The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (66 page)

Thus encouraged, Iraq continued to use chemical weapons, causing the Secretary-General to send investigative missions to the region yearly. They all concluded that Iraq had used chemical weapons against Iranian forces, but when the Security Council was finally moved to pass another resolution relating to this in February 1986, it merely reminded Iraq and Iran that they were signatories to the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting their use.
²⁰
Admittedly, this was followed a month later, after yet another damning report by the Secretary-General’s fact-finding mission, by a statement from the President of the Council which named Iraq for the first time, expressing profound concern ‘that chemical weapons on many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian forces’ and strongly condemning their use.
²¹
However, there was no follow-up and Iraq suffered no adverse consequences.

Iraq persisted in using chemical weapons until the very end of the war against Iranian forces, and, notoriously, against its own population in the Kurdish region of Iraq where it became an integral part of the Iraqi government’s al-Anfal campaign in 1988 to suppress the Kurdish insurrection.
²²
In March 1988 Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja – then under the occupation of Kurdish guerrillas and Iranian forces – resulted in the deaths of some five thousand of its inhabitants. Iran brought this to the attention of the UN Secretary-General, rightly believing that the Security Council was unlikely to respond – the Council at the time being both preoccupied with trying to get Iraq and Iran to accept UN SC Resolution 598, and restrained by concerns about Iraq’s sovereignty in what was regarded as an ‘internal affair’.
²³
De Cuéllar sent a mission to Iran where they found clear evidence of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. However, when this was reported back to the UN Security Council it had already become clouded by accounts which suggested that both Iran and Iraq had used chemical weapons in the fighting around Halabja. These had arisen from confusion at the site of the attack and by the fact that some Iraqi soldiers had been affected, but also seems to have been taken up by some US government agencies, perhaps as a way of deflecting sole blame from Iraq.

These preoccupations had their effect on the Security Council and thus, when Resolution 612 was passed in May 1988 it vigorously condemned ‘the continued use of chemical weapons in the conflict’, but then stated that it ‘expects both sides to refrain from the future use of chemical weapons in accordance with their obligation under the Geneva Protocol’.
²⁴
Heartened by this response, Iraq not only stepped up its use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, but also used them repeatedly in the series of offensives launched against Iranian forces from April to June.
²⁵
There is little doubt that Iraq’s use of these weapons in such a profligate way, unrestrained by any international sanctions or action from the UN Security Council, played an important role in undermining the morale of Iranian forces on the battlefield, and in influencing the Iranian government’s decision to accept a ceasefire. There seemed to be nothing to prevent further escalation of the conflict by Iraq.
²⁶

At least as powerful in undermining morale in Iran and in influencing the thinking of the Iranian government in 1988, was the fear that Iraq might soon use chemical weapons against Iranian cities, as it had against Halabja. In both Iran and Iraq towns had been hit by artillery, air, and missile bombardment at various times during the war. In 1983, facing up to the imminent Iranian threat on the battlefield, it seems that Iraq deliberately targeted a number of Iranian towns for the first time, using both aircraft and surface-to-surface missiles. This led the Iranian government in May 1983 to ask the UN Secretary-General to send a fact-finding mission which reported on the ‘heavy and intensive destruction of civilian areas of Iran by aerial, artillery and missile attacks and light damage in Iraqi civilian areas’. However, when this was taken up by the Security Council, it resulted in Resolution 540 of October 1983 which simply called for ‘the immediate cessation of all military operations against civilian targets, including city and residential areas’ and requested the Secretary-General ‘to continue his mediation efforts … to achieve a comprehensive, just and honourable settlement’ and ‘to consult with the parties concerning ways to sustain and verify the cessation of hostilities’.
²⁷
As de Cuéllar himself remarked, this ‘was hardly realistic’, not least because the Security Council’s failure to single out Iraq had confirmed Iran’s belief in the biased nature of the Council.
²⁸

