that Mr. Sina had taken ammunition including a mortar shell into his room and that this had accidentally detonated -- probably by falling off his bed."
Dutton contended that U.N. officials had rushed to judgment, disseminated incriminating falsehoods and suppressing evidence that might have exonerated Shaw, including testimony from a colleague of Sina's who asserted that the Albanian had frequently kept munitions in his room. "I seriously doubt it was Shaw," the witness, Barbara Sihira, said in an interview with The Post.
Dutton also faulted the U.N. mission's lawyers for failing to ensure that Shaw had adequate legal counsel and for pressuring the Afghan police to arrest him after a preliminary police investigation established that there was not enough evidence to hold him. The lawyers' actions, he wrote in a June 2007 report, were "irresponsible and resulted in the wrongful detention of a staff member under horrendous circumstances." Shaw was held for more than 30 days in a detention center with suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.
Dutton's probe showed that Shaw had improperly transferred weapons, including two surface-to-air missiles, from U.N. custody to a British weapons depot where he previously worked. The transfer was authorized by Sina and two other U.N. officials. Still, Dutton did not conclude that the men were attempting to smuggle the weapons and said the allegations of a feud were overblown. Dutton also said Shaw had unknowingly entered Sina's room after asking a maid for a bathroom.
In the weeks following the explosion, Dutton and other UNDP officials helped Shaw get out of prison and out of the country, and a top UNDP official assured Afghan authorities that Shaw had not been involved in the incident.
The U.N. peacekeeping department -- which oversees U.N. operations in Afghanistan -- maintains that Dutton misinterpreted key facts and improperly acted as an advocate for Shaw in the course of his investigation. "There were real weaknesses in the investigation," said Phil Cooper, a former top U.N. peacekeeping official.
The head of the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, also rejected Dutton's findings in a July 2007 memo, concluding that the world body's failure to secure the original crime scene -- which was renovated and repainted before Dutton began his work -- made it impossible to "ascertain the origin of the explosion."
U.N. lawyers contend that Dutton naively accepted Shaw's word that he had inadvertently gone into Sina's room to use the bathroom. They also noted that Shaw had once been seen by a journalist stealing a key to room where Sina previously lived.
Shaw initially denied possessing the key. But in a Post interview he acknowledged that the key had turned up in his personal belongings, saying it had been planted there by someone seeking to frame him. He also said the smuggling allegations were concocted by his superiors in retaliation for having raised concerns about the safety record of a British de-mining organization that was later involved in the accidental deaths of Afghan minors.
'My Name Is Mud'
The United Nations typically severs relations with suspects, and sometimes even victims, to limit the damage to the organization's reputation. Shaw and Sina, both highly regarded weapons technicians, saw their contracts terminated within months of the explosion, and they were forced out of the United Nations.
"My name is mud," said Shaw, who is suing the UNDP for $5 million, saying it suppressed evidence that he was innocent. He imagines the conversations prospective employers might have: "Have you not heard? He blew someone up."
Last year, the UNDP offered to pay $50,000 in compensation to Shaw with no acknowledgment of liability.
Sina said the UNDP ended his contract while he was recovering from the explosion. He is seeking unspecified financial compensation from the organization, saying his injuries and trauma have left him incapable of supporting his wife and two children.
"Never, never as an ex-ammunition technical officer, as an ex-major in the army, would I have made that stupid mistake to keep ammunition in my room," he said. "How can the U.N. leave this case orphaned?"
M2 edition, MD zone, A01
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 36 Words: 1306 Slug: uncrime12
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 36 Words: 1306 Slug: uncrime12
Alleged Crime Goes Unsolved as U.N. Agencies Argue
By Colum LynchWashington Post Staff Writer
UNITED NATIONS -- It was 10:30 p.m. in Kabul, and Shkelquim Sina had just e-mailed his wife goodnight when an explosion ripped through his hotel bedroom, obliterating a wall, scorching nearly half his body and leaving the United Nations weapons expert barely clinging to life.
The alleged culprit was not a terrorist attacker but a U.N. colleague: Within 24 hours, Robert Shaw, a former weapons specialist for British intelligence, had been turned over to Afghan authorities by U.N. officials on suspicion of attempting to murder his Albanian colleague.
Robert Shaw(courtesy of a friend)
The October 2006 incident is one of the most egregious alleged crimes to have occurred within the U.N.'s ranks, but the ensuing investigation unraveled, leaving both men with shattered lives and damaged reputations with virtually no hope of having their names cleared.
Hundreds of pages of confidential U.N. documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with those involved in the incident, demonstrate how U.N. agencies turned against each other as they struggled to determine who was responsible for the explosion. The case highlights the challenges the United Nations faces in policing the conduct of more than 150,000 U.N. civilian officials and uniformed peacekeepers around the world.
