04/15/2011
'Foreign Policy Suicide'
Berlin's Hesitancy in the UN and the World
The façade of the United Nations headquarters building on First Avenue in New York is ripped open, so from a distance the broad skyscraper on the East River looks as though shells have been launched into a section between the 20th and 30th floors. But the holes are only the result of a long-overdue renovation.
A visitor hoping to find the Security Council meeting hall, which has moved because of the construction into a basement under the General Assembly's auditorium, now has to walk through labyrinthine catacombs, many steel doors, hallways with cables dangling from the ceiling, underground parking garages and past plywood walls to reach a lobby filled with the reassuring sky-blue of the UN.
Light-colored doors open into the Security Council's temporary home, where history has been made rapidly in recent weeks. A visitor stands a good chance of witnessing the start of a new world order. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon sometimes even sounds like a hawk when he mentions "immediate action" and the overriding need to "protect the civilian population." He says an epoch of "more robust" UN policy is unfolding, a time in which the globally interconnected world is no longer willing to merely look on as dictators attack their own people.
Many signs were pointing in this direction in March and, on the evening of March 17, many old certainties came to an end.
The Libya Surprise
The main item on the agenda that Thursday was Resolution 1973, an update of Resolution 1970, adopted only three weeks before. The meeting concerned Libya, its leader Moammar Gadhafi, and most likely the effort to prevent a bloodbath in Libya's second-largest city, the rebel stronghold Benghazi, with a population of 700,000. When the 15 ambassadors at the council's horseshoe-shaped conference table had raised their hands to approve the resolution, many things were suddenly very different.
The Russians did not use their veto, though the resolution included authorization to intervene militarily. The Chinese did not block the resolution, though it involved a deep intervention into Libya's internal affairs. The Americans voted for the resolution, though the International Criminal Court in The Hague, of which they disapprove, remained in play. The Lebanese voted in favor, though it meant paving the way for attacks on a fellow Arab country. The South Africans and the Nigerians voted yes, even though their vote was a violation of African solidarity. And the Germans? They abstained. They had concerns -- not to mention state elections.
Of course, the real action at the UN and the Security Council always takes place outside the meetings -- in office towers and hotels west of the headquarters building, between First and Park Avenues, in the suites of embassies and consulates scattered throughout Midtown. Year in and year out, the world's biggest diplomatic circus unfolds in back rooms, restaurants and entire office floors in the wider vicinity of UN headquarters. These are the places anyone seeking to describe the genesis of that important second Libya resolution has to visit.
Based on leaks from UN diplomats and on assessments by delegation members from within the narrow circle of the Security Council, we can conclude that the importance of the March 17 session and its prologue can hardly be overestimated -- because it demonstrated that the United Nations, so often decried as toothless, is embarking on new and unfamiliar paths.
A Sea Change in New York?
The UN may no longer be willing to look on while civilians are victimized, and -- following the traumatic experiences in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur -- it may be willing to counter violence with military force, when necessary. No one makes these decisions lightly. On the contrary, they're difficult decisions, particularly when faced by an organization that was built on the ruins of World War II. Since then, as one UN ambassador says, the world body has felt "culturally, almost genetically" committed to peace.
During a debate on intervention, pro and con arguments are equally important. A country can be seen as guilty for getting involved as much as for standing on the sidelines, as Germany did on March 17, when it opted not to participate in the Libyan action. There were respectable reasons for Germany's decision in this particular case, but anyone who examines the course of events can also see that Germany had chosen to follow a special path -- as if it had failed to read the future.
Indeed, everything seems to indicate that the UN no longer intends to rule out embarking on its own and engaging in active military missions when -- and only when -- it comes to protecting innocent people and saving the lives of uninvolved civilians. This change of policy will inevitably lead to images of UN soldiers firing weapons. It will also present Germany with delicate decisions, again and again.
A categorical "no" to the use of armed force is not an option for the largest economic power in Europe. Germany pays the third-largest contribution to the UN, and it has long asserted that it should be given a permanent seat on the Security Council. If this ambition was not already a mirage, it was possibly "kicked into the can once and for all" on March 17, as former German Forein Minister Joschka Fischer argued in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Even more serious than a possible end to the dream of "permanent" membership, though, is the impression that Germany abdicated responsibility at a historic moment -- instead of participating in the attempt to stop a lunatic dictator. (Some European UN ambassadors have uttered this opinion under the cloak of anonymity.)
