It is with a collective sigh of relief that the people of the world greeted the signing on Monday of the UN-brokered agreement to end the Iraq weapons crisis. By preventing the outbreak of war in the region, the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan achieved a rare victory, an outcome that had eluded his counterpart, Perez de Cuellar, seven years ago. One of the reasons for Annan's success was that while de Cuellar had gone to Baghdad without specific proposals beyond the ``wish of the international community for a peaceful solution'' to the crisis, the agenda this time was far more specific. It was a two-fold one -- respect for the Security Council's resolutions governing the inspection regime in Iraq and the preservation of integrity of the UN Special Commission's (UNSCOM) inspection process. At the same time, as an UN spokesperson pointed out, the negotiations were also to focus on establishing guidelines for the inspection regime in order to ``respect Iraq's sovereignty and national security''.According tothe terms of the agreement thrashed out during the five meetings that Annan had with Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, and a three-hour session with Iraq President Saddam Hussein, unfettered access to all suspect arsenals of chemical and biological weapons in the country will now be granted to UN inspectors. Their locations have already been defined by a UN map-making team with Iraqi cooperation, and presumably include the eight ``Presidential sites'' that Hussein had earlier declared off-limits because he considered them symbols of national sovereignty. The other niggling issue in the negotiations was the time-frame for the inspection team, which has already been on the job for the last six years. The Iraqi authorities had insisted on a two-month deadline. However, no such commitment appears to have been made in the final agreement.
The big question is, of course, whether Monday's agreement will stick. Just as his human rights copybook is blotted, Hussein does not have an exactly blemishless recordof standing by his international commitments. He would surely not have settled for this agreement but for the certainty of an imminent US strike. But what is of equal concern is the US response to the Baghdad agreement. Washington, suspicious as ever, has relegated to itself the role of being the final arbiter of any peace agreement and reserved the right to deploy military force against Iraq unless it is sufficiently convinced of the efficacy of such an accord. This muscle-flexing is entirely of a piece with the US handling of the four-month crisis. While US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, had lobbied hard against Iraq on the moral high ground of freeing the world from weapons of mass destruction, it is well known that it was the US government that had in the '80s provided Iraq with weapons-specific biological agents to help it in its offensive against Iran. Given these unhappy footnotes to the history of that era, it would behove the US now to make every effort to ensure that peace in the Gulf isnot just a mirage. For this to happen, it is important for the UN to concentrate its energies on working towards the lifting of the crippling economic sanctions against Iraq that are currently laying its people low.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