Since 2006, more than 850 peacekeepers have been sent home after allegations of corruption, sexual misconduct, gold smuggling and arms trafficking. Last year, just seven of those cases had been resolved; the most serious punishments were dismissal or up to 40 days in a military jail. In a rare case of more severe punishment, Nigerian military authorities last month sentenced 27 Nigerian peacekeepers to life in prison for mutiny in Liberia after they protested the theft of their U.N. salaries by their own officers, news reports said. The officers were demoted.
"We don't know" how many perpetrators get punished, said Alan Doss, the U.N. special representative in Congo. "Clearly, the reporting system needs improvement. We don't get the kind of systematic feedback we should be getting."
Lacking its own police force, the United Nations relies on a combination of local law enforcement authorities, internal U.N. investigators and outside consultants with varying degrees of competence and limited power to enforce their findings.
Early last year, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proposed establishing a U.N. anti-crime squad to respond more aggressively to allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct in peacekeeping missions. But the initiative encountered broad opposition from member states, including the United States, whose governments feared it would place too much power in U.N. hands.
Even so, Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has said that improving U.N. management of humanitarian and peacekeeping operations is one of her top priorities.
Dueling Investigations Shaw was sipping a beer at the British Embassy in Kabul on Oct. 12, 2006, when he and his friends heard the explosion that injured Sina. Shaw quickly emerged as the prime suspect because he had been seen by a maid entering Sina's room several hours before the blast.
He was jailed for 24 hours and released into the custody of a former colleague in the British military. He was arrested a second time after U.N. lawyers furnished allegations that Shaw and Sina had been involved in a conspiracy to smuggle weapons and had quarreled. A U.N. crime scene analysis concluded that the explosive had been planted under Sina's bed.
Shaw's employer, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), launched its own investigation, led by a South African police investigator, Frank Dutton, who reconstructed the crime scene a month after the explosion. He concluded that a Russian 82mm mortar shell had detonated not under the bed but next to it, suggesting that Sina had brought it into the room himself.
"There is no evidence that Mr. Shaw detonated the explosion," Dutton wrote in a January 2007 report. "The evidence supports the conclusion that Mr. Sina had taken ammunition including a mortar shell into his room and that this had accidentally detonated -- probably by falling off his bed."
Dutton contended that U.N. officials had rushed to judgment, disseminated incriminating falsehoods and suppressing evidence that might have exonerated Shaw, including testimony from a colleague of Sina's who asserted that the Albanian had frequently kept munitions in his room. "I seriously doubt it was Shaw," the witness, Barbara Sihira, said in an interview with The Post.
Dutton also faulted the U.N. mission's lawyers for failing to ensure that Shaw had adequate legal counsel and for pressuring the Afghan police to arrest him after a preliminary police investigation established that there was not enough evidence to hold him. The lawyers' actions, he wrote in a June 2007 report, were "irresponsible and resulted in the wrongful detention of a staff member under horrendous circumstances." Shaw was held for more than 30 days in a detention center with suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.
Dutton's probe showed that Shaw had improperly transferred weapons, including two surface-to-air missiles, from U.N. custody to a British weapons depot where he previously worked. The transfer was authorized by Sina and two other U.N. officials. Still, Dutton did not conclude that the men were attempting to smuggle the weapons and said the allegations of a feud were overblown. Dutton also said Shaw had unknowingly entered Sina's room after asking a maid for a bathroom.
In the weeks following the explosion, Dutton and other UNDP officials helped Shaw get out of prison and out of the country, and a top UNDP official assured Afghan authorities that Shaw had not been involved in the incident.
The U.N. peacekeeping department -- which oversees U.N. operations in Afghanistan -- maintains that Dutton misinterpreted key facts and improperly acted as an advocate for Shaw in the course of his investigation. "There were real weaknesses in the investigation," said Phil Cooper, a former top U.N. peacekeeping official.
The head of the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, also rejected Dutton's findings in a July 2007 memo, concluding that the world body's failure to secure the original crime scene -- which was renovated and repainted before Dutton began his work -- made it impossible to "ascertain the origin of the explosion."
U.N. lawyers contend that Dutton naively accepted Shaw's word that he had inadvertently gone into Sina's room to use the bathroom. They also noted that Shaw had once been seen by a journalist stealing a key to room where Sina previously lived.Shaw initially denied possessing the key. But in a Post interview he acknowledged that the key had turned up in his personal belongings, saying it had been planted there by someone seeking to frame him. He also said the smuggling allegations were concocted by his superiors in retaliation for having raised concerns about the safety record of a British de-mining organization that was later involved in the accidental deaths of Afghan minors.
