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Irak-Resolution 678 (1990)
Die Resolution 678 des UN-Sicherheitsrates legitimierte als "Angriffsresolution" den Krieg gegen Saddam Husseins Irak im Anschluß an dessen Einmarsch in Kuwait. Sie steht im Zusammenhang mit den Resolutionen 677 (1990), 687 und 688 (1991), die die Sanktionen gegen den Irak bis in das Jahr 2003 hinein verlängerten. In dieser Zeitspanne wurde das einst entwickelte Land durch Bombenangriffe und unbarmherzige Sanktionen auf den Status eines failed state zurückgeworfen. Wie es dazu kommen konnte und welche Folgen die Sanktionen hatten, wurde von den westlichen Medien nicht intensiv thematisiert.
Entstehung
John Pilger berichtet über die diplomatischen Aktivitäten des US-Außenministeriums hinter den Kulissen der UN. Der damalige Außenminister James Baker nutzte eine Mischung aus Bestechung und Drohung gegenüber den Mitgliedern des UN-Sicherheitsrates. Im Einzelnen beschreibt Pilger folgendes:
- For the first time, the full UN Security Council capitulated to an American-led war party and abandoned its legal responsibility to advance peaceful and diplomatic solutions. On 29 November, the United States got its war resolution. This was made possible by a campaign of bribery, blackmail and threats (...). In 1990, Egypt was the most indebted country in Africa. Baker bribed President Mubarak with $14bn in 'debt forgiveness' and all opposition to the attack on Iraq faded away. Syria's bribe was different; Washington gave President Hafez al-Assad the green light to wipe out all opposition to Syria's rule in Lebanon. To help him achieve this, a billion dollars' worth of arms was made available through a variety of back doors, mostly Gulf states. Iran was bribed with an American promise to drop its opposition to a series of World Bank loans. The bank approved the first loan of $250m on the day before the ground attack on Iraq. Bribing the Soviet Union was especially urgent, as Moscow was close to pulling off a deal that would allow Saddam to extricate himself from Kuwait peacefully. However, with its wrecked economy, the Soviet Union was easy prey for a bribe. President Bush sent the Saudi foreign minister to Moscow to offer a billion-dollar bribe before the Russian winter set in. He succeeded. Once Gorbachev had agreed to the war resolution, another $3bn materialised from other Gulf states.- The votes of the non-permanent members of the Security Council were crucial. Zaire was offered undisclosed 'debt forgiveness' and military equipment in return for silencing the Security Council when the attack was under way. Occupying the rotating presidency of the council, Zaire refused requests from Cuba, Yemen and India to convene an emergency meeting of the council, even though it had no authority to refuse them under the UN Charter. - Only Cuba and Yemen held out. Minutes after Yemen voted against the resolution to attack Iraq, a senior American diplomat told the Yemeni ambassador: 'That was the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast.' Within three days, a US aid programme of $70m to one of the world's poorest countries was stopped. Yemen suddenly had problems with the World Bank and the IMF; and 800,000 Yemeni workers were expelled from Saudi Arabia. - The ferocity of the American-led attack far exceeded the mandate of Security Council Resolution 678, which did not allow for the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and economy. When the United States sought another resolution to blockade Iraq, two new members of the Security Council were duly coerced. Ecuador was warned by the US ambassador in Quito about the 'devastating economic consequences' of a No vote. Zimbabwe was threatened with new IMF conditions for its debt. The punishment of impoverished countries that opposed the attack was severe. Sudan, in the grip of a famine, was denied a shipment of food aid. - None of this was reported at the time. By now, news organisations had one objective: to secure a place close to the US command in Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Amnesty International published a searing account of torture, detention and arbitrary arrest by the Saudi regime. Twenty thousand Yemenis were being deported every day and as many as 800 had been tortured and ill-treated. - Neither the BBC nor ITN reported a word about this. 'It is common knowledge in television,' wrote Peter Lennon in the Guardian, 'that fear of not being granted visas was the only consideration in withholding coverage of that embarrassing story.' - When the attack was over, the full cost was summarised in a report published by the Medical Education Trust in London. More than 200,000 people were killed or had died during and in the months after the attack. This also was not news. Neither was a report that child mortality in Iraq had multiplied as the effects of the economic embargo intensified. Extrapolating from all the statistics of Iraq's suffering, the American researchers John Mueller and Karl Mueller have since concluded that the subsequent economic punishment of the Iraqis has 'probably taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all weapons of mass destruction in history'.
Folgen
- Im Jahr 2000 beschrieb John Pilger unter dem Titel Squeezed to death die Folgen der Resolution für die Bevölkerung des Irak:
- This is a war against the children of Iraq on two fronts: bombing, which in the last year cost the British taxpayer £60 million. And the most ruthless embargo in modern history. According to Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, the death rate of children under five is more than 4,000 a month - that is 4,000 more than would have died before sanctions. That is half a million children dead in eight years. If this statistic is difficult to grasp, consider, on the day you read this, up to 200 Iraqi children may die needlessly...
- Through the glass doors of the Unicef offices in Baghdad, you can read the following mission statement: "Above all, survival, hope, development, respect, dignity, equality and justice for women and children." A black sense of irony will be useful if you are a young Iraqi. As it is, the children hawking in the street outside, with their pencil limbs and eyes too big for their long thin faces, cannot read English, and perhaps cannot read at all.
- "The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my experience," Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the literacy rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities. Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest." ...
- Ten years ago, 92% of the population had safe water, according to Unicef. Today, drawn untreated from the Tigris, it is lethal. Touching two brothers on the head, the head said, "These children are recovering from dysentery, but it will attack them again, and again, until they are too weak." Chlorine, that universal guardian of safe water, has been blocked by the Sanctions Committee. In 1990, an Iraqi infant with dysentery stood a one in 600 chance of dying. This is now one in 50.
