After the journey — a UN man’s open letter to Tony Blair
Hans von Sponeck
Published 23 September 2010
Hans von Sponeck, UN humanitarian co-ordinator from 1998-2000, demands answers from the
former prime minister to a simple question: Why is Iraq in such a mess?
Dear Mr Blair,
You do not know me. Why should you? Or maybe you should have known me and the
many other UN officials who struggled in Iraq when you prepared your Iraq
policy. Reading the Iraq details of your "journey", as told in your
memoir, has confirmed my fears. You tell a story of a leader, but not of a
statesman. You could have, at least belatedly, set the record straight. Instead
you repeat all the arguments we have heard before, such as why sanctions had to
be the way they were; why the fear of Saddam Hussein outweighed the fear of
crossing the line between concern for people and power politics; why Iraq ended
up as a human garbage can. You preferred to latch on to Bill Clinton's 1998
Iraq Liberation Act and George W Bush's determination to implement it.
You present yourself as the man who tried to use the UN road. I am not sure. Is
it really wrong to say that, if you had this intention, it was for purely
tactical reasons and not because you wanted to protect the role of the UN to
decide when military action was justified? The list of those who disagreed with
you and your government's handling of 13 years of sanctions and the
invasion and occupation of Iraq is long, very long. It includes Unicef and
other UN agencies, Care, Caritas, International Physicians for the Prevention
of Nuclear War, the then UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and Nelson Mandela.
Do not forget, either, the hundreds of thousands of people who marched in
protest in Britain and across the world, among them Cambridge Against Sanctions
on Iraq (CASI) and the UK Stop the War Coalition.
You suggest that you and your supporters - the "people of good will",
as you call them - are the owners of the facts. Your disparaging observations
about Clare Short, a woman with courage who resigned as international
development secretary in 2003, make it clear you have her on a different list.
You appeal to those who do not agree to pause and reflect. I ask you to do the
same. Those of us who lived in Iraq experienced the grief and misery that your
policies caused. UN officials on the ground were not "taken in" by a
dictator's regime. We were "taken in" by the challenge to tackle
human suffering created by the gravely faulty policies of two governments -
yours and that of the United States - and by the gutlessness of those in the
Middle East, Europe and elsewhere who could have made a difference but chose
otherwise. The facts are on our side, not on yours.
Here are some of those facts. Had Hans Blix, the then UN chief weapons
inspector, been given the additional three months he requested, your plans
could have been thwarted. You and George W Bush feared this. If you had
respected international law, you would not, following Operation Desert Fox in
December 1998, have allowed your forces to launch attacks from two no-fly
zones. Allegedly carried out to protect Iraqi Kurds in the north and Iraqi
Shias in the south, these air strikes killed civilians and destroyed
non-military installations.
I know that the reports we prepared in Baghdad to show the damage wreaked by
these air strikes caused much anger in Whitehall. A conversation I had on the
sidelines of the Labour party conference in 2004 with your former foreign
secretary Robin Cook confirmed that, even in your cabinet, there had been grave
doubts about your approach. UN Resolution 688 was passed in 1991 to authorise
the UN secretary general - no one else - to safeguard the rights of people and
to help in meeting their humanitarian needs. It did not authorise the no-fly
zones. In fact, the British government, in voting for Resolution 688, accepted
the obligation to respect Iraq's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
I was a daily witness to what you and two US administrations had concocted for
Iraq: a harsh and uncompromising sanctions regime punishing the wrong people.
Your officials must have told you that your policies translated into a meagre
51 US cents to finance a person's daily existence in Iraq. You acknowledge
that 60 per cent of Iraqis were totally dependent on the goods that were
allowed into their country under sanctions, but you make no reference in your
book to how the UK and US governments blocked and delayed huge amounts of
supplies that were needed for survival. In mid-2002, more than $5bn worth of
supplies was blocked from entering the country. No other country on the Iraq
sanctions committee of the UN Security Council supported you in this. The UN
files are full of such evidence. I saw the education system, once a pride of
Iraq, totally collapse. And conditions in the health sector were equally
desperate. In 1999, the entire country had only one fully functioning X-ray
machine. Diseases that had been all but forgotten in the country
re-emerged.
