Examination of Witness (Numbers 500 -
519)
TUESDAY 6 JULY 1999
MR R FOWLER
500. We talked about this earlier but I want
to take you a bit further on this issue. One of the things which
has come out of this session and the previous session and other
sessions on this is the lack of intelligence of the United Nations
organisation in terms of the implementation of sanctions. You
are getting round that to some extent by having two panels.
(Mr Fowler) Yes; to some extent.
501. Devise your own intelligence system for
a sanctions system in general. What is missing at the moment to
give this organisation a brain?
(Mr Fowler) You are quite right to suggest that what
we are trying to do through the panels is bring a little light
into this very murky area. Very few people know very much about
the diamond business. It is a remarkable business and certainly
not like any other that I have met before. Similarly the arms
business is necessarily murky. A great deal of information is
publicly available but ultimately, by intelligence, ultimately
I would hope that I could have tail numbers of aircraft leaving
specific places and going to other places and loading specific
equipments and then going on and offloading them where they are
not supposed to do that and have clear firm evidence of all of
that. I do not have that. Very, very few countries have access
to the capabilities which would allow you to get that kind of
information, although ultimately—back to the embarrassment
business—if we really wished to hold a country's practices
up to the light and say they are in default of their obligations
in the following instances, you have to have the kind of information
that these panels will not produce.
502. Does that mean we have to argue for a UN
intelligence service of some kind?
(Mr Fowler) It is a very interesting and not new idea.
I think it is doomed to failure. I think there would be no agreement,
most particularly amongst the permanent members of the Security
Council, that the United Nations ought to have an intelligence
service.
503. How do we solve this?
(Mr Fowler) In the report, and it was an interim report,
which we brought in a month ago, for instance we talked about
a relatively new idea of having customs monitors in the surrounding
countries to Angola principally, to eastern Angola, but all of
Angola, not straddling a particular road or railway or even runway
but rather to roam more widely gathering information, not by any
subterfuge or illicit manner, simply talking to truck drivers
and policemen and local customs inspectors and people who live
in villages by routes to find out what is going on.
504. With respect, we need to go back one stage.
Who decides to deploy those customs people?
(Mr Fowler) The Security Council.
505. How does the Security Council get the gumption
to do that?
(Mr Fowler) That is a fair point but again we are
getting into UN reform there and the nature of the United Nations
and what we all want it to be, which is to me a fascinating subject,
but it is very complex. In this case, I am confident that something
like that can be done.
506. By your panels?
(Mr Fowler) The idea can be fleshed out by the panels,
working with the Secretariat as to what is feasible. There will
be significant concerns about individual security safety, freedom
of action, how the local governments know they are not spies,
etcetera. All those things, rules of engagement, reporting channels
can all be worked out. The reason it can be worked out is because
there is a remarkable consensus within the Council that this horrendous
war in Angola should be brought to an end. I am afraid that consensus
is not always present elsewhere and that is the way we designed
the organisation.
507. May I ask one last question about the exemption
procedure which is frequently criticised for being too slow? Is
there a case for a standard list of all situations so we do not
have to argue on a case by case basis? Can you see it being speeded
up in any effective way?
(Mr Fowler) First of all, this whole exemptions issue
does not really apply to my Committee. Canada is still a member
of all those other Committees, so I am not trying to wriggle away
from your question, but in my Committee it could apply. For instance,
somebody could make a case that Mr Savimbi ought to go to some
peace talks in Switzerland or something and wanted to make an
exemption for travel and we could look at that, but at the moment
that sort of issue has not arisen. With respect to standing exemptions,
I am inclined to turn your question around and say yes, you probably
could do that on a case by case basis. The most obvious example
is something like Iraq or Libya as it was. We discussed this in
the Libya Sanctions Committee. We talked about various pilgrimages
and whether you could not simply exempt the Haj with respect to
Libyan sanctions. To some extent we do that, but to another extent
people say that just opens a great huge loophole for all kinds
of financial chicanery, etcetera. Therefore, no, even something
that simple or medical exemptions and this kind of thing. Most
or many of the meetings of that Committee, when Libyan sanctions
were still in force, related to special medical evacuation flights.
It was the view of the Committee, which Canada shared, that we
were probably better to look at each of those on a case by case
basis.
Ann Clwyd
508. How many Sanctions Committees are in existence
at the UN at present?
(Mr Fowler) Eight, although Libya is now in suspension.
509. Given what you have been telling us this
morning, which I found very interesting, sanctions do appear a
rather crude instrument to bring a country to heel, given the
fact that you have said you do not have intelligence gathering
as such, but you rely on Member States to give you the information.
