Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict

Chapter One: Another World War

On a dark afternoon in January 1999, with the wind chill factor down to minus ten and snow rushing around outside the thirty-eighth floor of the United Nations headquarters in New York, the secretary general, Kofi Annan, could be forgiven for feeling beleaguered. Nineteen ninety-eight, he said to me, "was a hell of a year. But I think 1999 will be worse."

Eleven months before, he had been hailed in much of the world as a savior after persuading Saddam Hussein to permit UN inspectors to resume their search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, thus stopping the United States and Great Britain from bombing Iraq. One newspaper called him "the world's secular pope," a phrase which recalls Joseph Stalin's mocking question, "How many divisions has the pope?"

But within weeks Saddam had reneged on his agreement with Annan; Iraq continued to flout countless resolutions of the Security Council. For months Annan had continued to try to be the peacemaker, and in November 1998 he finessed another delay in a U.S. attack aimed at forcing Iraq to comply with the resolutions, to the fury of some American policymakers. But in December the United States and Britain lost patience and responded to Iraqi intransigence with four days of bombing just before Ramadan and Christmas.

The Anglo-American action split the Security Council. There was no precise warning when it began on December 16. Members of the council were debating the crisis when their cell phones started ringing almost in unison. Some, particularly the Russian ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, and the French ambassador, Alain Dejammet, were furious. Annan made a short statement: "This is a sad day for the United Nations, and for the world....It is also a very sad day for me personally."

Annan tried to find a way of reuniting the council. It was not easy. He had continual calls or visits from the Russians and the French to complain about the attacks. The French were especially bitter; from President Jacques Chirac down, they denounced "les anglo-saxons," by whom they meant not only the United States and Britain but also Richard Butler, the tough and sometimes undiplomatic Australian chairman of the UN's Iraq arms inspectors, UNSCOM -- the United Nations Special Commission, which had been set up to disarm Iraq completely of its weapons of mass destruction after the Gulf war in 1991. Butler's December 1998 report alleging continued Iraqi obstruction had been the casus belli for the bombing. Butler must go, Chirac said several times to Annan. The Russians said the same, more brutally and more publicly.

In early January 1999, articles in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe quoted "confidants" of the secretary general complaining that the United States had placed spies on Butler's teams to collect information not just for the UN but also for Washington. The Iraqis had alleged this of UNSCOM all along, and a dissident American inspector, Scott Ritter, who had resigned from UNSCOM in 1998, had made similar allegations.

Publicly Annan responded that there was no evidence for such allegations, but he added, "Obviously, were these charges true, it would be damaging to the United Nations' disarmament work in Iraq and elsewhere." These remarks aroused the fury of the Washington Post, which accused him of "the sly undermining" of the UN's own inspectors. In the New York Times, the columnist A. M. Rosenthal, who had characterized Annan's policy toward Saddam as "diligent appeasement," now described the secretary general as "Saddam's greatest single asset at the UN." A long profile in The New Republic by David Rieff, the author of Slaughterhouse, a swinging attack on the United Nations in Bosnia, castigated Annan as "The Indecent Decent Man" and said that he refused "to regard the evil in the world realistically." The UN Secretariat under Annan, Rieff charged, was "in principle and in practice committed to the peaceful resolution of conflicts almost at any price."

Other articles asserted that Annan was as eager to rid himself of the turbulent Richard Butler as the French, Russians and Chinese. It was certainly true that among many of Annan's staff, Butler was about as popular as a whore in a nunnery. They saw him as too close to the United States and too publicly belligerent toward Iraq. Annan insisted to me, however, that Butler was not the problem, and that since the United States and Britain had justified their recent bombing by his report, there was no way Butler could be quickly eased aside, whatever the French and the Russians demanded.

At the Council on Foreign Relations in mid-January 1999, Annan defended himself publicly against the attacks: "Whatever means I have employed in my efforts in dealing with Iraq, my ends have never been in question." These included disarming Iraq and reintegrating its people into the international community. "By precedent, by principle, by charter and by duty, I am bound to seek those ends through peaceful diplomacy," Annan said.