You refuse to acknowledge that you and your policies had anything to do with
this humanitarian crisis. You even argue that the death rate of children under
five in Iraq, then among the highest in the world, was entirely due to the
Iraqi government. I beg you to read Unicef's reports on this subject and
what Carol Bellamy, Unicef's American executive director at the time, had
to say to the Security Council. None of the UN officials involved in dealing
with the crisis will subscribe to your view that Iraq "was free to buy as
much food and medicines" as the government would allow. I wish that had
been the case. During the Chilcot inquiry in July this year, a respected
diplomat who represented the UK on the Security Council sanctions
committee while I was in Baghdad observed: "UK officials and
ministers were well aware of the negative effects of sanctions, but preferred
to blame them on the Saddam regime's failure to implement the oil-for-food
programme."
No one in his right mind would defend the human rights record of Saddam
Hussein. Your critical words in this respect are justified. But you offer only
that part of this gruesome story. You quote damning statements about Saddam
Hussein made by Max van der Stoel, the former Dutch foreign minister who was UN
special rapporteur on human rights in Iraq during the time I served in Baghdad.
You conveniently omitted three pertinent facts: van der Stoel had not been in
Iraq since 1991 and had to rely on second-hand information; his UN mandate was
limited to assessing the human rights record of the Iraqi government and
therefore excluded violations due to other reasons such as economic sanctions;
and his successor, Andreas Mavrommatis, formerly foreign secretary in Cyprus,
quickly recognised the biased UN mandate and broadened the scope of his review
to include sanctions as a major human rights issue. This was a very important
correction.
Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, who in the years of sanctions on
Iraq was his country's permanent representative to the UN, is not mentioned
in your book. Is that because he was one of the diplomats who climbed over the
wall of disinformation and sought the truth about the deplorable human
conditions in Iraq in the late 1990s? Amorim used the opportunity of his
presidency of the UN Security Council to call for a review of the humanitarian
situation. His conclusion was unambiguous. "Even if not all the suffering
in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi
people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of the
prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of
war."
Malaysia's ambassador to the UN, Hasmy Agam, starkly remarked: "How
ironic it is that the same policy that is supposed to disarm Iraq of its
weapons of mass destruction has itself become a weapon of mass
destruction." The secretary general, too, made very critical observations
on the humanitarian situation in Iraq. When I raised my own concerns in a
newspaper article, your minister Peter Hain repeated what the world had become
accustomed to hearing from London and Washington: it is all of Saddam's
making. Hain was a loyal ally of yours. He and others in your administration
wrote me off as subjective, straying off my mandate, not up to the task, or, in
the words of the US state department's spokesman at the time, James Rubin:
"This man in Baghdad is paid to work, not to speak!"
My predecessor in Baghdad, Denis Halliday, and I were repeatedly barred from
testifying to the Security Council. On one occasion, the US and UK governments,
in a joint letter to the secretary general, insisted that we did not have
enough experience with sanctions and therefore could not contribute much to the
debate. You were scared of the facts.
We live in serious times, which you helped bring about. The international
security architecture is severely weakened, the UN Security Council fails to
solve crises peacefully, and there are immense double standards in the debate
on the direction our world is travelling in. A former British prime minister -
"a big player, a world leader and not just a national leader", as you
describe yourself in your book - should find little time to promote his
"journey" on a US talk show. You decided differently. I watched this
show, and a show it was. You clearly felt uncomfortable. Everything you and
your brother-in-arms, Bush, had planned for Iraq has fallen apart, the sole
exception being the removal of Saddam Hussein. You chose to point to Iran as
the new danger.
Whether you like it or not, the legacy of your Iraq journey, made with your
self-made GPS, includes your sacrifice of the UN and negotiations on the altar
of a self-serving alliance with the Bush administration. You admit in your book
that "a few mistakes were made here and there". One line reads:
"The intelligence was wrong and we should have, and I have, apologised for
it." A major pillar of your case for invading Iraq is treated almost like
a footnote. Your refusal to face the facts fully is the reason why "people
of good will" remain so distressed and continue to demand
accountability.
Hans von Sponeck is a former UN assistant secretary general and was UN
humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq from 1998 until he resigned in protest in
March 2000.
