Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
December 3, 2007
Pg. 14
By Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD, Dec. 2 — The new United Nations special representative for Iraq has been here barely three weeks, but he says he is moving swiftly to reassert the organization’s involvement in a place from which it had largely retreated after its compound was bombed four years ago.
The special representative, Staffan de Mistura, a longtime United Nations diplomat of Italian and Swedish parentage, said in an interview last week that the United Nations was prepared to carry out the expanded mission mandated by a Security Council resolution approved in August.
The resolution requires the United Nations to help the Iraqi government with goals including reconciling political factions, meeting the needs of returning refugees and settling internal boundary disputes, like deciding whether the semiautonomous Kurdistan region will include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. To that end, Mr. de Mistura said, he had begun to amass a larger staff with extensive expertise in areas where the Iraqi government has requested assistance.
Mr. de Mistura warned that time was short for the government to win legislative approval for political reconciliation measures that could defuse deep disagreements between Sunni and Shiite factions. Those unresolved issues — a date for provincial elections, a formula for sharing oil revenues and the drawing of provincial boundaries — are “Damocles swords” threatening Iraq’s future, he said.
“These laws cannot be left too long,” he said. “Otherwise what happens is that the feeling would be the dialogue doesn’t lead anywhere and then we could go back — which nobody wants — to violence, which has proven to lead nowhere.”
Mr. de Mistura has spent much of his career as a diplomat for the United Nations and speaks Italian, Swedish, colloquial Arabic, English, French and German. He has served in Afghanistan and Somalia, and he has worked two other lengthy stints in Iraq — in the Kurdish region in the early 1990s and as the deputy special representative in 2005 and 2006. He said that if the security situation remained stable, the United Nations was ready to assist the Iraqi government in any area that it needed help.
He is the successor to Ashraf Qazi, who served as special representative to the secretary general from 2004 through October 2007.
“The U.N. has quite a few weaknesses, but it has some remarkable strengths too — it has expertise in many areas,” said Mr. de Mistura, noting that he had already brought in experts to work on elections and refugees.
While the organization still has far fewer than the more than 500 international experts that it had in 2003 when the compound was struck by a truck bomb, its staff has expanded significantly from the skeleton crew of 35 that it maintained after the attack. Until recently, the United Nations team was based largely in Amman, Jordan, limiting its sense of the situation on the ground.
Mr. de Mistura said the United Nations’ international staff in Iraq was 250 to 300 people, with a main office in Baghdad and smaller ones in Basra and Erbil. However, a significant portion of those are security staff members — he would not say how many. He said he hoped to add as many as 100 staff members in the coming month. Unless the security situation worsens, he added, he expects that they will be experts rather than more security staff members. The United Nations also now employs 500 to 600 “highly qualified” Iraqis in the country, he said.
“We are not in a developing country, we are in a country that has rebuilt itself again and again and again,” he said. “The type of aid they require is not getting food and medicines, it’s getting a specialist in how to fight cholera.”
He has 12 election experts in country who have begun to work with the Iraqi electoral commission and will help prepare the country for holding provincial elections next year, and he has two or three experts from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. They are working with the Ministry of Migration to devise a plan for those who want to return to their homes.
So far, most of those returning have gone back to the homes they lived in before they fled, Mr. de Mistura said. He described the current return as “a flow, not a flood.” However, subsequent waves of returnees may not be able to return to their homes because they have been occupied by families who were also forced to flee their homes in other neighborhoods or parts of the country.
“The issue is where do they go and how do you compensate” if their homes are now occupied by other families, Mr. de Mistura said. “What do you do with those who are inside their homes? That could become an area of tension rather than an area of happy return and complicate matters for the government.”
For Mr. de Mistura, the primary danger is the uncertain security situation. As a colleague and friend of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations special representative who was killed in the 2003 bombing, along with 21 others, he is all too aware of the risks. A renewal of violence, especially if it harmed United Nations staff members or assets, would drastically curtail the mission’s activities in Iraq. “We can not deny the fact that the more the U.N. becomes visible, the more there could be danger,” Mr. de Mistura said. “Those that only want to create havoc in Iraq could do so again, and that’s why we’re very conscious of the security aspect.”
“The U.N. in many ways has been perceived by the Iraqis as a doctor who can be called in in order to assist in finding proper medicines in order to stabilize the patient,” he continued. “If there is someone who does not want the patient stabilized he may not like the doctor.”
