Examination of Witness (Numbers 480 -
499)
TUESDAY 6 JULY 1999
MR R FOWLER
480. It is a humanitarian disaster, a million
dead, 800,000 on the move, etcetera. Is there any way in which
we can encourage the media to focus more on this which one would
hope might have positive impact? Perhaps this Committee might
even help.
(Mr Fowler) I hope very much it will and I have to
say—and I hope I would have said even if you had not pointed
out the BBC in the room—that the BBC has followed my travels
wherever I have been and has been one of the very few media organisations
to pay significant attention to this problem and I would go further
and say to Africa generally. I think we could look beyond the
BBC for the problem. The thrust of your question is absolutely
clear. Why is it that everybody knows about Kosovo and nobody
knows about Angola and they do not know anything about Sierra
Leone or Liberia or Sudan or Congo; it is quite a long list. I
wish that it were otherwise. We have become rather ethnocentric
in our media preoccupations and I agree with you completely that
anything we can do to encourage not only the media but instruments
of government to concern themselves more broadly would be a good
thing.
Dr Tonge
481. What is the United Nations doing about
controlling arms brokers in the West particularly? You talked
a lot about supplies and armaments getting in via outside countries
when it is in their interest. Presumably they get something out
of it. What is the UN doing about it?
(Mr Fowler) Questions like that always come back to
the Pogo cartoons' misuse of Admiral Dakater's admonition, "I
have seen the enemy and they is us". The UN is us. What are
we doing about it? The issue is what are individual UN member
states doing about it? The UN has no capacity to do anything.
482. The Germans are proposing some form of
registration of arms brokers in Europe, are they not? We are pushing
the British Government to do that.
(Mr Fowler) I believe the Germans are indeed speaking
about that. The UN has of course had an arms' register for years.
483. It does not have a brokers' register.
(Mr Fowler) No, that is right. I agree with you that
from my perspective this is a very happy development. Even the
arms' register is an instrument that not everybody uses, not everybody
uses at all, not everybody uses accurately, not everybody uses
fully.
484. If it cannot be implemented and monitored
and enforced, what is the point of the UN.
(Mr Fowler) How long do you have?
Chairman
485. A short answer.
(Mr Fowler) The UN does many many things, some of
them well, some of them not at all well and those it does not
do well, it does not do well because its member states are not
committed to seeing it do that. Why has the UN not fixed many
of these problems we are talking about in Africa? It is because
we, the member states, have not given it the wherewithal to do
so and because frankly we have not been that interested in seeing
those things occur. This is yet another one of those.
Dr Tonge
486. Yes, but it is not just to do with the
member states, is it? It is to do with the organisation of the
UN and the way it goes about its business as well. The UN is an
entity, it is not just the member states.
(Mr Fowler) It is tiny by any measurement. The UN's
regular budget is smaller than the Canadian aid agency. The UN
Secretariat is smaller than Canada's defence headquarters. I do
enjoy telling my American colleagues at the UN that this bloated
organisation which they consider needs significant reform, in
New York numbers some 9,000 people and when I last checked, support
to the legislative branch of government in Washington numbered
34,000.
Chairman: Order. I do not think we can continue
on the reform of the United Nations.
Mr Robathan
487. I understand you have encountered some
problems in the chairing of the Angola Sanctions Committee. Could
you comment on that?
(Mr Fowler) Are you suggesting that we have a poor
chairman?
488. No, not at all. What problems have been
encountered in chairing the Angola Sanctions Committee, if any?
(Mr Fowler) This is very brave. I am trying to look
where your question may be coming from.
489. Information provided by the Clerk actually.
(Mr Fowler) As Chair for seven months I have encountered
no particular problem. These are early days. In May the Security
Council passed resolution 1237 which set up two panels. It is
the first time the Security Council has tried this sort of thing.
Six experts to examine where Savimbi gets his money, looking principally
at financial transactions, diamonds and how he gets his oil. The
second panel of four experts to look at where he gets his war
materiel and how he gets it into his country. We expect to announce
the composition of those panels at the end of this month and to
see their reports by the end of the year. Rather than a problem
for the chair, the Council has been remarkably flexible in allowing
us to consider this kind of vehicle. We shall see how that goes.
490. That is perhaps the answer we wanted to
hear.
(Mr Fowler) In that case I should note that the first
offer of support for these panels came from the UK, which was
very gratefully received by the chair. The latest information
suggests that we might actually be paying for this whole thing.
It will cost about US$1 million through the regular budget as
opposed to voluntary contributions. That has to be settled in
the next couple of weeks.
491. This particularly applies to Angola, but
you might want to comment on elsewhere. To what extent have sanctions
been responsible for increasing black market activity?
(Mr Fowler) That is extremely germane in other sanctions
regimes administered by the Council I would think. In this case,
it is generally assumed—I see no reason to believe otherwise—that
as long as Mr Mobutu was in charge in Zaire/Congo Monsieur Savimbi
marketed most of his diamonds through Monsieur Mobutu. Now that
resolution 1173 is passed and it is illegal to assist in the marketing
of UNITA diamonds, diamonds are necessarily black market in some
manner or other; laundered through other countries or simply taken
to the diamond markets in London, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Bombay and
marketed as something else. Yes, necessarily this large production
of high quality diamonds is marketed through a black market of
some kind or other.
