U.N. Staff Unions Balk at Iraq Mission
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

UNITED NATIONS – With everybody from the Kerry campaign to its own officials calling for more United Nations involvement in Iraq, fearful U.N. staffers are demanding that Secretary-General Annan not send them to Iraq.
Two unions representing 60,000 U.N. staffers from around the world sent a joint letter to Mr. Annan yesterday, saying deployment of staff in Iraq “cannot be justified now.”
While the unions understand “the extreme political pressures that you face regarding the role of the U.N. in Iraq,” the letter to Mr. Annan said, “We cannot condone the deployment of U.N. staff in view of the unprecedented high level of risk to the safety and security of the staff.”
The letter, co-signed by the president of the Federation of the International Civil Servants Associations, Robert Weisell, and the president of the Coordinating Committee for International Staff Unions and Associations, Rosemarie Waters, comes as Senator Kerry’s campaign has stepped up rhetoric on the campaign trail about the need for international involvement in Iraq, particularly by the U.N.
During Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, Senator Edwards scolded Vice President Cheney for the low number of U.N. staffers in Iraq.
“Right now, the United Nations, which is responsible for the elections in January, has about 35 people there,” Mr. Edwards said. “Now, that’s compared with a much smaller country like East Timor, where they had over 200 people on the ground. You need more than 35 people to hold an election in Cleveland, much less in Iraq. The reality is we need a new president with credibility with the rest of the world and who has a real plan for success. Success breeds contribution, breeds joining the coalition.”
According to a U.N. spokesperson, the U.N. both organized and conducted the 1999 referendum on independence in East Timor, as opposed to Iraq, where its current role is just to assist Iraqis in organizing the January national election. In East Timor, the U.N. had 30 international staffers and more than 400 volunteers from around the world.
The staffers’ letter calls on Mr. Annan to not send anyone else to Baghdad.
“Just one staff member is one staff member too many in Iraq,” it says. Saying that Mr. Anann “takes note” of the letter, his spokesman Fred Eckhard, said that “the security situation at present does not permit raising staff numbers.”
Since withdrawing after the August 19, 2003, bombing of its Baghdad headquarters, which killed 22 staffers, including one of the organization’s brightest up-and-coming stars, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the organization has shied from any significant involvement in Iraq.
A former Canadian U.N. ambassador, David Malone, who has recently ended a stint at the head of the U.N.-friendly International Peace Academy, wrote in the International Herald Tribune of “an orgy of outrage and self-pity that has increasingly paralyzed the U.N.’s capacity to respond meaningfully to needs in Iraq that it might be best placed to address.”
While U.N. officials have habitually blamed the American-led coalition for not supplying enough security for a return to Iraq, Mr. Malone wrote that the U.N. staffers “need to get a grip. We don’t need the U.N. in Denmark or Canada. We need it in difficult and often unsafe environments, where absolute security cannot be achieved.”
He noted, as did the U.N.’s own inquiry into the headquarters bombing, that “the U.N., not least de Mello himself, made serious security mistakes, for example, ignoring basic safety measures like the blast-proofing of windows and insisting that U.S. military protection be withdrawn.”
Regardless of blame, the staff union letter insisted that “even the best-intentioned and executed security plans cannot guarantee the protection of U.N. staff in the current environment” in Iraq. Adding that even “the most heavily armed and equipped military cannot guarantee its own safety” there.
The U.N. has 37 international staffers in Iraq. Most of them are helping the Iraqis organize the election. In addition to that group headed by Mr. Annan’s special representative Ashraf Qazi, there are 166 staffers who could help in development and reconstruction. The staffers are stationed across the border in Amman.
The U.N. is also in negotiations with the nation of Fiji, which has reportedly agreed to send 150 troops for protection of a potential U.N. presence in Iraq. As the staff letter noted, however, the call in this year’s Security Council resolution for establishing a multinational force for U.N. protection, which would be independent of the American-led coalition, “remains largely unanswered.”
The head of the U.N. Development Program, Mark Malloch Brown, in a conversation with reporters yesterday, said, “U.N. workers would be particularly vulnerable to high profile attacks and kidnapping intended to embarrass and stall the whole international operation and support,” in Iraq, he said, adding it would be dangerous to add the U.N to the mix.
When one reporter told him that correspondents in Iraq put their own life on the line, however, Mr. Malloch Brown, a former journalist, said, “I was deeply embarrassed when you guys were in Baghdad before we were after the fall of Saddam Hussein.”
“I am extremely nervous about this new culture of security which sometimes jeopardizes us being where we should be,” he added. “When the time comes to expand our numbers we would obviously, because of the danger, make it a voluntary assignment. We would not force people to go, but I have no doubt that we will have sufficient volunteers.”