'My Name Is Mud'
The United Nations typically severs relations with suspects, and sometimes even victims, to limit the damage to the organization's reputation. Shaw and Sina, both highly regarded weapons technicians, saw their contracts terminated within months of the explosion, and they were forced out of the United Nations.
"My name is mud," said Shaw, who is suing the UNDP for $5 million, saying it suppressed evidence that he was innocent. He imagines the conversations prospective employers might have: "Have you not heard? He blew someone up."
Last year, the UNDP offered to pay $50,000 in compensation to Shaw with no acknowledgment of liability.
Sina said the UNDP ended his contract while he was recovering from the explosion. He is seeking unspecified financial compensation from the organization, saying his injuries and trauma have left him incapable of supporting his wife and two children.
"Never, never as an ex-ammunition technical officer, as an ex-major in the army, would I have made that stupid mistake to keep ammunition in my room," he said. "How can the U.N. leave this case orphaned?"
M2 edition, MD zone, A01
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Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 36 Words: 1306 Slug: uncrime12
See story on page
See all pages in this section for this day
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Dateline: UNITED NATIONS
Inches: 36 Words: 1306 Slug: uncrime12
Alleged Crime Goes Unsolved as U.N. Agencies Argue
By Colum LynchWashington Post Staff Writer
UNITED NATIONS -- It was 10:30 p.m. in Kabul, and Shkelquim Sina had just e-mailed his wife goodnight when an explosion ripped through his hotel bedroom, obliterating a wall, scorching nearly half his body and leaving the United Nations weapons expert barely clinging to life.
The alleged culprit was not a terrorist attacker but a U.N. colleague: Within 24 hours, Robert Shaw, a former weapons specialist for British intelligence, had been turned over to Afghan authorities by U.N. officials on suspicion of attempting to murder his Albanian colleague.
The October 2006 incident is one of the most egregious alleged crimes to have occurred within the U.N.'s ranks, but the ensuing investigation unraveled, leaving both men with shattered lives and damaged reputations with virtually no hope of having their names cleared.
Hundreds of pages of confidential U.N. documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with those involved in the incident, demonstrate how U.N. agencies turned against each other as they struggled to determine who was responsible for the explosion. The case highlights the challenges the United Nations faces in policing the conduct of more than 150,000 U.N. civilian officials and uniformed peacekeepers around the world.
Since 2006, more than 850 peacekeepers have been sent home after allegations of corruption, sexual misconduct, gold smuggling and arms trafficking. Last year, just seven of those cases had been resolved; the most serious punishments were dismissal or up to 40 days in a military jail. In a rare case of more severe punishment, Nigerian military authorities last month sentenced 27 Nigerian peacekeepers to life in prison for mutiny in Liberia after they protested the theft of their U.N. salaries by their own officers, news reports said. The officers were demoted.
"We don't know" how many perpetrators get punished, said Alan Doss, the U.N. special representative in Congo. "Clearly, the reporting system needs improvement. We don't get the kind of systematic feedback we should be getting."
Lacking its own police force, the United Nations relies on a combination of local law enforcement authorities, internal U.N. investigators and outside consultants with varying degrees of competence and limited power to enforce their findings.
Early last year, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proposed establishing a U.N. anti-crime squad to respond more aggressively to allegations of corruption and sexual misconduct in peacekeeping missions. But the initiative encountered broad opposition from member states, including the United States, whose governments feared it would place too much power in U.N. hands.
Even so, Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has said that improving U.N. management of humanitarian and peacekeeping operations is one of her top priorities.
Dueling Investigations Shaw was sipping a beer at the British Embassy in Kabul on Oct. 12, 2006, when he and his friends heard the explosion that injured Sina. Shaw quickly emerged as the prime suspect because he had been seen by a maid entering Sina's room several hours before the blast.
He was jailed for 24 hours and released into the custody of a former colleague in the British military. He was arrested a second time after U.N. lawyers furnished allegations that Shaw and Sina had been involved in a conspiracy to smuggle weapons and had quarreled. A U.N. crime scene analysis concluded that the explosive had been planted under Sina's bed.
Shaw's employer, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), launched its own investigation, led by a South African police investigator, Frank Dutton, who reconstructed the crime scene a month after the explosion. He concluded that a Russian 82mm mortar shell had detonated not under the bed but next to it, suggesting that Sina had brought it into the room himself.
"There is no evidence that Mr. Shaw detonated the explosion," Dutton wrote in a January 2007 report. "The evidence supports the conclusion that Mr. Sina had taken ammunition including a mortar shell into his room and that this had accidentally detonated -- probably by falling off his bed."