Chairman
492. You said that the only thing you can do
to a country which is not implementing sanctions, such as under
Resolution 1173, is that you can name them and shame them. Is
there nothing else you can do?
(Mr Fowler) As chairman of the Sanctions Committee
that is what I can do. That is what I suppose therefore the UN
and the UN Security Council can do; the same thing. Individual
countries can do much more and are supposed to do much more. In
other words, when each of us joins the United Nations we pass
something which most of us call the UN Participation Act, which
requires us, each member state, to give force of law to the decisions
of the Security Council. In this regard it is somewhat supranational.
As soon as the Council passes a sanction each country is supposed
to adapt its legislation to give force of law to that sanction.
If there is a sanction against selling arms to UNITA in Canada,
usually by regulation, we would pass an Order in Council which
would add that activity to the existing legislation barring certain
kinds of activity. That means that if any Canadian were caught
and action was brought against the Canadian engaged in the selling
of arms to UNITA we could apply the law and perhaps put that individual
in gaol.
493. Yes, but the problem is the culture of
impunity in southern Africa, is it not, or the states surrounding
Angola? How can we get them to take a similar action as you described
in Canada in their countries?
(Mr Fowler) You are absolutely right and again this
was one of the principal messages I brought to the region a month
ago. The intensity, the seriousness with which the countries of
the region apply sanctions varies enormously. Some countries in
the region are very forceful and steely eyed about the extent
to which they are determined to see these measures effectively
enforced and others seem to be less committed. The Government
of South Africa for instance has taken extraordinary measures
to make illegal the recruitment and deployment of mercenaries.
I think the Government of South Africa will agree that they still
have to work out the application of these regulations and laws,
but they are in advance of most others of us in this regard. Certainly
we shall continue and in subsequent reports and in the work of
the panels which I just mentioned, they will work to encourage
governments to enact this legislation and one of the things you
may have seen in our report is that the UN Legal Office is producing
a sort of legal template which we shall make available to all
countries, and which I shall very particularly seek to make available
to people I met in the region, suggesting that if part of the
problem is not knowing exactly what kind of legislation to enact,
here is a good example of the kind of thing they might wish to
enact.
494. The trouble is of course that even if you
have the enactment and laws it is clearly a step in the right
direction, but the question as to whether or not they have the
power and the bureaucratic administration to enforce it is another
matter.
(Mr Fowler) Of course it is. In addition, it is fair
to point out that all the countries in the region in one way or
another mentioned that it was not they who were buying the diamonds
and it was not they who were selling the war materiel. Whatever
imperfections there are in their own application of these measures,
they are not supplying Monsieur Savimbi with US$4 billion and
they are not supplying him with BNP2s and tanks and endless amounts
of ammunition.
Mr Worthington
495. Can we talk about the way the Sanctions
Committees operate. You chair this particular Sanctions Committee.
One of the jobs it does is decide upon exemptions from those sanctions.
I understand that you work in secret and by consensus. Do you
agree with that?
(Mr Fowler) Yes, I guess in secret; they are closed
meetings if that is what you mean. Yes, by consensus, although
any chairman can decide to bring an issue. Each of these Sanctions
Committees is a committee of the whole, that is they have the
15 members of the Council and as you know in the case of the elected
members, those members change every two years. There is a fair
amount of coming and going which is perhaps not ideal to the pursuit
of some of these things which have a much longer focus. I have
been very clear in the report we have already produced and in
the work of these panels that we are going to work very publicly.
The moment my report was made available to the Council, it was
also distributed publicly. The work of the panels will be public,
the panels will report, publicly that is. Ultimately the Council,
significantly because of the veto, works by consensus. As you
know, it takes nine positive votes to pass a resolution, but any
one of the five permanent members can defeat it. Therefore consensus
is really the order of the day within the Council. It is not surprising
that is the rule of thumb in the Committees as well.
496. I can understand that but going round the
world and assembling 15 nations, finding 15 which are totally
pure all the time with regard to any particular sanction must
be quite difficult.
(Mr Fowler) Including five who are always there.
497. Yes; indeed. Do you not think there will
come a time when there is a qualified majority voting on Sanctions
Committees because of the issue of delay? How do you have effective
sanctions if you have to have everything argued through?
(Mr Fowler) No, I do not, so long as the Council works
the way it does and is formed the way it is formed, which dates
back to the Charter and I assure you that for five years we have
been debating reform of the Security Council and we have not agreed
on recommendations with respect to working methods.
498. And the numbers will only go up.
(Mr Fowler) In terms of membership of the Council?
499. In terms of any reform of the Security
Council the numbers will go up.
(Mr Fowler) They certainly will not go down; I agree
with you. I also think that as long as there are vetoes—and
this is a very delicate and active issue at the United Nations—the
thrust towards consensus will be there. Other than that, you just
have vetoes being flung around back and forth and you go absolutely
nowhere.
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