Global Policy Forum

The unlikely shared enemy of the Bush Administration and Robert Mugabe's regime, in Zimbabwe, it turns out, is a soft-spoken sixty-four-year-old Swedish diplomat who rides around Manhattan in a Saab, socializes with George Soros, and holds a black belt in judo. Pierre Schori, Sweden's Ambassador to the United Nations, and a former member of both the European and the Swedish Parliaments, had until recently been planning to move his family from the Upper East Side, where they have lived for the past three years, to Pristina, where he expected to become the new head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. But instead Schori, who was not shy about expressing his distaste for the invasion of Iraq ("My cool compatriot gave no mandate for war; instead of Blitzkrieg, we got Blix inspections," he liked to say, alluding to his countryman Hans Blix), has been blackballed by the United States. Despite receiving a unanimous recommendation for the post from the European Union, in May, as well as the full approval of Russia, Schori learned definitively last month that, thanks to White House intransigence, he will not be moving to Kosovo after all.

"I find it so outrageous," Schori said the other day, in his corner office at the Swedish Mission, on the forty-sixth floor of One Dag Hammarskjí¶ld Plaza, overlooking the East River. "Only twice have I been stopped in my official duty as a European Union representative on a mission for democracy. Once, when I was kicked out by Mugabe in a very brutal way." Schori headed the E.U. election-observer team that was expelled from Zimbabwe in the weeks preceding last year's contested Presidential election. "And the other is this. Zimbabwe was clear-cut. But Kosovo is something else, something more anonymous."

Ostensibly, the Americans' reasons for opposing Schori are that Sweden is not a member of NATO and that Schori lacks the proper experience. This, at least, is what the Swedish foreign ministry was told by the U.S. Ambassador in Stockholm, and again, later, by Colin Powell. Schori has heard from friends both here and abroad, however, that it is, in fact, his lack of support for the Iraq war—and, long before that, his objections to Vietnam and Latin America policies during the Nixon and Reagan Administrations—that makes him unattractive to the powers in Washington. The European press, including the Financial Times, has largely supported this account. Schori, meanwhile, cites personal mementos from Henry Kissinger and John Negroponte as evidence of amiable diplomacy in the face of political differences over the years. (A State Department spokesman last week declined to comment on the reasons for Schori's rejection.)

Schori would not be the first international representative to fall victim to the Bush Administration's seemingly personal agenda. Last April, for instance, José Bustani, the Brazilian director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was removed from power with a vote of no-confidence instigated by the State Department, which had threatened to withhold annual budget payments if Bustani remained for a full term. The U.S. charged Bustani with "financial mismanagement" and "ill-considered initiatives," but was reported to have opposed him principally because he was in favor of sending chemical-weapons inspectors into Iraq.

Meddling in a U.N. appointment that has traditionally been handled by the European Union (which provides more than eighty per cent of project funding), however, marks a new level of petty retribution, and Schori, who is tall, and bald, like Blix, with sharp features and blue eyes, believes he has been maliciously miscast. "I am outraged at the accusation of being anti-American," he said. "It reeks of McCarthyism. Is somebody afraid of independent Swedes?"

He looked out the south-facing window. "I watched the towers fall right here," he said. "I could see the fire burning. Everyone came in here and cried." He turned and faced east, gesturing at the Trump World Tower. "Here we have one of the things I admire most about America—the spirit of competitive entrepreneurship," he said. Then he gestured to the comparatively paltry U.N. complex nearby. "And here—international coí¶peration. But it's more like international squalor. So I wrote Mr. Trump a letter. I asked him for help in repairing the U.N. facility, which will require one billion dollars. He replied that he will do it for one-third the price of the lowest estimate. We will see."

Schori took a seat by a coffee table covered with books: "Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm," "Kennedy's Wars," "Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa." He continued to reminisce. "If anybody is pro-American, it's me. I was here for the first time as a sailor when I was fourteen. My American adventure—it was a Holden Caulfield trip, kind of. I read everything. ‘Studs Lonigan' was my favorite." He recalled being awed, as a young boy, by an exhibition about the Marshall Plan that travelled by train through Europe in the nineteen-forties, and he spoke of taking his son to visit the beaches of Normandy years later.

He also described a visit he'd made to Washington, in 1987, the year after Prime Minister Olof Palme had been assassinated. "I remember, at the traditional dinner at the White House, they would have a dance afterward," he said. "On the floor, Papa Bush bumped into me. And he said, ‘Pierre, I'm so sad that Olof Palme couldn't be here.' I mean, that's so civilized! They have nothing of this feature here now."

Michael Steiner, the German who has led the Kosovo mission for the past year and a half, vacated his post earlier this month, and Kofi Annan has yet to nominate a successor. Schori, who is still angry, left late last week for what he called a "welfare-state vacation"—six weeks back home in Sweden, with a brief stopover in the Balkans for a women's-rights conference. "Part of my heart is in the Balkans," he said. "I'm sad, of course, not being able to do my European duty, because Kosovo is a European dilemma. I mean, it's really a challenge for Europe's future," he said. "But at least the theatres here are better than in Pristina."

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