Dutton contended that U.N. officials had rushed to judgment, disseminated incriminating falsehoods and suppressing evidence that might have exonerated Shaw, including testimony from a colleague of Sina's who asserted that the Albanian had frequently kept munitions in his room. "I seriously doubt it was Shaw," the witness, Barbara Sihira, said in an interview with The Post.
Dutton also faulted the U.N. mission's lawyers for failing to ensure that Shaw had adequate legal counsel and for pressuring the Afghan police to arrest him after a preliminary police investigation established that there was not enough evidence to hold him. The lawyers' actions, he wrote in a June 2007 report, were "irresponsible and resulted in the wrongful detention of a staff member under horrendous circumstances." Shaw was held for more than 30 days in a detention center with suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.
Dutton's probe showed that Shaw had improperly transferred weapons, including two surface-to-air missiles, from U.N. custody to a British weapons depot where he previously worked. The transfer was authorized by Sina and two other U.N. officials. Still, Dutton did not conclude that the men were attempting to smuggle the weapons and said the allegations of a feud were overblown. Dutton also said Shaw had unknowingly entered Sina's room after asking a maid for a bathroom.
In the weeks following the explosion, Dutton and other UNDP officials helped Shaw get out of prison and out of the country, and a top UNDP official assured Afghan authorities that Shaw had not been involved in the incident.
The U.N. peacekeeping department -- which oversees U.N. operations in Afghanistan -- maintains that Dutton misinterpreted key facts and improperly acted as an advocate for Shaw in the course of his investigation. "There were real weaknesses in the investigation," said Phil Cooper, a former top U.N. peacekeeping official.
The head of the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, also rejected Dutton's findings in a July 2007 memo, concluding that the world body's failure to secure the original crime scene -- which was renovated and repainted before Dutton began his work -- made it impossible to "ascertain the origin of the explosion."
U.N. lawyers contend that Dutton naively accepted Shaw's word that he had inadvertently gone into Sina's room to use the bathroom. They also noted that Shaw had once been seen by a journalist stealing a key to room where Sina previously lived.
Shaw initially denied possessing the key. But in a Post interview he acknowledged that the key had turned up in his personal belongings, saying it had been planted there by someone seeking to frame him. He also said the smuggling allegations were concocted by his superiors in retaliation for having raised concerns about the safety record of a British de-mining organization that was later involved in the accidental deaths of Afghan minors.
'My Name Is Mud'
The United Nations typically severs relations with suspects, and sometimes even victims, to limit the damage to the organization's reputation. Shaw and Sina, both highly regarded weapons technicians, saw their contracts terminated within months of the explosion, and they were forced out of the United Nations.
"My name is mud," said Shaw, who is suing the UNDP for $5 million, saying it suppressed evidence that he was innocent. He imagines the conversations prospective employers might have: "Have you not heard? He blew someone up."
Last year, the UNDP offered to pay $50,000 in compensation to Shaw with no acknowledgment of liability.
Sina said the UNDP ended his contract while he was recovering from the explosion. He is seeking unspecified financial compensation from the organization, saying his injuries and trauma have left him incapable of supporting his wife and two children.
"Never, never as an ex-ammunition technical officer, as an ex-major in the army, would I have made that stupid mistake to keep ammunition in my room," he said. "How can the U.N. leave this case orphaned?"
Monday, May 18, 2009
Iraq Uses Oil Wealth to Thwart US Efforts to Isolate Saddam
The Washington Post
Published on: Tuesday, 7/03/2001, A section,
edition, zone, A01
Iraq Uses Its Buying Power As Leverage Increasing Clout Complicates U.S. Efforts to Isolate Hussein
By Colum Lynch
Special to The Washington Post
UNITED NATIONS, July 2 -- For more than four years, France has been the world's largest beneficiary of trade with Iraq through a U.N.-sponsored humanitarian aid program, signing deals for more than $3 billion worth of Peugeot minibuses, Renault garbage trucks, Alcatel communications equipment and other French goods.
But in the past year, France's privileged status has begun to fade. Irritated by Paris's opposition to illegal surcharges on oil exports and its training of U.N. weapons inspectors, Baghdad has slashed trade with its most important European supplier nearly in half.
The change illustrates how Baghdad uses its buying power to reward international allies and punish opponents, complicating efforts by the United States to isolate Saddam Hussein's government and prevent him from rebuilding his military or developing weapons of mass destruction.
Today, the Bush administration was forced to concede defeat, at least temporarily, on one of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief foreign policy initiatives, an effort to win approval in the 15-member U.N. Security Council for an overhaul of the 10-year-old economic sanctions on Iraq. (Details, Page A16.)
