There was a reverent hush in the United Nations Security Council chamber on Monday as members gathered to hear the weapons inspectors’ reports on Iraq. Outside, protesters waved placards insisting ”No blood for oil”.
But on one of the most important days in UN history, a day on which its multilateral structures would be sorely tested by United States’s unilateral instincts, there was a more tempered atmosphere.
In the past this room, dominated by a Norwegian mural symbolising the promise of future peace and freedom, looking over a horseshoe seating the 15 council members, has been the backdrop for dramatic debate and bitter rows.
In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, the US ambassador said to his Russian counterpart: ”Let me ask you one simple question: do you deny that the Soviet Union has placed missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no? Do not wait for the interpretation. Yes or no?”
”I am not in an American court of law,” the Russian replied. ”You will receive the answer in due course.”
But on Monday there was no flagrant confrontation or open dispute. UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix greeted America’s UN ambassador, John Negroponte, with a discreet thumbs-up. The Iraqi ambassador did the rounds of his Arab counterparts, air-kissing in defiant bonhomie.
With new security measures in place, no dignitary was too grand to escape the eye of the the UN’s Trinidadian security guard.
But if Blix’s report was intended to be decisive, the US had apparently already made up its mind. Before he had even entered the council meeting Negroponte told reporters: ”Iraq has neither come forth with a full and complete declaration of its weapons of mass destruction, nor has it been cooperating immediately and unconditionally and actively as required by Resolution 1441.”
After 15 minutes of glad-handing, the French chairman called the meeting to order. First came Blix’s report, delivered with a mixture of scientific precision and linguistic contortion. ”Cooperation might be said to relate to both substance and process,” he said. ”Iraq has decided in principle to provide cooperation on process … A similar decision is indispensable to provide cooperation on substance.”
The words were easy enough to grasp but their precise implications remained elusive. ”Let me end by simply noting that [the] capability which has been built up in a short time, and which is now operating, is at the disposal of the Security Council.”
A plea for more time or simply a statement of fact to be discarded? If it was difficult for English analysts to decipher, spare a thought for the Russian translator whose rendition was peppered with pauses.
The report by Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was more straightforward. ”We have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons programme … our work is steadily progressing and should be allowed to run its natural course.”
To the horror of the Americans and delight of the French and Germans, twice he spelt out an extended time frame in terms of ”months” — not the days and weeks that hardliners had been looking for. — Â