On the day the second Libya resolution passed, rebels in Benghazi had reported that the city could only be held for another 12 hours. Gadhafi's troops were advancing; in the event that government forces captured it, the city could very well face a massacre -- the "slaughter" the dictator had promised when he shouted on TV that he would "cleanse" the country, from "house to house," of the "rats" of the opposition.
The Americans had seemed opposed to the idea of a no-fly zone and military strikes until the day of the vote, if only because they were worried about becoming mired in a third war with a Muslim country. They changed their minds, it became apparent last week, in response to the dramatic reports from Benghazi. Only two hours before the actual vote, say diplomats in New York, Washington performed an about-face and joined the supporters of the resolution.
This change of heart was also influenced by a coalition that had formed in the meantime -- after the Arab League, speaking with many voices but one resolution, had called upon the world to take action. The African Union opposed Gadhafi and was joined by the Organization of the Islamic Conference. This widespread support for the resolution also persuaded China and Russia not to use their vetoes.
The most credible advocates of an intervention were Libyan diplomats around the world who had resigned in protest against their mad employer. It was Libya's deputy UN ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, who accused Gadhafi in late February of wanting to murder his own people and who had called for a rapid intervention at the Security Council.
What ultimately startled the Americans on March 17, though -- and what drove the French and the British to act quickly -- did not seem to impress the Germans. Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle spoke all over the country during this period and repeated the best sentences from a speech titled "Courageous Citizens Instead of Angry Citizens." When asked about Libya in Passau, he said Germany fosters a "culture of military restraint."
Since then, Westerwelle has repeatedly declared Germany to be a reliable partner, and he says he has great sympathy "for the people" fighting for their freedom in North Africa. But the world's injustices can't be solved "by our military intervention everywhere," he adds. Westerwelle referred to a "slippery slope" that Germany did not wish to find itself on, and the foreign minister repeatedly asked the rhetorical question of whether ground troops would have to be sent in if the allies' air strategy failed.
Westerwelle has given this speech, or elements of it, since mid-March. He'd wanted to score points with it leading up to the important parliamentary elections in the two southwestern German states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. He did so with the calm certainty that the majority of Germans preferred to hear nothing at all about military matter -- that they couldn't care less about foreign policy as long as it results in combat missions instead of jobs.
Domestic Politics at the UN
The upshot of this strategy is that the German foreign minister used the Security Council for domestic political purposes. This alone is embarrassing enough, and it did not go unnoticed in New York. Westerwelle took his campaign for peace on the road, seemingly moved by his own scruples, and in March he had nothing but praise for his own decision at campaign stops in southwestern German cities like Heilbronn, Mannheim, Worms, Freiburg, Stuttgart and Bad Dürkheim.
"It breaks my heart when I see some of the images from Libya, Yemen and Syria," he said six days after the abstention in New York, at a time when the British, Americans and French were already waging war to impose a no-fly zone. "But that's the way it has to be," Westerwelle added. "The military is the last tool of politics." He was applauded for these words in Bad Dürkheim. These days in Germany, he can count on being applauded for these kinds of words -- without any embarrassing questions.
But it's important to note that the Security Council debate never revolved around sending ground troops to Libya. In fact, a ground action is expressly forbidden under Resolution 1973. It permits "all necessary measures…to protect civilians," but excludes "a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory."
German concerns, in other words, had been carefully built into the resolution. The deployment of ground troops was prohibited from the outset -- in part because the German government constantly cited this prohibition as a condition for approving the resolution. The business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) and its leadership, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its speakers, and the German chancellor herself have chosen to ignore this fact -- or else they're unfamiliar with it.
German Vice Chancellor Philipp Rösler recently replaced Westerwelle as party chief of the Free Democrats. But Westerwelle remains Foreign Minister, and when Ulrich Deppendorf interviewed Rösler on the ARD television network last Tuesday, he suggested to the new vice chancellor that Westerwelle's Libya policy had come in for sharp criticism. Rösler was allowed to answer, unchallenged, "that it was correct not to send any German soldiers to Libya." Two sentences later he praised German foreign policy, which had achieved "both" goals: "Our soldiers don't have to go to Libya as ground troops," he said. "And the alliance stands, and we stand behind our alliance."