Annan was calling attention to the limits of his role. Miracles are rare; in the end he was seen merely to have delayed war and was now being accused by some of having played into Saddam's hands. Annan insisted that a UN secretary general cannot be judged by the same standards as a head of state because he is bound by the demands and interests of the UN's 185 members (188 by the end of 1999). "With no enforcement capacity and no executive power beyond the organization," Annan told his audience at the Council on Foreign Relations, "a secretary general is armed only with tools of his own making. He is invested only with the power that a united Security Council may wish to bestow, and the moral authority entrusted to him by the charter."

There is a vast gulf between what millions around the world believe about the United Nations and the reality. The idealized belief is that the UN is an independent and objective body of nations, gathered under one blue flag, to bring peace, perfect justice and economic development. Annan, a practicing Christian, shares some of this quasi-religious belief in the institution.

What the idealists often fail to reckon with is both the power of and the divisions within the Security Council, particularly its permanent five members, who have the power of veto. Back in 1945, the five major powers had been given the veto to guarantee their commitment to the new world body and to enable them to prevent the council from authorizing force against them. Otherwise, they were supposed to exercise collective responsibility for "the maintenance of international peace and security." They did not treat the veto with such reserve, and during the Cold War it was constantly invoked and abused -- especially by the Soviet Union.

It is a relic of World War II that the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France dominate the impossible but probably essential world body. But they do, and attempts to change the membership to reflect more accurately the world on the edge of the millennium have always foundered. None of the permanent five wishes to leave the council, and too many of the other members of the UN wish to join. So the agreements or the divisions between the victors of 1945 still determine much of the direction of the world. They can either project the power of the United Nations or tie its hands. That is the reality, as against the ideal.

Annan was invested with the moral authority of the charter of the United Nations, but this did not and could not override the realities of power as displayed in the council. The expectations of the secretary general were always great, but his ability to deliver was never as broad.

Iraq was not the only crisis at this time. There was the continued emergency in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic in what remained of Yugoslavia. There the Serbs and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were held in an uneasy truce by the presence of unarmed Western monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), backed up by the threat of NATO bombing of the Serbs.

Annan had just received a briefing paper from his senior staff which warned him that the human crisis in Kosovo was getting worse and worse. The KLA was spreading its power in the countryside; the level of violence was increasing and moving into urban areas. "There is a strong apprehension that the KLA may be moving towards IRA tactics," read this report. There was a real fear that clashes would escalate out of control. The government in Belgrade considered that the KLA was preparing for war, and was itself again on the offensive against KLA strongholds and neighboring civilians alike; local Serbs were arming themselves. There was no dialogue between the two sides; in the face of Serb repression, the moderate Albanian leadership had been sidelined by the KLA radicals. (For years, those concerned about Kosovo had warned that the confrontation could turn violent; for years, the West had failed to act on those warnings.)

In an agreement of October 1998, the American negotiator Richard Holbrooke had managed to persuade President Milosevic of Yugoslavia to accept these unarmed observers from the OSCE to monitor a partial withdrawal of Serb troops from Kosovo. The deal had then been seen as an achievement. But ten weeks later the monitors were still not fully deployed. Originally, two thousand had been envisaged, but recruitment was not easy, and so far only eight hundred were on the ground. They were being dragged into the conflict beyond their mandate. Recently, for example, they had mediated the release of Yugoslav soldiers captured by the KLA. Annan was warned by his staff, "With the accumulation of such extra tasks the KVM [the monitors] could face the same problems as UNPROFOR in Bosnia." This was a warning with substance. UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, was one of the unhappiest UN peacekeeping missions in recent times.

As with Iraq, the Security Council was divided on Kosovo, with Russia being, as always, more sympathetic to the Serbs than other members. China, always fearing that Tibet, whose independence it has crushed since the 1950s, could be next, was unsympathetic to any intervention in other nations' affairs. The council's division meant that it was often unable to react to developments on the ground. It had even failed to agree to a statement on the capture of the Yugoslav soldiers. There was no reason to believe that it would be able to agree on any course of action if the situation deteriorated and international involvement was urgently needed. "The UN has little leverage on events and is not getting any guidance from the Council," Annan was told.