One of the principal factors in the U.S. defeat was Iraq's financial muscle. It has been growing along with Baghdad's oil revenue, which has surged from $4 billion in 1997 to $18 billion last year. Moreover, analysts say Iraq has undertaken a broad shift in its trade policy, channeling ever more trade to its neighbors and making it harder for Washington to secure their support.
In the last six months of 2000, according to confidential U.N. records, Egypt signed more than $740 million in contracts with Iraq, making it Baghdad's No. 1 trading partner. Following close behind is the United Arab Emirates, with $703 million in business. Syria, meanwhile, buys as much as $1 billion in oil from Iraq each year.
The Iraqi government has used this leverage to try to block the Bush administration's plan and, gradually, to erode the sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. When the United States and Britain introduced a Security Council resolution that would lift restrictions on imports of civilian goods but tighten up on military-related items, Iraq halted its oil exports in protest on June 4.
To punish France, apparently for backing some aspects of U.S. policy, Baghdad cut its imports of French goods to $310 million in the second half of 2000, down from $616 million in the first six months of last year, according to U.N. records. Baghdad also has threatened retaliation against its neighbors, including Turkey and Jordan, if they go along with a U.S.-British proposal to tighten their borders and halt Iraqi smuggling.
"Politics is about interests. Politics is not about morals," said Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Douri. "If the French and others will take a positive position in the Security Council, certainly they will get a benefit. This is the Iraqi policy."
The pressure clearly is having an impact.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov warned last week that Moscow would veto the U.S.-backed sanctions resolution because it threatened Russia's commercial relations with Baghdad. Iraq owes Russia about $8 billion, largely for past arms sales, and Russian companies are major middlemen in the Iraqi oil trade.
Syrian President Bashar Assad also told U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan at a June 14 meeting that he would not allow U.N. inspectors into his country to enforce the U.S.-British plan. And Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu Ragheb sent Annan a letter warning that Jordan's cooperation "might very well threaten its social, economic and political stability."
Even some of Washington's most stalwart allies have been swayed by the prospect of gaining a foothold in Iraq's expanding oil economy. The Netherlands, where exports to Iraq dropped after it backed an American plan for weapons inspectors in 1998, has been pressing the 15-member Security Council to lift a ban on foreign investment in Iraq's oil sector.
Diplomats said the Netherlands, like many other countries, is eager to obtain commercial contracts for its own firms, including the powerful Royal Dutch/Shell Group.
"Iraq is using money and oil as a weapon against the international community," said James B. Cunningham, the acting U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "My government is accustomed by now to Iraq's cynicism towards its own people, and to its bluster and threatening policies. We find it harder to understand, however, why others would join in playing that game when the status quo is clearly not satisfactory."
The U.N. Security Council first voted in December 1996 to allow Iraq to sell oil to purchase food, medicine and other humanitarian goods. Gradually, all limits have been removed on the amount of oil that Iraq can sell through the "oil-for-food" program, but the revenue must go into a U.N. escrow account, and Iraqi purchases are carefully reviewed by a Security Council committee.
Under the U.S.-British proposal, the council effectively would end restrictions on civilian imports. But it would establish a series of highly targeted or "smart" sanctions to prevent Iraq from smuggling oil through neighboring countries, evading U.N. scrutiny and using the profits to buy military supplies.
Some analysts contend that the Bush administration miscalculated the degree of opposition to this plan.
"I think we were naive in pressing for smart sanctions, first in enumerating to the world exactly what they were, second in believing we could realize them," said Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, a trade group in New York.
The Bush administration had hoped to win approval of the Security Council resolution this week. But resistance, particularly from Russia, forced the United States and Britain today to agree instead to a five-month extension of the existing oil-for-food program. It is the second time that the administration has pushed back its self-imposed deadline for revamping the sanctions.
Britain's ambassador to the United Nations, Jeremy Greenstock, appealed to the council last week not to "allow national economic self-interest to hold up positive measures for the Iraqi people."
"The risk is that if we do not act now, the Security Council may never be in a position to act," he added. "There is no intention in this resolution to harm the economic interests of neighboring states or others doing legitimate business with Iraq. We expect to see an expansion of civilian trade which will benefit all."
Four of the five permanent members of the Security Council -- the United States, China, France and Britain -- reached agreement last week on a list of items with both military and civilian applications. Such "dual-use" imports would be subject to Security Council approval under the U.S.-British plan. But Russia did not accept the list.
The talks were deeply influenced by Iraq's growing economic might. France and China succeeded in drastically shortening the original U.S. list in part to allow unrestricted imports of items, including computers and telecommunications equipment, that their companies are trying to sell to Baghdad.
