Speech delivered by Amb. Frank Ruddy at the conservative political action conference (c-pac), Mayflower Hotel, Washington D.C.,
Febr. 23, 1996
The poet William Blake wrote that "he who would do good to another
must do it in minute particulars. General good is the pies of the
scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer." We heard all about the good of
mankind during the U.N.'s 50th anniversary celebrations a while back,
heady oratory about noble ideals and aspirations which the U.N. can
turn into reality for the good of all humanity. Let me give you some
idea of how the U.N. works when the speeches have ended, the cameras
and microphones are turned off, and the sculpted ice swans have
melted at the Secretary General's cocktail parties, some of Blake's
"minute particulars."
In 1994 our State Department nominated me to help run a referendum in
a U.N. mission called MINURSO (they all sound like cough medicines)
in a no-man's land called Western Sahara, located just where the name
suggests. The referendum was to let 100'000 people living there
decide whether to be an independent state or part of Morocco. If ever
there was a job ready-made for the U.N. this was it, or so it seemed.
The referendum was originally scheduled for January, 1992, and even
today, 4 years and over a quarter Billion dollars later (that's over
$2'500 per voter, too rich even for Steve Forbes), the referendum is
dead in the water, or rather in the hot Saharan sand, but the U.N.,
like the Energizer Bunny, just keep going and going and going,
pouring millions of dollars each month into a mission that is doing
so little that if all its employees went on strike, no one would
notice.
Worse than the extravagant waste of money on this mission over the
years is the U.N.'s duplicity in managing it: the U.N. has sold out
the nobodies, the 100'000 Saharans for whose right to
self-determination the referendum was to be held, to keep favor with
a somebody, King Hassan II of Morocco, who invaded Western Sahara
years ago, lost his claim to the territory in the World Court and
ordered his old chum and fellow North African, Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
to provide a U.N. fig leaf to cover Morocco's naked aggression and
occupation of Western Sahara.
During my time in Western Sahara, Morocco conducted, without a raised
eyebrow from Boutros-Ghali's hand-picked representative who ran the
referendum, a campaign of terror against the Saharan people. I had
not seen the likes of it since I observed the apartheid government in
South Africa in action against blacks when I visited there with Roy
Wilkins in the early 70's. Morocco did not simply influence the
referendum; they controlled it, down to what days the mission worked.
Morocco tapped U.N. phones, intercepted U.N. mail and searched the
living quarters of U.N. staff, with impunity. More importantly, the
Moroccan authorities disenfranchised Saharan voters right and left
and substituted Moroccan ringers in place of bona fide Saharan
voters.
These outrages were documented to Boutros-Ghali's representative in
MINURSO by outsiders like me, but also by U.N. contract employees and
veteran U.N. professionals, but they were never acted on.
Boutros-Ghali's man did not have the ... gravitas (that wasn't my
first choice) to take on the King's gangster-in-chief in Western
Sahara, a charming and ruthless flic, like Captain Segura,
Batista's police chief in Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana.
When these same outrages finally brought to the attention of the U.N.
Headquarters official in charge of the referendum, they were
dismissed as "not serious". Not necessarily wrong, just "not
serious". The official, by the way, who reacted so cavalierly to
these outrages was U.N. Undersecretary Kofi Annan, the current
odds-on favorite to succeed Boutros-Ghali.
Just about this time last year I had just testified before Chairman
Hal Rogers' U.N. appropriations subcommittee about what was going on
at MINURSO. The testimony was picked up by
the wire services and went all over the world. It was a cover story
in Jeune Afrique, and on the basis
of that testimony, N. Y. Times reporter Chris Hedges visited
the mission and confirmed in the pages of the N. Y. Times what
I had testified to. Once the media picked up the story, the U.N.,
like Captain Renaud in Casablanca, announced it was shocked,
shocked to hear such things and would put their brand new inspector
general on the case. His inspection was a whitewash of the mission,
as expected, but as unexpected, the inspection report was laughable,
literally. One doesn't expect to find much mirth in U.N. documents,
but this was an unintended exception. For example, Colonel Dan Magee,
who commanded U.S. troops in MINURSO, had complained that a senior
mission official was alandering U.S. troops, publicly referring to
them all as "a bunch of thieves". Magee thought the U.N. inspector
general would be interested to hear about that kind of bigotry. Magee
was wrong. The inspector general found that the senior mission
official was in the habit of disparaging lots of nationalities, not
just Americans, and concluded in his report that since the official
was an equal opportunity bigot, Magee didn't have a leg to stand on.
Incredible, but as Casey Stengel used to say :"You could look it
up".
The Security Council under the leadership of Argentinian Ambassador
Emilio Cardenas rejected the inspector general's Inspector
Clouseau-like report within days of its appearance. According to the
Washington Post, Ambassador Cardenas characterized the
inspection report as "tall tales coming out of MINURSO", and the
Security Council sent its own team to the mission to find what the
inspector general should have found. The reason the original
inspection report was done so poorly was because, as he later
acknowledged, the U.N.'s inpector general really wasn't allowed to do
a lot of inspecting. He was prohibited, for example, from looking
into the possibility that Morocco was behaving improperly in the
referendum because Morocco was a member of the club, of the U.N., and
the U.N. inspector general is not allowed to risk embarrassing a
member state by investigating whether they were stealing the U.N.'s
referendum. It was rather as if Kenneth Start, as special prosecutor,
in carrying out his investigation, were prohibited from investigating
possible felonies by his peers, anyone, lets say, who holds a high
post in the federal government, because it might offend them. Absurd,
but welcome to the U.N. The brand new office of inspector general, by
the way, in case you missed the hype is touted as the keystone in
Boutros-Ghali's reform of the U.N.
In October, 1995, Human Rights Watch based in New York published its
38 pages
Report
on MINURSO, and it is devastating, documenting blatant human
rights violations and vote fraud carried out right under the
figurative nose of the mission. The mission and the U.N., as
expected, are in denial.
Perhaps the best "minute particular" of business-as-usual at the U.N.
was being invited and then dis-invited to address the 4th Committee
of the U.N. General Assembly October 12, 1995. Boutros-Ghali
personally intervened to see to it that the 4th Committee did not
hear what I had to say about MINURSO. I was, I am told, the first
person ever barred from speaking before that committee in the U.N.'s
50 years history, but, at least, I'm in good company. Boutros-Ghali
also barred Chinese dissidents from even entering the U.N. I could
get in. I just couldn't say anything when I got there. But think
about that the next time you hear Boutros-Ghali talk about reforming
the U.N.: Boutros-Ghali prevented the 4th Committee, composed
entirely of member states of the U.N., from hearing someone who just
might have been able to tell them why they were wasting a quarter
Billion dollars on a mission and referendum going nowhere.
In 1993, when former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh was
serving as Undersecretary for management at the U.N., he submitted to
Boutros-Ghali a report for streamlining the U.N., eliminating waste
and fraud and saving hundreds of millions of dollars. Boutros-Ghali,
as Thornburgh has stated publicly, had the report suppressed and
remaining copies shredded.
May be Boutros-Ghali has changed. May be the U.N. really is living up
its lofty goals. May be the MINURSO fiasco was an aberration. May be
we should give Boutros-Ghali a second term, 5 more years to do good
for mankind.