December 3, 2007
Pg. 14
By Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD, Dec. 2 — The new United Nations special representative for Iraq has been here barely three weeks, but he says he is moving swiftly to reassert the organization’s involvement in a place from which it had largely retreated after its compound was bombed four years ago.
The special representative, Staffan de Mistura, a longtime United Nations diplomat of Italian and Swedish parentage, said in an interview last week that the United Nations was prepared to carry out the expanded mission mandated by a Security Council resolution approved in August.
The resolution requires the United Nations to help the Iraqi government with goals including reconciling political factions, meeting the needs of returning refugees and settling internal boundary disputes, like deciding whether the semiautonomous Kurdistan region will include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. To that end, Mr. de Mistura said, he had begun to amass a larger staff with extensive expertise in areas where the Iraqi government has requested assistance.
Mr. de Mistura warned that time was short for the government to win legislative approval for political reconciliation measures that could defuse deep disagreements between Sunni and Shiite factions. Those unresolved issues — a date for provincial elections, a formula for sharing oil revenues and the drawing of provincial boundaries — are “Damocles swords” threatening Iraq’s future, he said.
“These laws cannot be left too long,” he said. “Otherwise what happens is that the feeling would be the dialogue doesn’t lead anywhere and then we could go back — which nobody wants — to violence, which has proven to lead nowhere.”
Mr. de Mistura has spent much of his career as a diplomat for the United Nations and speaks Italian, Swedish, colloquial Arabic, English, French and German. He has served in Afghanistan and Somalia, and he has worked two other lengthy stints in Iraq — in the Kurdish region in the early 1990s and as the deputy special representative in 2005 and 2006. He said that if the security situation remained stable, the United Nations was ready to assist the Iraqi government in any area that it needed help.
He is the successor to Ashraf Qazi, who served as special representative to the secretary general from 2004 through October 2007.
“The U.N. has quite a few weaknesses, but it has some remarkable strengths too — it has expertise in many areas,” said Mr. de Mistura, noting that he had already brought in experts to work on elections and refugees.
While the organization still has far fewer than the more than 500 international experts that it had in 2003 when the compound was struck by a truck bomb, its staff has expanded significantly from the skeleton crew of 35 that it maintained after the attack. Until recently, the United Nations team was based largely in Amman, Jordan, limiting its sense of the situation on the ground.
Mr. de Mistura said the United Nations’ international staff in Iraq was 250 to 300 people, with a main office in Baghdad and smaller ones in Basra and Erbil. However, a significant portion of those are security staff members — he would not say how many. He said he hoped to add as many as 100 staff members in the coming month. Unless the security situation worsens, he added, he expects that they will be experts rather than more security staff members. The United Nations also now employs 500 to 600 “highly qualified” Iraqis in the country, he said.
“We are not in a developing country, we are in a country that has rebuilt itself again and again and again,” he said. “The type of aid they require is not getting food and medicines, it’s getting a specialist in how to fight cholera.”
He has 12 election experts in country who have begun to work with the Iraqi electoral commission and will help prepare the country for holding provincial elections next year, and he has two or three experts from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. They are working with the Ministry of Migration to devise a plan for those who want to return to their homes.
So far, most of those returning have gone back to the homes they lived in before they fled, Mr. de Mistura said. He described the current return as “a flow, not a flood.” However, subsequent waves of returnees may not be able to return to their homes because they have been occupied by families who were also forced to flee their homes in other neighborhoods or parts of the country.
“The issue is where do they go and how do you compensate” if their homes are now occupied by other families, Mr. de Mistura said. “What do you do with those who are inside their homes? That could become an area of tension rather than an area of happy return and complicate matters for the government.”
For Mr. de Mistura, the primary danger is the uncertain security situation. As a colleague and friend of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations special representative who was killed in the 2003 bombing, along with 21 others, he is all too aware of the risks. A renewal of violence, especially if it harmed United Nations staff members or assets, would drastically curtail the mission’s activities in Iraq. “We can not deny the fact that the more the U.N. becomes visible, the more there could be danger,” Mr. de Mistura said. “Those that only want to create havoc in Iraq could do so again, and that’s why we’re very conscious of the security aspect.”
“The U.N. in many ways has been perceived by the Iraqis as a doctor who can be called in in order to assist in finding proper medicines in order to stabilize the patient,” he continued. “If there is someone who does not want the patient stabilized he may not like the doctor.”