Do you yourself have doubts about sanctions?
(Mr Fowler) I have huge doubts about sanctions but
I have not come up with anything better. In other words, they
are the blunt instrument you mentioned. We are seeing this in
Iraq every day. There is no doubt that sanctions have caused huge
humanitarian problems across the Iraqi population and it is something
which we Canadians worry about a great deal. That said, short
of military action through Chapter 7, there are not a lot of other
instruments with which you can influence a government. I personally
believe that sanctions against South Africa and the apartheid
regime in South Africa were ultimately largely successful. My
own view is that it was principally the financial sanctions which
made the difference, when the apartheid regime finally realised
they would have no access to capital. However, there was an awful
lot of cheating along the way. Was it worth it? Yes, I think it
was. Was it imperfect? Extremely so. Generally that is how the
UN measures success or failure: 56 per cent is a big success.
Realistically speaking, when an issue gets to the UN it is already
difficult and complex and often we are choosing the best among
bad options. We are usually imperfectly applying it because we
are a collection of individual states.
510. Given that so many organisations within
the UN are under-resourced, could you explain about your Sanctions
Committee, about the administrative and other backup which you
have?
(Mr Fowler) Yes. I have about one third of a person
in the UN Secretariat who helps me arrange meetings. My own expenses
are paid by the Canadian Government and as we make these travels.
Lest I leave the pervadingly negative impression, I am actually
rather upbeat on the possibility of effectively applying sanctions
against UNITA. Perhaps I can answer your current question with
a little bit of your previous one: what is success? I do not think
I can stop, no matter what we do, no matter what the panels do,
no matter how much convincing we do of governments, I am not going
to stop Monsieur Savimbi from selling diamonds. What we hope we
can do is make it more difficult. Above all we can make it more
expensive, in other words he will get less money for it. We can
force him into grey and black markets. We can force him away from
more regulated, more lucrative markets like London, maybe Antwerp,
into more popular markets which will give him less for his stones.
There is no substance known to man which has a higher concentration
of value than diamonds. Little sacks of diamonds will get out
and will reach the market. Let us make it less profitable. Exactly
the same thing on the arms side. The arms trade is such that there
will always be people willing to sell these things to people.
The issue is the price: the price of the arms and the price of
the transport to get them in there. What we hope to do is force
both of those up, make him pay much more for what he gets and
make it much more difficult and much more expensive for him to
get it. That is success. Now I shall get a little bit dreamy.
There is no doubt in my mind that if we wanted, all of us, collectively,
if we wanted to stop Monsieur Savimbi from getting these weapons
it is within our means to do so. We could do that. I just do not
know how much we want it. We have these two panels which seem
to be going to be funded out of our regular budget contributions.
That will give us more substance to our recommendations and by
the way I very much hope that these panels, which I will chair,
will not be bound by that initial set of 14 initial recommendations
we made a month ago. They will look at those, see whether they
make sense, add others, propose other areas of study, commission
additional studies as they see fit and I think, back to our discussion
of consensus and will in the Council, there is a significant degree
of consensus and will that this terrible war in Angola ought to
be something we should be able to agree on. We have not been very
good at agreeing on Iraq and we have not been very good at agreeing
on Kosovo. We have not been very good at agreeing on a number
of things in the Council recently and we are beginning to notice
that, at least in the Council. Therefore we agree it would be
nice to find areas in which we could be useful and maybe this
is one. I have suggestions for others as well, but this may be
one and therefore I am somewhat optimistic and evidence of that
is the willingness of people to produce money and time to get
the job done.
511. What powers do Sanctions Committees have
to redress losses incurred by third countries as a result of loss
of trade with the sanctions state?
(Mr Fowler) It is a very nice point and I am afraid
I do not know the answer. The Charter of the United Nations provides
for this possibility. Way back in 1945, this was envisaged. It
has never been effectively used, so it is not so much an issue
of the Sanctions Committees, it really is an issue for the Security
Council, but far broader than that, to what extent could this
extremely cash strapped organisation contemplate a task of the
enormity you mentioned. The claims on the United Nations for damage
in relation to any sanctions regime would be off the scale of
what the UN has at its disposal. I think that is what has inhibited
any effective action along those lines to date. It is just another
world. I am happy to say that in my particular area of responsibility,
this question does not apply.
512. What steps have been taken by Sanctions
Committees to learn lessons from other sanctions regimes?
