Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

United Nations - France today joined Russia in formally opposing the nomination of Rolf Ekeus, as Swedish disarmament expert, as the head of a new inspection commission charged with finishing the job of disarming Iraq.

Mr. Ekeus, who was nominated on Monday by Secretary general Kofi Annan, was the first chief arms inspector sent to Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The Iraqis do not want him back. The rejection by two veto-wielding Security Council members -- and signals that China is also likely to openly oppose the choice -- has created a crisis for Richard C. Holbrooke, the United State representative and this month's Security Council president. In the midst of a month of sessions devited to Africa, he will now have to detour back to Iraq after carefully avoiding entanglement in that vexed issue since his arrival in August.

The council is expected to meet late Tuesday afternoon to discuss where to go next. For several weeks, council members have been unable to agree on any of more than two dozen candidates being considered by the Secretary General, who had until Sunday at midnight to name an executive chairman for the new disarmament panel, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

On Monday morning, with no consensus on the council, which must approve Mr. Annan's choice, the Secretary General named Mr. Ekeus, now Sweden's ambassador to the United States and a candidate thought to have the backing of the United States and Britain. The council split, apparent in December when the new commission was created and China, France and Russia abstained rather than vote for it, had now deepened. Iraq, sensing victory, stepped up its attacks on the new commission and Mr. Ekeus today.

A new showdown over Iraq is something that the Clinton administration has, by most accounts, sought desperately to avoid in an election year. American diplomats had seemed hopeful earlier today that there would be no serious challenges to Mr. Annan's choice. The Security Council is to take up the issue at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, diplomats said. There are concerns among council delegations that friends of Iraq, led by Russia, intend to make this into what American politicians would recognize as a filibuster. By stalling action on a new inspection system, they could indefinitely postpone any resolution of the Iraq crisis.

Meanwhile, support for economic sanctions is steadily eroding, most of all in Russia and France, where business interests are paramount. Iraq has been under United Nations sanctions since the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. To have them lifted, it has to meet disarmament requirements in biological, chemical, nuclear and missile systems. But officials here predict that additional nations may be tempted to expand commercial interests in Iraq, which is selling oil at record prices under a more generous program intended to provide civilians with needed goods. Iraq's recent history would indicate that it will try to use the cover of civilian imports to acquire material for weapons.

A resolution on Dec. 17 to revise United Nations policy toward Iraq and send arms inspectors back to the country stipulated that a new chief arms inspector be chosen in 30 days. Mr. Annan had spent several weeks steering through multiple objections to a long list of candidates. "Over 30 days, he raised something like 25 names and could not find one on which all could agree," said Mr. Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard. "So he put forward the name of the person he thought best for the job." Mr. Ekeus was chosen with at least the tacit approval if not the urging of the Clinton administration, some United Nations officials and diplomats say. His appointment was quickly applauded by the State Department.

"We thank the secretary general for his exhaustive efforts to find a candidate who meets the rigorous criteria necessary to carry out this important disarmament mission," said a statement by a spokesman for the State Department, James P. Foley. Some diplomats and officials, who have watched the administration steadily withdraw from involvement on the Iraqi issue here, said with Mr. Ekeus in place administration officials could assure critics that a credible chief inspector was back on the job, even if sanctions were ultimately lifted in the process.

The administration would be history by the time that happened, given the steps Iraq has to agree to take to meet disarmament requirements. Both Congress and the administration have had disagreements with Mr. Annan in the past over his handling of Iraq, in particular his trip to Baghdad in February 1998. That was even though the agreement that he signed there ended a stalemate over inspections, sparing the United States from having to take military action then.

Later, Washington also objected to two of Mr. Annan's appointees in Iraq, saying they were too sympathetic to the government. In recent days, diplomats and arms-control experts have said that Mr. Annan could not afford to be seen as giving in to Iraq on a new inspector. Managing the issue now lies with the president of the Security Council this month, Richard C. Holbrooke. Today, Mr. Holbrooke, who has largely stayed clear of Iraq since his arrival in August as the American representative, gave council members 24 hours to study Mr. Annan's nomination of Mr. Ekeus and decide whether they would challenge it. Russia was the first to raise an objection. Had there been no objections, Mr. Ekeus would have automatically become executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

Iraq, too, immediately attacked the nomination. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who is visiting Spain, called the move dishonest. For several weeks, the Iraqis, apparently expecting a more conciliatory gesture from the secretary general, have been harshly critical of Mr. Annan in the controlled Iraqi press. While serving as chief inspector in Iraq, Mr. Ekeus was routinely vilified by the Iraqis, who called him "the damned Ekeus" and accused him of, among other things, causing the starvation of Iraqi children and being an Israeli spy.

In his low-keyed methodic way, Mr. Ekeus kept up the pressure in a protracted game of cat and mouse. He sent divers to the depths of a canal to find illegally imported missile parts that the Iraqis had hurriedly jettisoned. He documented a nuclear program larger than atomic-weapons experts had imagined existed. He badgered Iraq on its unacceptable accounting for biological warfare materials until literally cartons of damning information were suddenly "found" on a chicken farm -- and still he was not satisfied.

In an interview at the end of his tenure in June 1997, Mr. Ekeus said that President Saddam Hussein had never given up plans to build biological and chemical weapons and that the Iraqis were prepared to lie at every step of the inspection effort to conceal and salvage their illicit programs. "They tell the most incredible stories," Mr. Ekeus said. "It's like the 'Thousand and One Nights,' where every night they tell a different story to save themselves." Mr. Ekeus was criticized, however, for agreeing in 1996 to Iraqi demands for restrictions on inspections at some sites close to the Iraqi leadership. Some arms-control experts say that from that moment on Iraq steadily widened the wedge of "unacceptable" searches and "off limits" sites, barring inspectors from presidential palaces and ministerial offices where they suspected that documents and equipment might have been hidden.

Richard Butler, the Australian arms control expert who followed Mr. Ekeus as chairman of the first disarmament commission, known as Unscom, inherited a fast-unraveling system and ultimately lost the support of the Clinton administration in efforts to stand up to the Iraqis. Today, Mr. Butler said that the next 24 hours would be critical for the new inspection program. Mr. Butler, now a diplomat in residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview the council was confronted with "the same issue that it was trying to solve with this resolution, namely a recalcitrant state bucking its authority."

"The first specific test," he said, "was the appointment of a new executive chairman, and here the behavior last week of the members of the Security Council who are clearly the spokespeople for Iraq suggests that they are not prepared to see an appointment of which Iraq does not approve. "By that action, on this issue at least, they are effectively making Iraq the sixth veto power at the council. All of this raises the gravest question about the council's willingness or ability to implement its own law and to protect its own authority.

"In these circumstances, what chance is there that Iraq would agree to the re-establishment of an effective monitoring system if they are being allowed a veto on a matter like who the executive chairman should be? Rolf Ekeus is an admirably qualified person. Probably no one knows more about this subject than he. Maybe that's precisely why they are vetoing him."