Such sentences leave little room for interpretation. They either mean that senior German politicians have no idea what they're talking about when they discuss foreign policy, or that senior German politicians are deliberately twisting the truth to cover up political mistakes.
The German abstention on the evening of March 17 was a mistake in the eyes of many UN observers and diplomats. The more time that passes, the more people at UN headquarters in New York are likely to call a spade a spade. The Germans' abstention was "clearly a case of foreign policy suicide," says a senior member of a UN delegation represented on the council.
An 'Outstanding Day for the World'
In a conversation with SPIEGEL, another individual who attended Security Council sessions said he was convinced that German UN diplomats had in fact advised the government in Berlin to approve the resolution -- but that Westerwelle was against the idea. "If it had been up to Chancellor Merkel," says another European UN diplomat, "Germany would certainly have voted yes and would then have not taken part militarily or would have only provided logistical support. It wouldn't have been a problem."
The man who ought to know is Peter Wittig. He's 56 and doesn't yet have a single gray hair. An affable and worldly man, he has been Germany's ambassador to the United Nations for more than a year. Wittig went to school in Oxford and Canterbury, which is probably where he acquired his British manner. He's a man who wears matching ties, socks and cufflinks. "I haven't heard any criticism from my colleagues here in New York," he says, and seems believable. The UN ambassadors see themselves as part of a big family, and they all know what it feels like to be under political pressure at home.
Wittig's corner office on the 21st floor of the German House, diagonally across the street from UN headquarters, has a view across the East River and out to Queens. Germany's ambassador is a political appointee; he's as loyal as one can expect. He weighs his words carefully. But anyone who saw him when he almost euphorically spoke to the press about the first UN resolution on Libya, Resolution 1970, which Germany supported, and who now hears him speaking so woodenly about Germany's decision to abstain from voting on the second resolution, can imagine what is going on inside his head.
Wittig said it was an "outstanding day for the world" when the first Libya resolution -- which lacked a military component -- was approved, 15-0. The international community would "not tolerate the gross and systematic human rights violations of the Libyan regime," he said. "My country is very pleased that the Council has acted so quickly and decisively." Wittig was proud, and justifiably so. It was a proud moment.
Three weeks later, when Germany was no longer willing to support the new Resolution 1973, and Wittig raised his arm to abstain, he read a thin explanation to the Council. He did not appear before the press. And when asked once again about Germany's position on Libya in his office on a recent Tuesday, he responded with these noncommittal words: "Our partners know that we are not neutral. We only see a future for Libya without Gadhafi and his system."
The question of why "we" are not acting accordingly and why "we" are not joining our friends in shaping a world without Gadhafis and Gbagbos remains unanswered. But it is a core question of current German foreign policy. And it seems that no one in the German government has a convincing answer.
For the moment, Germany is on the wrong side of history. At least that's how the French, the British and the Americans see it, even if they would never admit it publicly. Germany does not seem reliable, as Westerwelle constantly claims. In fact, Germany seems rather unpredictable at the UN Security Council -- and unusually isolated within NATO, so much so that the German military is withdrawing its ships from the Mediterranean, almost like a saboteur. Columnists in France and England have questioned whether politicians in Berlin are sufficiently mature when it comes to foreign policy.
These questions always come up when the gears of history begin to turn. In such moments, the German government is expected to react quickly -- and to improvise. But when revolutions erupt and civil wars rage, when everything becomes volatile and chaotic and there is no time to devise plans or weigh options, German foreign policy begins to waver -- even more so when massacres are imminent and an ethical dilemma rises among waiting, hoping, acting and doing nothing.
This aspect of foreign policy is hardly ever discussed in Berlin or discussed enough elsewhere in the country. That nations like Germany, which adhere to high values and human rights, must occasionally stand behind their convictions is a thought that a stable majority of Germans never seems to understand. The rights, and freedom, simply exist. The obligations, and the constant battle over achievements, are forgotten.
No Risk Please, We're Germans
And because the government tends to follow behind or press just ahead of this social majority, or because it now recruits members from within its ranks, Germany can generally hope that its own values will be defended by other nations -- most notably the United States, but also France, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and even little Denmark.