Talks on an interim arrangement for autonomy for Kosovo were getting nowhere. By January 1999, the KLA had reoccupied parts of the province from which the Serbs had driven them in 1998. Armed incidents were increasing wherever Serbs and Albanians were in contact. In mid-January the bodies of forty-five Albanian Kosovar villagers, including three women and a twelve-year-old boy, were found on a hillside around the village of Racak, fifteen miles south of the capital, Pristina.

Kofi Annan called for a full investigation. The international observers blamed the Yugoslav security forces. Yugoslav officials accused the KLA of staging the massacre with its own dead and said the international monitors were party to the lie. The Yugoslav army's mobile anti-aircraft cannon pounded Racak. The Belgrade government then ordered the head of the observers, the American diplomat William Walker, out of the country. Louise Arbour, the UN prosecutor for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, was turned back from the border when she tried to enter the country to carry out an investigation.

Even though the Russians condemned both the massacre and Walker's expulsion by Belgrade (later suspended), the Security Council remained divided. Some members feared that only NATO air strikes against the Serbs would stop the growing Serbian abuse of the Albanian population. Other members were afraid of NATO becoming, in effect, "the air force of the KLA." There were cruel echoes of the dilemmas the UN had faced in Bosnia in the early nineties.

And there were many other issues crowding the secretary general's agenda with greater or lesser urgency that January.

In Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, the 1994 UN intervention to restore democracy, backed if not controlled by the United States, had at first been thought of as a success. But when I went there in January 1999, there seemed to be almost no government at all; the country was spiraling down into greater impoverishment and anarchy and the outside world -- especially the United States -- had no policy whatsoever beyond somehow preventing Haitians from fleeing in boats to Florida.

In Cambodia, over which the United Nations had established a form of trusteeship in the early 1990s, there was now fierce debate over the fate of Khmer Rouge leaders who had been involved in the mass murder of over a million Cambodians in the 1970s, and who had never been brought to trial. Over the past few months, the Khmer Rouge guerrilla movement had finally collapsed. Pol Pot, the movement's principal leader, had died in 1998, but other leaders had been given amnesties by the Cambodian government. To add insult to injury one group of senior Khmer Rouge who had returned from their border redoubts had just been treated by the government to a tourist trip around the country. Why, more and more Westerners, if not Cambodians, were asking, when international tribunals had been established to try alleged war criminals from Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was nothing being done about the Khmer Rouge?

The gloomy backdrop to these and other crises was Africa. Indeed, Annan said that the Security Council was now spending 60 percent of its time on Africa.

In Angola, which had been torn by civil war for almost a quarter of a century, the UN peacekeeping process, which had continued through alternating periods of war and peace since 1991, had collapsed; all-out war began again in December 1998; the country was on the cusp of another disaster. The return to war marked the end of the difficult, incomplete peace process that had begun with the Lusaka Protocol of November 1994. The process had been overseen by two UN peacekeeping missions, which had cost the international community about $1.5 billion. Two UN planes had just been shot down over Angola, with all twenty-three people on board killed. (On board the second plane was the son of the pilot of the first, who had gone to search for the wreckage of his father's flight.)

Annan's senior staff warned him that "heavy fighting is taking place in several regions of the country, with dire humanitarian consequences." The government had launched a major attack against the rebel UNITA forces led by Jonas Savimbi, whose belligerence was one of the main reasons for the return to war. At the same time the government had embarked on a propaganda campaign against the UN because of its failure to induce UNITA to remain in the peace process.

The Angolan government wanted the current UN mission, MONUA, to leave when its mandate expired at the end of February. But some African countries were urging the UN to stay and were complaining about "double standards" if the UN left Angola but stayed in equally difficult environments such as the former Yugoslavia. Annan, however, told the Security Council that there was no longer any basis on which the UN could remain in Angola and recommended that its armed thousand-man force of peacekeepers be gradually reduced and then remo...