Cameron Duodu: LETTER FROM THE NORTH
In its January 6 issue, The Washington Post reported: “United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has obtained what he regards as convincing evidence that UN arms inspectors helped collect eavesdropping intelligence used in United States efforts to undermine the Iraqi regime, according to confidants who said he is deeply alarmed by the implications of the relationship for the world body.
“The accounts made available to Annan, some of which draw on classified US information passed to him through intermediaries, describe an operation in which the UN Special Commission, or Unscom, took steps to assist the US in listening to some of the most sensitive communications of the Baghdad regime.”
“Unscom directly facilitated the creation of an intelligence collection system for the US in violation of its mandate,” said one Annan adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity and echoed sentiments expressed by two others. “The UN cannot be party to an operation to overthrow one of its member states.”
Annan is not the type of man who will run an office from which unauthorised statements can be made to reporters. This raises the question: why is Annan, who prides himself on his ability, so far, to cultivate cordial relations with the Americans, now willing to put Washington in the dock?
The answer is that he has probably discovered – at a very late stage in his political life – that Washington is a law unto itself. Washington talks peace while waging war; it espouses humanitarian concern while inflicting torture and death on the poor of the world.
As regards the UN, no one should be surprised to find Washington pressing any instrument created by that organisation into service as a tool of US foreign policy. We saw this happen in Africa 39 years ago, when Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba made the mistake of inviting the UN into his country to restore order.
The US voted to support UN intervention. But once the UN had set its Congo operation in motion, the US subverted the UN’s efforts by corruptly buying up key UN officials, and placing them under the covert control of the US. So the UN Congo operation, which was supposed to insulate Congo from the machinations of the Cold War combatants, ended up as a camouflaged US operation.
A great deal has been written about the US’s Congo “formula”, yet nearly 40 years later it is still being replicated.
This is simply because highly placed people in the world refuse to believe the US can be guilty of such blatant duplicity.
In case there are still some doubting Thomases about, here is a quotation recording the boasting which the then US secretary of state, Dean Rusk, indulged in when he addressed the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on how the US had used the UN’s supposedly neutral officials in Congo: “There was a moment of euphoria in Washington. A relieved Rusk told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in closed session [on 20 December 1961]: `We were very gratified through direct contacts we were able to establish, as well as through some efforts on the part of certain UN officials, that Adoula came out of this as prime minister.’
“The secretary of state credited the UN’s `closely co-ordinated activities’ with the US mission [in the Congo] for `this success over Gizenga'” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa, Richard D Mahoney; Oxford University Press).
Meanwhile, we await information – which will surely be forthcoming – on the exact relationship between the US and the executive chair of Unscom, Richard Butler. Is Butler in the pay of the US? Are members of Butler’s staff – presumably recruited by Butler – actually US agents operating for the US under the umbrella of a UN Security Council mandate?
That such questions need be asked at all must break Annan’s heart. Here is a man who, in fulfilment of his obligations as secretary general of an organisation dedicated to achieving the peaceful solution of world problems, worked day and night and succeeded, against all odds, in preventing another round of bombing of Iraq by the US and its allies in March 1998.
Now he wakes up to find that within hours of Butler presenting a negative report on Iraq to the Security Council, all the good work he had done had been negated and that the US and Britain had begun unloading bombs on Iraq again.
Would it be too much for Annan to wonder whether Butler secretly gave the two bomb-happy countries his report before sending it to the UN Security Council and Butler’s theoretical boss, the secretary general? Or maybe Butler didn’t need to hand the report to the US and Britain because they wrote it?
I hope Annan doesn’t take Butler’s treachery too much to heart. Sabotage goes with the territoryof UN secretary general. It was when the late Dag Hammarskjld realised the extent of US/British sabotage against “his” Congo operation that he embarked on that fateful journey to Katanga which resulted in the mother of all assassinations.
Annan’s achievement in preventing war in March 1998 annoyed a lot of people in the US administration. In revenge, they are trying to inflict a spiritual/intellectual assassination on him. Then, he will be so depressed he won’t be able to prevent war.
Annan must resist, for the world needs him to save it from unscrupulous politicians like President Bill Clinton, who will kill and maim innocent people to save themselves from the consequences of their own inability to hold their sexual urges in check.