It's strange that almost all of Germany's neighbors perceive it as a question of honor and national duty to engage in risky actions to help others in acute emergencies. Germans, on the other hand, perceive it as an unreasonable demand, and whenever possible they prefer to help, not with deeds, but with money and encouraging rhetoric.
In mid-March, Libya was an acute emergency. Westerwelle's speeches about his aching heart and his argument that the world's injustice could not be solved "by our military intervention everywhere" seemed out of place and a little helpless.
No nation, and certainly none represented in the Security Council, intends to "intervene militarily everywhere." On the contrary, the world lives with screaming injustices, constantly and everywhere, and even though many governments suffer as a result, no one would hit upon the idea to remedy this situation with force.
Only occasionally -- rarely, in fact -- is it a matter of warding off the threat of a crime against humanity. No one, not even the Germans, has disputed that systemic massacres were to be expected in Libya. It was a matter of stopping a tyrant who was preparing to deploy the military to murder his own people. The reaction at the UN was understandably hectic. It had to be, because there was no reasonable alternative.
The German skeptics across the political spectrum who continue to describe the actions of the anti-Gadhafi alliance as being "insufficiently conceived" are completely right. The actions were not well conceived. They were born out of necessity, and the first sorties were chaotic because the nations that took action were convinced that they lacked the time to think things through.
They were not out to cleanly and permanently regulate the affairs of Libya through the use of force. They were intent on preventing a bloodbath within a few hours with an untidy, last-minute campaign. Given these circumstances, the idea that Westerwelle could have been the foreign minister of a permanent Security Council member -- equipped with veto power -- is extremely unsettling.
The Security Council's Growing Agenda
We should be pleased that only a broad outline of the German debate makes it across the Atlantic. The ambassadors in the Security Council understood that the voting behavior of their colleague Wittig had to do with elections at home, which allowed them to brush it off. The world acknowledges that German soldiers will now at least be deployed to protect humanitarian aid convoys, and then it turns quickly to the next issue.
In the room where the Security Council meets in New York, Libya and the Ivory Coast will remain key issues on the agenda until the end of April. But sessions are also scheduled to discuss Iraq, piracy in Somalia, sexual violence against women, the spread of handguns, Afghanistan and whatever else happens in the interim.
Last Monday, the UN chief's special envoy for Libya, Abdul-Ilah al-Khatib, delivered his report. He had just returned from Gadhafi's country, where he had negotiated with representatives of the regime, but not with the dictator himself, and where he had met in Benghazi with representatives of the rebels, who now have a national transitional council.
Khatib spoke persuasively, but the room was almost empty, with fewer than five people in the visitors' gallery and only the members of the 15 delegations sitting around the table at the front. One of those present was Chinese UN Ambassador Li Baodong, who is known for his silence and apparently said almost nothing during the debate over Libya. The white-haired Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, listened to the presentation, as did Singh Puri, the turbaned Indian envoy, and Colombian Ambassador Nestor Osorio, who consistently exudes the elegance of an aging silent movie star, sitting next to quick-witted Frenchman Gérard Araud, whom one could easily imagine wearing an officer's uniform.
The 15 envoys at this table have a tough and complex job, almost murderously so in recent weeks. The world has so many worries at the moment that they hardly fit into the pages of a newspaper anymore. The New York Times is now devoting only news summaries to events that would have been front-page news only a few months ago. The names of so many countries have become synonymous with war, or crisis, or rebellion, that it's difficult to distinguish between what's important and what's not.
Today Yemen, yesterday Bahrain, tomorrow Oman -- who knows? And then there are the old, sour crises that the Council still has to address. The names of countries like Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan appear on the cover pages of handouts with tedious regularity. The Israelis and the Palestinians stubbornly remain at an impasse while Haiti sinks into chaos, and no one knows yet whether Japan will have to be placed on the agenda. Everything in this churned-up world somehow has to be addressed in the Security Council's temporary chamber.
Last Monday, the ambassadors listened to Khatib report on Libya and to his account of shuttling between fronts and parties to negotiate a sustainable ceasefire. Every detail is disputed. Everything is uncertain. Nevertheless, everything has to be attempted, again and again.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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