Unsurprisingly, what came to be known as ‘the war of the cities’ continued, with both sides launching sporadic bombing or missile attacks against civilian population centres in the two countries. In view of the inactivity of the Security Council, de Cuéllar took an independent initiative in June 1984 to get Iran and Iraq to desist. He succeeded in persuading them both to sign up to this, and to agree to the stationing of UN observers in the two countries to monitor compliance. The arrangement lasted for nearly a year, but when de Cuéllar tried in March 1985 to get them to renew their pledges, he had little success. Exchanges of fire continued, tailing off largely because neither side saw much advantage in pursuing this strategy.
²⁹
The tactic was revived in February 1988, leading Iraq to hit Tehran for the first time with modified Soviet Scud missiles. It had a terrifying effect on the population, large numbers of whom had fled the city by the end of March. The terror was compounded not only by news of the use of chemical weapons against civilians at Halabja, but also by the Iranian authorities’ public acknowledgment that this might indeed be the next step in Iraq’s escalation of the war, thereby playing into Iraq’s hands by undermining morale further.
³⁰

The developing conflict in another theatre of war – the waters of the Persian Gulf – also played a role in 1988. Since 1981, Iraq had been attacking ships trading with a number of Iranian ports and in 1982 it had extended the range of its attacks to the Iranian oil-terminal island of Kharg, hitting neutral ships, as well as Iranian shipping. As Iraq’s desperation about the situation on the land front increased, so it became more determined to strike at Iran’s economic infrastructure, declaring naval exclusion zones and acquiring from France the planes and missiles to enforce this to Kharg and beyond. Iran responded by stopping and searching neutral shipping it claimed might be assisting the Iraqi war effort and by periodically threatening to ‘close’ the Straits of Hormuz. As the Iraqi campaign intensified in 1983, these Iranian threats became more strident, causing mounting concern amongst oil producers and consumers. In October 1983, the Security Council passed Resolution 540, using its customary ‘even-handed’ wording to call on both states ‘to cease immediately all hostilities in the region of the Gulf, including all sea-lanes’, even though, at that stage, only Iraq had been responsible for attacking and sinking neutral shipping.
³¹

In May 1984, Iran began to strike back, hitting tankers trading with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – Iraq’s main financial backers. The concerned Arab Gulf states brought this formally to the attention of the Security Council which passed Resolution 552 in June 1984.
³²
Although it did not mention Iran by name it unequivocally condemned ‘the recent attacks on commercial ships en route to and from the ports of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia’, demanding that ‘such attacks should cease forthwith and that there should be no interference with ships en route to and from the states that are not parties to the hostilities’. It also went so far as to threaten that ‘in the event of non-compliance… to meet again to consider effective measures that are commensurate with the gravity of the situation in order to ensure the freedom of navigation in the area’. As de Cuéllar commented, ‘the resolution served only to increase further Iran’s disdain for the Council, if that were possible.’
³³

Even so, despite the fact that in the following two years some 90 ships were attacked by Iraq (of which 30 were sunk) and some 65 ships were attacked by Iran (of which 7 were sunk), the Security Council did nothing. Four of the Permanent Members of the Security Council – the US, the USSR, the UK, and France – did, however, act unilaterally or in concert with allies, increasing their military naval presence in the Gulf and the Arabian sea, responding to Iranian threats to close the Straits of Hormuz. With the escalation of the ‘tanker war’ as it became known, the US and the USSR became more deeply involved. In early 1987 the USSR leased three large tankers to Kuwait and in March the US, partly in response to this move, agreed to a Kuwaiti request to place thirteen of its fleet under the US flag, committing US naval forces to their protection. Effectively, the two superpowers had entered the conflict, doing nothing to discourage Iraqi attacks on the Iranian oil trade, even if it meant the sinking of neutral shipping, whilst seeking to deter Iran militarily from attacking the Kuwaiti and Saudi oil that was financing the Iraqi war effort.
³⁴