(Mr Fowler) Of late quite a lot. The chairs, before
Canada joined the Council in January, of the Sanctions Committees
over the last two years got together and produced a list of lessons
learned which they brought to the Council early this year. For
instance, with respect to my work on diamonds, that is particularly
germane to my colleague the Ambassador for Argentina's work in
Sierra Leone where diamonds figure very largely. He is also the
vice-chair of my Committee. Clearly any success we have in better
managing the sale of illicit diamonds could be germane should
these talks in Sierra Leone break down and diamonds again become
an issue in Sierra Leone.
513. Can you tell us how you liaise with national
member states and with UN agencies such as UNICEF, OCHA and the
World Food Programme?
(Mr Fowler) In every possible way. As chair of this
Committee I write to all of those people. If I hear even significant
anecdotal evidence about sanctions busting on the part of a country
I will write to their ambassador in the first instance for an
explanation. If I do not get an adequate one I will write directly
from the Council President to his head of state or foreign minister.
If we do not get an adequate answer then we publish what we think
is wrong in our regular reports. We work very closely with the
programmes and agencies, informally and formally. If I need some
work done, I will usually ask the Secretary-General of the United
Nations to arrange to have UNDP or UNICEF or whoever look at something
to see whether we can enforce the much needed coordination in
that area, although of course we have regular contacts with each
of those programmes and agencies and we use them all the time.
514. Is the quality of national reporting to
the Sanctions Committees variable or consistent?
(Mr Fowler) Variable.
Chairman
515. We were wondering how the UN imposed resolutions
could be made more flexible. We were wondering whether there is
a case for an enabling resolution allowing sanctions committees
such as your own in relation to UNITA to determine the scope of
the sanction after assessing the vulnerabilities of the target
regime?
(Mr Fowler) It is a fascinating idea. To some extent
it is there, to a larger extent it is a bridge too far. The negotiations
which surround the passage of any sanctions resolution are fine
and complex indeed. In other words, the articulation of what is
to be sanctioned is usually an extremely carefully balanced agreement
with some wanting more and some wanting less and some wanting
none of it, etcetera. Therefore from the macro perspective, I
think members of the Security Council would be unwilling to give
significant interpretative scope to a sub-committee of the Council;
I suspect. That said, we had such scope. In other words, it is
extremely clear in my own mandate that I am encouraged by the
Council to come up with new ideas, either new ideas of applying
old sanctions more effectively or of entirely new sanctions, new
methods, new ways of encouraging compliance. Some of the recommendations
we made a month ago clearly have given pause to some members of
the Security Council.
516. Have those recommendations been implemented?
(Mr Fowler) No and we did not ask that that be the
case. Rather what I did was say this was just a couple of guys
travelling round central and southern Africa, talking to an awful
lot of people, developing ideas. This is the kind of thing we
think we should think about and above all it is the kind of thing
these panels should use as signposts and expand or eliminate.
In our travels for instance we insisted, as we will be in our
current travels, that we are not inspectors. I did not go to Zambia
for three and a half days to decide whether they were or were
not sanctions busting. I was neither mandated nor competent to
offer that kind of judgement. Our discussion a moment ago on a
small number of monitors seeking a 90 per cent answer say: I do
not know whether that will work. I think it will work. My own
experience tells me it could work but I should like these panels
to work closely with the Secretariat, with customs officials in
a number of countries to flesh that out and see whether they can
come up with a focused and complete recommendation which we can
then pass as a resolution and give force of law.
517. It still has to go through the process
of law, needing a further resolution from the Security Council.
(Mr Fowler) Yes, to give it force of law. In other
words, I did not feel that the recommendations which we brought
in on the basis of a three-week trip to Africa were sufficient
to cause effectively 185 countries to enact legislation.
518. When do you expect the Security Council
to give a decision on your report?
(Mr Fowler) The hope is that the Council will consider
the report of the panels which I will chair, which will subsume
all recommendations, early in the new year.
519. Do you think that the experience in Iraq
of the traditional comprehensive economic sanctions regimes which
we have imposed and as you said yourself have clearly done serious
humanitarian damage and have not had the effect which we had hoped
they would in Iraq now sounds the death knell of such comprehensive
sanctions and that we are now looking in the future at smart sanctions
as they are called?
(Mr Fowler) The enthusiasm for comprehensive sanctions
has been waning for some time. I think you are probably quite
right that barring a set of circumstances which I cannot at the
moment foresee, it is unlikely that the Security Council will
enact pervasive sanctions against anybody soon. Again, there may
well be circumstances which I have not envisaged.
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