Rich, poor states vie for security

By Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI (JP): Power and force remain at the heart of international relations, with strength respecting strength. What matters is not being right, but being strong. With the pursuit of military and economic power intended to reinforce each other, international organizations are increasingly being employed to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful states.

The World Trade Organization has helped the rich nations push their commercial interests, centered on greater access to foreign markets for their goods and services. In the political realm, a selective use of international organizations to promote the interest of powerholders is taking place. The wealthy states are seeking to hold on to their traditional advantages in the face of rising competition from Asian and other nations.

With most Western economies sheltered by a nuclear arsenal or a nuclear umbrella and the developing world no longer a consolidated block with common interests, the UN Security Council, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq have emerged in recent years as the favorite organizations of the powerholders.

These organizations supplement the great powers' unilateral strategies, pivoted on the readiness to employ force to defend vital interests. Credibly conveying the threat to use force to defend national interests is for these nations as important as actually employing force.

The increased use of national intelligence assets to assertively promote national interests is thus to be expected, even against allies. The recent controversies regarding American intelligence activities in Germany, France and Japan underscore the escalating technological and commercial rivalries in the advanced industrial world.

Little attention, however, has been paid to the furtive use of national intelligence assets by the wealthy and powerful states to individually and collectively influence and shape the agenda of international organizations. Information gathered by national technical means (NTM) is worming its way into select organizations without any international sanction.

The NTM-aided "discoveries" by one organization are used to influence the agenda of other international organizations. For example, UNSCOM's periodic, Western intelligence-assisted disclosures on Iraq lend support to U.S.-led demands for arming the IAEA with police-style search powers to prevent clandestine proliferation activity.

They are also used to support claims that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has replaced the cold war as the main threat to international security. By making UNSCOM and IAEA report to the UN Security Council, the great powers have sought to directly involve it in their proliferation-control strategies.

The IAEA is affiliated with the UN without being directly under its control. In recent years, however, it has, in its own words, emerged as the Security Council's "nuclear verification arm", while it views the council as a "political organ" to deal with any violation of a safeguards agreement.

This avowed institutional link is rooted in a 1992 Security Council Summit statement that council members would "take appropriate measures in the case of any violation notified to them by the IAEA". The legal basis of this link is questionable. After all, the Security Council is an instrument of great muscle and IAEA "safeguards" or inspections are designed to protect the nuclear hegemony of these powers.

With the agency emerging as a key instrument to shield their nuclear dominance, the powerholders are now seeking to successfully conclude negotiations by May on a new, highly intrusive IAEA inspection regime, known as the 93 + 2 program.

The program, which seeks to implicitly legitimize the use of intelligence data, will turn the original verification principle on its head. Instead of the IAEA verifying that there has been no diversion of safeguarded nuclear material, a non-nuclear subscribing state will have to show that it has no undeclared facility. Foreign inspectors will enjoy unhindered access.

Of greater concern, however, is the way NTM data has already slithered into IAEA activities. Information provided by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and other sources, for example, has guided IAEA activities in North Korea and Iraq, according to agency officials.

Today, the IAEA is routinely receiving national intelligence information. Intelligence data that could be useful to it, such as high-quality satellite imagery and signals intelligence, is available only from national intelligence sources, not commercially. What would be particularly troubling for the long- term credibility of the agency is the fact that such intelligence assets are concentrated in the hands of the nuclear powers.

The IAEA has no means of knowing whether the intelligence data fed to it has been distorted or falsified. The provider of NTM data can not only twist information to suit its strategic interests, it could release data to the agency at a time of its choosing to help orchestrate an international uproar or crisis. Verification work employing unverified data will seriously erode IAEA's credibility.

The degree of liberty granted to the UNSCOM is unprecedented in the annals of arms control. UNSCOM inspectors have unrestricted access, anytime, anywhere in Iraq. On-site inspections are supplemented with aerial overflights, access to official Iraqi documents and the use of ground-installed sensors. Whenever Iraq has balked at allowing unhindered UNSCOM operations, it has faced U.S.-led air strikes and then given in.

Yet, the UNSCOM relies on intelligence information without international sanction. Its officials acknowledge that the CIA directed the initial UNSCOM inspection teams to Iraqi facilities and to the Ministry of Agriculture building where thousands of very compromising documents were seized after a standoff lasting several days.

Western intelligence officials still liaise with the commission. The United States has established a "Support Office" within the State Department to work closely with the UNSCOM and, as part of the stated U.S. policy to preserve sanctions, has repeatedly offered new evidence to the commission to stop it from clearing Iraq.

For more than five years, the UNSCOM has been carrying out extensive search operations in Iraq after stripping it of its national sovereignty. According to Maurizio Zifferero, a senior IAEA official, the experience with disarming Iraq has underscored "the irreplaceable value of intelligence information" for the IAEA and UNSCOM.

Such statements have prompted some Western officials to suggest that some other international organizations should also be given intelligence data.

According to one American official, Edward J. Lacey, "U.S. arms control policy-makers, together with the intelligence community, should now begin the process of determining how best to secure U.S. intelligence sources and methods while sharing the information that is generated. Likewise, the United States should jointly explore with relevant international organizations what measures could be taken by those entities to ensure that U.S.- provided intelligence data would be safeguarded."

The silent majority in the community of nations needs to take up the issue of how international organizations are being corrupted by national intelligence information. The subterranean funneling of such data to international organizations and its use without international sanction raises very disturbing issues.

In the long run, international organizations cannot become foreign-policy and security instruments of the powerful states against the weaker states without their legitimacy being irreparably undermined.

The writer is a professor of security studies at the Center for Policy Research, an independent think-tank in New Delhi.

Window: This avowed institutional link is rooted in a 1992 Security Council Summit statement that council members would "take appropriate measures in the case of any violation notified to them by the IAEA".