Global Policy Forum

By Robert Holloway

The United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to send UN observers to the Palestinian territories late Tuesday, but said its action should not affect relations with friendly Arab states.

"I trust that it will not affect our relations with our Arab friends," the acting US ambassador to the United Nations, James Cunningham, told reporters after casting the first US veto in four years. But the Palestinian observer to the UN, Nasser Al-Kidwa, said the veto would provoke a negative reaction in Arab countries and "undermine the credibility" of the US role as broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Cunningham voted down a text unexpectedly put forward by the council's seven non-aligned movement (NAM) members after five days of inconclusive negotiations on an alternative compromise sponsored by the four Western European members.

The NAM draft called for a UN observer force to protect Palestinian civilians, 365 of whom have died in six months of clashes with Israeli security forces. Sixty-seven Israelis, 13 Arab Israelis and a German have also been killed. China and Russia joined the NAM in voting for the draft, providing the nine votes required for adoption of a resolution and making the US veto inevitable.

The Western Europeans abstained while Ukraine, which holds the rotating presidency of the council, did not take part in the vote.

Israel had already made clear its total opposition to a UN force and Cunningham told the council after the vote that "the United States opposed this resolution because it is unbalanced and unworkable and hence unwise." But Anwarul Chowdhury, coordinator of the NAM caucus, said they had acted out of "frustration" because other members had insisted on postponing action on the compromise text.

Chowdhury, who is also Bangladeshi ambassador to the UN, said "after five days of protracted negotiations, the NAM caucus decided that the time for action on the text on protection of Palestinian civilians has come."

He said the question was on the agenda of the Arab summit which opened in the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Tuesday and it was "essential" for the council to act before the summit closed.

Cunningham responded by accusing the NAM of pushing a vote in order to cut short negotiations on the compromise text "for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with the search for peace."

Al-Kidwa replied that the Palestinians and their supporters "tried our best to avoid this," and added: "We never planned to get into the situation where the veto was cast." He said he had hoped for "a more balanced position" from the new administration of US President George W. Bush in its first Security Council vote on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Cunningham said the United States was not yet ready to support the compromise draft, which expressed the council's readiness "to set up a protection mechanism, bearing in mind the needs of the Palestinian civilians." But, he said, "there's a great deal we support in that draft, much more that we do support than we don't" and he regarded it as still on the table.

In a gesture to Israel, the compromise text also said the council would act only "upon the express cooperation of the parties". The British ambassador, Jeremy Greenstock, expressed regret that the NAM had forced the council to vote on a draft that was doomed to fail.

"The deadline imposed on us, while understandable in the short term, carries less validity when considered in the long term," he said. "We were very close to something effective and valuable," Greenstock said of the European draft. "We hope that the concept of observers will not now be lost and we have work in hand to pursue it when the circumstances are right," he added.