For instance, the French telecommunications company Alcatel has more than $73 million in pending contracts with Iraq for microwave equipment, fiber optics, digital radio and other telecommunications devices, according to confidential U.N. records. Chinese companies, meanwhile, have more than $80 million in pending contracts. The Pentagon suspects one of those firms, Huawei Technologies Co., of illegally providing Iraq with fiber-optic cable to improve its antiaircraft missile batteries.
Published on: Tuesday, 7/03/2001, A section,
edition, zone, A01
Iraq Uses Its Buying Power As Leverage Increasing Clout Complicates U.S. Efforts to Isolate Hussein
By Colum Lynch
Special to The Washington Post
UNITED NATIONS, July 2 -- For more than four years, France has been the world's largest beneficiary of trade with Iraq through a U.N.-sponsored humanitarian aid program, signing deals for more than $3 billion worth of Peugeot minibuses, Renault garbage trucks, Alcatel communications equipment and other French goods.
But in the past year, France's privileged status has begun to fade. Irritated by Paris's opposition to illegal surcharges on oil exports and its training of U.N. weapons inspectors, Baghdad has slashed trade with its most important European supplier nearly in half.
The change illustrates how Baghdad uses its buying power to reward international allies and punish opponents, complicating efforts by the United States to isolate Saddam Hussein's government and prevent him from rebuilding his military or developing weapons of mass destruction.
Today, the Bush administration was forced to concede defeat, at least temporarily, on one of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief foreign policy initiatives, an effort to win approval in the 15-member U.N. Security Council for an overhaul of the 10-year-old economic sanctions on Iraq. (Details, Page A16.)
One of the principal factors in the U.S. defeat was Iraq's financial muscle. It has been growing along with Baghdad's oil revenue, which has surged from $4 billion in 1997 to $18 billion last year. Moreover, analysts say Iraq has undertaken a broad shift in its trade policy, channeling ever more trade to its neighbors and making it harder for Washington to secure their support.
In the last six months of 2000, according to confidential U.N. records, Egypt signed more than $740 million in contracts with Iraq, making it Baghdad's No. 1 trading partner. Following close behind is the United Arab Emirates, with $703 million in business. Syria, meanwhile, buys as much as $1 billion in oil from Iraq each year.
The Iraqi government has used this leverage to try to block the Bush administration's plan and, gradually, to erode the sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. When the United States and Britain introduced a Security Council resolution that would lift restrictions on imports of civilian goods but tighten up on military-related items, Iraq halted its oil exports in protest on June 4.
To punish France, apparently for backing some aspects of U.S. policy, Baghdad cut its imports of French goods to $310 million in the second half of 2000, down from $616 million in the first six months of last year, according to U.N. records. Baghdad also has threatened retaliation against its neighbors, including Turkey and Jordan, if they go along with a U.S.-British proposal to tighten their borders and halt Iraqi smuggling.
"Politics is about interests. Politics is not about morals," said Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Douri. "If the French and others will take a positive position in the Security Council, certainly they will get a benefit. This is the Iraqi policy."
The pressure clearly is having an impact.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov warned last week that Moscow would veto the U.S.-backed sanctions resolution because it threatened Russia's commercial relations with Baghdad. Iraq owes Russia about $8 billion, largely for past arms sales, and Russian companies are major middlemen in the Iraqi oil trade.
Syrian President Bashar Assad also told U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan at a June 14 meeting that he would not allow U.N. inspectors into his country to enforce the U.S.-British plan. And Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu Ragheb sent Annan a letter warning that Jordan's cooperation "might very well threaten its social, economic and political stability."
Even some of Washington's most stalwart allies have been swayed by the prospect of gaining a foothold in Iraq's expanding oil economy. The Netherlands, where exports to Iraq dropped after it backed an American plan for weapons inspectors in 1998, has been pressing the 15-member Security Council to lift a ban on foreign investment in Iraq's oil sector.
Diplomats said the Netherlands, like many other countries, is eager to obtain commercial contracts for its own firms, including the powerful Royal Dutch/Shell Group.
"Iraq is using money and oil as a weapon against the international community," said James B. Cunningham, the acting U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "My government is accustomed by now to Iraq's cynicism towards its own people, and to its bluster and threatening policies. We find it harder to understand, however, why others would join in playing that game when the status quo is clearly not satisfactory."
The U.N. Security Council first voted in December 1996 to allow Iraq to sell oil to purchase food, medicine and other humanitarian goods. Gradually, all limits have been removed on the amount of oil that Iraq can sell through the "oil-for-food" program, but the revenue must go into a U.N. escrow account, and Iraqi purchases are carefully reviewed by a Security Council committee.