- Just before Christmas, the department of trade and industry in London blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Dr Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, eminently suited his Orwellian reply. The children's vaccines were banned, he said, "because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of mass destruction - sanctions - seemed not to occur to him. A courtly, eloquent Irishman, Denis Halliday resigned as co-ordinator of humanitarian relief to Iraq in 1998, after 34 years with the UN; he was then Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the elite of senior officials. He had made his career in development, "attempting to help people, not harm them". His was the first public expression of an unprecedented rebellion within the UN bureaucracy. "I am resigning," he wrote, "because the policy of economic sanctions is totally bankrupt. We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that . . . Five thousand children are dying every month . . . I don't want to administer a programme that results in figures like these."
- When I first met Halliday, I was struck by the care with which he chose uncompromising words. "I had been instructed," he said, "to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults. We all know that the regime, Saddam Hussein, is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their parents for lack of untreated water. What is clear is that the Security Council is now out of control, for its actions here undermine its own Charter, and the Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. History will slaughter those responsible."
- Inside the UN, Halliday broke a long collective silence. Then on February 13 this year, Hans von Sponeck, who had succeeded him as humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, resigned. "How long," he asked, "should the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?" Two days later, Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, resigned, saying privately she, too, could not tolerate what was being done to the Iraqi people. Another resignation is expected.
- When I met von Sponeck in Baghdad last October, the anger building behind his measured, self-effacing exterior was evident. Like Halliday before him, his job was to administer the Oil for Food Programme, which since 1996 has allowed Iraq to sell a fraction of its oil for money that goes straight to the Security Council. Almost a third pays the UN's "expenses", reparations to Kuwait and compensation claims. Iraq then tenders on the international market for food and medical supplies and other humanitarian supplies. Every contract must be approved by the Sanctions Committee in New York. "What it comes down to," he said, "is that we can spend only $180 per person over six months. It is a pitiful picture. Whatever the arguments about Iraq, they should not be conducted on the backs of the civilian population."
Die Terrorismus-Resolution 1373 (2001)
In einer Pressemitteilung beschreibt die UNO in Kurzform die Besonderheiten dieser Resolution, die unmittelbar nach den Anschlägen vom 11. September 2001 beschlossen wurde:
- The resolution passed on September 28, 2011 was among the most radical of all UN resolutions ever considered.
- Security Council Resolution 1373 called on states to freeze terrorist financing, pass anti-terrorism laws, prevent suspected terrorists from traveling across international borders, and order that asylum seekers be screened for possible terrorist ties. It did this all under the rubric of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, thereby making these dictates binding under international law. This is where it was a step farther than the Security Council had ever gone before.
- Traditionally, international law becomes national law when countries voluntarily ratify an international treaty. Resolution 1373 was the one and only time that the Security Council forced all UN member states to revise national laws to comply with an international standard. This was a massive expansion of the powers of the Security Council, and the UN in general, and it reflected the urgency felt by the Security Council at the time. According to official records, the Council session that passed this resolution lasted only 3 minutes. There was no formal open debate about this new vision for the Security Council.
- In retrospect, the haste in which this resolution was considered gave rise to two big criticisms of 1373
- 1) The resolution did not mention that human rights at all. And it certainly didn’t say that rights be respected while cracking down on terrorists. (Though a resolution passed a few years later remedied that.) This gave countries with questionable human rights records an excuse to crack down on legitimate political dissent by calling it “terrorism.”
- 2) The Council never approved adequate resources to various UN agencies to help with the kind of technical capacity building required to implement this resolution. A country like Kenya might want to crack down on terrorist financing, but may not have the specific expertise to do so. Such a game changing resolution should have been met with a commensurate commitment by donors to support the implementation of the resolution.
- As these weaknesses in the resolution became apparent, Kofi Annan lead a fairly massive endeavor at the United Nations to create a common UN platform on counterterrorism. This became enshrined in 2006 in the UN’ Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, also known as “Uniting Against Terrorism.”
- The introduction to Uniting Against Terrorism by Kofi Annan gives you a sense of what it is all about.
- Today, I have the privilege of presenting to you my vision on that matter, contained in the document Uniting against terrorism: Recommendations for a global counter-terrorism strategy. - These recommendations stem from a fundamental conviction which we all share: that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes, is unacceptable and can never be justified. - Uniting around that conviction is the basis for what I hope will be a collective global effort to fight terrorism — an effort bringing together Governments, the United Nations and other international organizations, civil society and the private sector — each using their comparative advantage to supplement the others’ efforts. - In formulating my recommendations, I have built further on the “five Ds”– the fundamental components which I first outlined in Madrid last year. They are:
- dissuading people from resorting to terrorism or supporting it;
- denying terrorists the means to carry out an attack;
- deterring States from supporting terrorism;
- developing State capacity to defeat terrorism, and;
- defending human rights.
- (...) Finally, defending human rights runs like a scarlet thread through the report. It is a prerequisite to every aspect of any effective counter-terrorism strategy. It is the bond that brings the different components together. That means the human rights of all — of the victims of terrorism, of those suspected of terrorism, of those affected by the consequences of terrorism. - States must ensure that any measures taken to combat terrorism comply with their obligations under international law, in particular human rights law, refugee law and international humanitarian law. Any strategy that compromises human rights will play right into the hands of the terrorists.
Weblinks und Literatur
- Werthes, Sascha (2013) Die Sanktionspolitik der Vereinten Nationen. Rekonstruktion und Erklärung des Wandels der UN-Sanktionspraxis, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft
- Seit den 1990er Jahren boomt die Sanktionsaktivität des UN-Sicherheitsrates.