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The Bolton appointment will rock the UN ship

DAG Hammarskjöld, the most revered of past UN’s secretary-generals, once described the institution as a Santa Maria, battling its way through inclement weather and unsheltered oceans to a new world, only to find that the people on board blamed the storms on the ship itself.

The trouble is that the UN ship belongs to everyone and yet to no one. Nevertheless, if you are a big enough power or a strong enough group, you can throw the ship wildly off course with the flip of a switch. The Soviet Union did this in the 1960’s when Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk in the Assembly, accused the UN of being American controlled, and later demanded that the secretary-generalship be run by a troika. The Third World nations did this when they invited Yasser Arafat to address the Assembly still wearing his gun holster and shortly afterwards passed the resolution equating Zionism with racism.

The Bush administration could be preparing to do it now, with the nomination of John Bolton ("I don’t do carrots") as its next ambassador to the UN.

The US Senate appears to realise the UN is at a critical juncture. Hence the drawn out hearings on the confirmation of Bolton. A majority of the Senate, as are a big majority of American voters, is in principle in favour of the UN. But the Republican majority doesn’t want to see the Administration humiliated on an issue it attaches much importance to and this will probably override other considerations.

All this debate comes against the backcloth of Kofi Annan’s personal drama. Although officially exonerated by the commission of enquiry led by Paul Volcker into impropriety in the awarding of contracts for the oil-for-food scheme for Iraq, he can’t quite escape the cloud hanging over him. There are the unanswered questions why key relevant documents in his office were shredded and why he gave so much of his scarce time to meeting with his son’s employers, Cotecna, who appear to have cut some corners in the Iraqi import monitoring business, for which it had a UN contract.

Later Cotecna also paid Annan’s son a retainer, albeit a modest one, for little or no apparent work. The issues stay in the news as two dissident members of Volcker’s investigation team pursue their doubts publicly in front of three congressional committees.

For some diplomats and observers Annan has never come out from under the clouds of the meticulous inquiry, "Of the Actions Which the UN Took at the Time of the Genocide in Rwanda", commissioned by the secretary-general and headed by Ingvar Carlsson, the former prime minister of Sweden. In it Annan was roundly criticised because as head of peacekeeping "he did not brief the secretary-general" about a key cable warning of what was likely to happen from the UN’s commander in Rwanda, General Romeo Dellaire of Canada, and the Security Council "was not informed".

Carlsson later told me that in a democracy such a serious infraction would normally be a resigning matter. Instead Annan was promoted to secretary-general.

The fact was that the Clinton Administration wanted his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, regarded as anti-American, out of office. To placate the African bloc whose "turn" it was supposed to be another African had to be found. Annan with his record was considered pliable and most of the time reasonably able. But after his stance on Iraq, when he termed the American invasion "illegal", the Bush administration has had little time for him. The main reason why it has not joined the pressure from some in Congress demanding his resignation is that the White House is well aware that Annan’s term will be up in 18 months and is confident that Annan, with so many albatrosses around his neck, will not prove difficult anymore. Once Bolton is in place Washington can rock the UN boat to ensure they get the secretary-general they really want.

We can expect for Washington to push for some low key, grey, bureaucrat — another Kurt Waldeim, but without a secret Nazi past, again a piece of history that the Soviet Union used, as perhaps the US did as well, to keep him in line. (The only other possible candidate acceptable to Bush would be the by then ex prime minister, Tony Blair. But this, after Britain’s role in Iraq, would cause uproar.)

The Bush administration suffered grievously from the way the UN stymied its efforts to mobilise world opinion behind its invasion of Iraq. But this will not be allowed to happen again. With a no holds barred ambassador and a pliant new secretary-general the way will be open for Washington to get its way more often on the issues that it believes matter.

Jonathan Power is a widely published commentator