Under the U.S.-British proposal, the council effectively would end restrictions on civilian imports. But it would establish a series of highly targeted or "smart" sanctions to prevent Iraq from smuggling oil through neighboring countries, evading U.N. scrutiny and using the profits to buy military supplies.
Some analysts contend that the Bush administration miscalculated the degree of opposition to this plan.
"I think we were naive in pressing for smart sanctions, first in enumerating to the world exactly what they were, second in believing we could realize them," said Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, a trade group in New York.
The Bush administration had hoped to win approval of the Security Council resolution this week. But resistance, particularly from Russia, forced the United States and Britain today to agree instead to a five-month extension of the existing oil-for-food program. It is the second time that the administration has pushed back its self-imposed deadline for revamping the sanctions.
Britain's ambassador to the United Nations, Jeremy Greenstock, appealed to the council last week not to "allow national economic self-interest to hold up positive measures for the Iraqi people."
"The risk is that if we do not act now, the Security Council may never be in a position to act," he added. "There is no intention in this resolution to harm the economic interests of neighboring states or others doing legitimate business with Iraq. We expect to see an expansion of civilian trade which will benefit all."
Four of the five permanent members of the Security Council -- the United States, China, France and Britain -- reached agreement last week on a list of items with both military and civilian applications. Such "dual-use" imports would be subject to Security Council approval under the U.S.-British plan. But Russia did not accept the list.
The talks were deeply influenced by Iraq's growing economic might. France and China succeeded in drastically shortening the original U.S. list in part to allow unrestricted imports of items, including computers and telecommunications equipment, that their companies are trying to sell to Baghdad.
For instance, the French telecommunications company Alcatel has more than $73 million in pending contracts with Iraq for microwave equipment, fiber optics, digital radio and other telecommunications devices, according to confidential U.N. records. Chinese companies, meanwhile, have more than $80 million in pending contracts. The Pentagon suspects one of those firms, Huawei Technologies Co., of illegally providing Iraq with fiber-optic cable to improve its antiaircraft missile batteries.
Chavez Calls Bush a Racist Devil
The Washington Post
Published on: Thursday, 9/21/2006, A section,
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20
Inches: 23 Words: 854 Slug: chavez21
Venezuelan Leader Demonizes Bush
Chavez Calls President a Racist 'Devil'
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 -- President Hugo Chavez, the combative Venezuelan leader, denounced President Bush in a U.N. speech Wednesday as a racist, imperialist "devil" who has devoted six years in office to military aggression and the oppression of the world's poorest people.
Speaking from the lectern where Bush spoke a day earlier, Chavez said he could still smell the sulfur -- a reference to the scent of Satan. Even by U.N. standards, where the United States is frequently criticized as the world's superpower, Chavez's remarks were exceptionally inflammatory. They were also received with a warm round of applause.
Chavez's address followed a series of strident speeches by U.S. adversaries, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Together, they represent an emboldened alliance of oil-rich states that defy U.S. demands to change their policies on a range of issues, including the development of nuclear technology and the role of U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur.
"Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world," Chavez told the chamber of international diplomats. "I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world."
Bush administration officials dismissed Chavez's remarks as the ravings of a reckless political leader. "I'm not going to dignify a comment by the Venezuelan president towards the United States," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. "I think it's not becoming for a head of state."
In an effort to bolster his case, Chavez waved a copy of Noam Chomsky's book "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Domination" and recommended that everyone read it. The book, written by the American linguist and longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy, argues that the United States' pursuit of political supremacy is having devastating consequences for the majority of the world's people.
"The president of the United States came to talk to the peoples -- to the peoples of the world," Chavez said. "What would those peoples of the world tell him if they were given the floor? . . . I think I have some inkling of what the peoples of the south, the oppressed people, think. They would say, 'Yankee imperialist, go home.' "
"The world is waking up," he added. "I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism."
Chavez's U.N. appearance is part of a Venezuelan campaign to gain election to the Latin American seat on the U.N. Security Council, a post that would place it in a position to challenge U.S. policies. The United States, which vigorously opposes Venezuela's candidacy, is supporting a competing bid for the post by Guatemala, a poor Central American republic with little political influence at the United Nations.
In portraying the United States as an imperial power, Chavez sought to evoke memories of the Cold War, when Third World revolutionaries such as Cuban President Fidel Castro (an ally and mentor of Chavez) and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe delivered scathing attacks against the United States.
U.N. experts said that though Chavez's speech may resonate with delegations who oppose a new world order built around American power, it was so undiplomatic that it may undermine his chances of getting into the Security Council. It "confirms the worst stereotypes about the U.N. General Assembly being a circus sideshow filled with venom and rabid anti-Americanism," said Edward Luck, an expert on the United Nations at Columbia University. "I never thought anyone could make Ahmadinejad look like a moderate, but Chavez has done it."