Inevitably, this led to an increasing number of confrontations between the Iranian and US navies, leading the USSR in 1987 to float the idea of allowing merchant ships to fly the UN flag, protected by a UN naval force. However, this came to nothing.
³⁵
By April 1988 US warships had destroyed three Iranian oil platforms in retaliation for Iranian attacks on US-flagged tankers or on US naval vessels, effectively reducing Iran’s oil exports by about eight per cent. When frigates of the Iranian navy tried to challenge the US navy, they were sunk. As McNaugher remarks, ‘the United States was now hitting the same targets Iraq had been hitting for some years. From an Iranian perspective the strike on the Sirri [oil] platform represented the emergence of a U.S.–Iraqi axis.’
³⁶
In July 1988, the confrontation went one step further when the
USS Vincennes
shot down a civilian Iranian airliner taking off from Bandar Abbas, mistaking it for a warplane. This prompted Iran to return to the UN Security Council for the first time since 1980, calling for an urgent meeting. The Council, mindful of the possibility that Iran might finally accept Resolution 598, passed Resolution 616, expressing ‘deep distress’ and ‘sincere condolences’ for the loss of life – and emphasizing the need for ‘a full and rapid implementation’ of resolution 598 as a basis for ‘a comprehensive, just, honourable and durable settlement of the conflict’ between Iran and Iraq.
³⁷

These developments gave Ayatollah Khomeini the cue to approve Iran’s pursuit of a negotiated end to the war. Not only had much of the Iranian leadership become convinced that Iran was now fighting the US directly, instead of its ‘proxy’ Iraq, but they also believed that the US and Iraq would stop at nothing to beat Iran into submission, whether this was through attacks on its armed forces, its population centres, or its economic infrastructure. Despite the fact that Iran had continued to portray the UN Security Council as little more than a plaything of the great powers, and of the US in particular, by 1988 there did exist at the UN a possible way out of the cataclysm which Iran’s leadership felt was staring the country in the face: Security Council Resolution 598.

The resolution had its origins in factors working within the UN – and some important developments outside that body. Within the UN, the Secretary-General had become exasperated by the fact that war had escalated, with a bloody stalemate at the front and increasingly horrific accounts of the use of chemical weapons, of the bombardment of civilian areas, and of the sinking of merchant ships in the waters of the Gulf. Yet the Security Council seemed unwilling or unable to act collectively to prevent any of it. When he took this to the Security Council in October 1986, it responded with a resolution so vacuous that, as de Cuéllar drily remarked, ‘this did not mark a high point in my appreciation of the Council’s work.’
³⁸
Exasperated as he may have been, however, this was not the time to show it in public since he was coming up for reappointment as Secretary-General. Having secured a second term in office, de Cuéllar lost little time in trying to get things moving and in a famous January 1987 press conference called for a ‘meeting of minds’ between the five Permanent Members of the Council to reach ‘the solution of problems related to peace and security’.
³⁹

This initiated a process of secret negotiations between the representatives of the five Permanent Members of the Security Council to devise a resolution to end the war that would stand some chance of acceptance by both Iran and Iraq. The cooperative atmosphere which was created by the regular informal meeting of these representatives was due not simply to their personalities, nor to the managerial skill of the Secretary-General, but to significant shifts occurring within the major powers, which affected their perception of the urgency of the need to resolve the conflict between Iran and Iraq. For the USSR, the coming to power of Gorbachev and the ‘new thinking’ and ‘reconstruction’ which were loudly proclaimed as the hallmark of a new Soviet politics also marked its approach to foreign policy – and inevitably affected what de Cuéllar called ‘the stultifying shroud of the Cold War that had long enveloped the Security Council’.
⁴⁰

The US administration was receptive, if wary of this development, but in 1986/7 was smarting from the revelations of the ‘Iran-Contra’ scandal which had exposed the US, despite its public pronouncements, as yet another power willing to exploit and even prolong the war in order to advance its own narrow interests. This was equally the case in France, where a minister of defence was alleged to have been profiting personally from arms sales generated by the war. In the United Kingdom, government circles were only too well aware of the lucrative deals signed with Iraq that were so close to arms deals that they were to become the subject of a public enquiry in the 1990s. Thus for three of the Permanent Members of the Security Council, largely complacent during the previous six years of war, it was becoming apparent that the conflict had the potential to escalate not simply in the war zone, but also at home in ways that could be politically damaging.
⁴¹