Although Chavez is renowned for his caustic views on the Bush administration, some senior U.N. diplomats were startled by his statement. Asked if Chavez had gone too far, China's Foreign Minister Li Zhao Xing said: "He really said that? Are you sure? He would go that far?"
Britain's Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett suggested that the Chavez comments went beyond the pale of diplomatic protocol at the United Nations. "Even the Democrats wouldn't say that," she said.
Some of the world's poorest countries, such as Bolivia, sought to prove they could stand up to the United States. Bolivian President Evo Morales, a close ally of Chavez, chastised the Bush administration for adding his nation to a list of major drug-producing countries because it permits the cultivation of coca, which is consumed by many Bolivians as tea but is also used to make cocaine.
Holding a coca leaf in his hand, Morales told the General Assembly he would never yield to U.S. pressure to criminalize coca production. "With all respect to the government of the United States, we are not going to change anything. We do not need blackmail or threats," Morales said.
Published on: Thursday, 9/21/2006, A section,
Dateline: UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20
Inches: 23 Words: 854 Slug: chavez21
Venezuelan Leader Demonizes Bush
Chavez Calls President a Racist 'Devil'
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 -- President Hugo Chavez, the combative Venezuelan leader, denounced President Bush in a U.N. speech Wednesday as a racist, imperialist "devil" who has devoted six years in office to military aggression and the oppression of the world's poorest people.
Speaking from the lectern where Bush spoke a day earlier, Chavez said he could still smell the sulfur -- a reference to the scent of Satan. Even by U.N. standards, where the United States is frequently criticized as the world's superpower, Chavez's remarks were exceptionally inflammatory. They were also received with a warm round of applause.
Chavez's address followed a series of strident speeches by U.S. adversaries, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Together, they represent an emboldened alliance of oil-rich states that defy U.S. demands to change their policies on a range of issues, including the development of nuclear technology and the role of U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur.
"Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world," Chavez told the chamber of international diplomats. "I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world."
Bush administration officials dismissed Chavez's remarks as the ravings of a reckless political leader. "I'm not going to dignify a comment by the Venezuelan president towards the United States," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. "I think it's not becoming for a head of state."
In an effort to bolster his case, Chavez waved a copy of Noam Chomsky's book "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Domination" and recommended that everyone read it. The book, written by the American linguist and longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy, argues that the United States' pursuit of political supremacy is having devastating consequences for the majority of the world's people.
"The president of the United States came to talk to the peoples -- to the peoples of the world," Chavez said. "What would those peoples of the world tell him if they were given the floor? . . . I think I have some inkling of what the peoples of the south, the oppressed people, think. They would say, 'Yankee imperialist, go home.' "
"The world is waking up," he added. "I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism."
Chavez's U.N. appearance is part of a Venezuelan campaign to gain election to the Latin American seat on the U.N. Security Council, a post that would place it in a position to challenge U.S. policies. The United States, which vigorously opposes Venezuela's candidacy, is supporting a competing bid for the post by Guatemala, a poor Central American republic with little political influence at the United Nations.
In portraying the United States as an imperial power, Chavez sought to evoke memories of the Cold War, when Third World revolutionaries such as Cuban President Fidel Castro (an ally and mentor of Chavez) and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe delivered scathing attacks against the United States.
U.N. experts said that though Chavez's speech may resonate with delegations who oppose a new world order built around American power, it was so undiplomatic that it may undermine his chances of getting into the Security Council. It "confirms the worst stereotypes about the U.N. General Assembly being a circus sideshow filled with venom and rabid anti-Americanism," said Edward Luck, an expert on the United Nations at Columbia University. "I never thought anyone could make Ahmadinejad look like a moderate, but Chavez has done it."
Although Chavez is renowned for his caustic views on the Bush administration, some senior U.N. diplomats were startled by his statement. Asked if Chavez had gone too far, China's Foreign Minister Li Zhao Xing said: "He really said that? Are you sure? He would go that far?"
Britain's Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett suggested that the Chavez comments went beyond the pale of diplomatic protocol at the United Nations. "Even the Democrats wouldn't say that," she said.
Some of the world's poorest countries, such as Bolivia, sought to prove they could stand up to the United States. Bolivian President Evo Morales, a close ally of Chavez, chastised the Bush administration for adding his nation to a list of major drug-producing countries because it permits the cultivation of coca, which is consumed by many Bolivians as tea but is also used to make cocaine.
Holding a coca leaf in his hand, Morales told the General Assembly he would never yield to U.S. pressure to criminalize coca production. "With all respect to the government of the United States, we are not going to change anything. We do not need blackmail or threats," Morales said.
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