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CWC: Bustani Loses Vote and Job By David Ruppe Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — The United States yesterday won the dismissal of the Brazilian official in charge of implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention, in a vote at a special session of treaty parties in The Hague (see GSN, April 22). A heavy majority of the parties approved a U.S.-offered resolution to remove Jose Bustani, director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, from the job he has held since 1997. The vote went decisively in the U.S. favor: 48 members, or 87 percent, voted in favor of Bustani’s removal, while seven voted in opposition. Another 43 members abstained. A senior U.S. State Department official denied charges made in the Brazilian press that the United States had paid the debts of some members to the organization in exchange for their votes. The senior official said no money was provided to other members. “There were reports in the Brazilian press, but there was absolutely nothing to it. We have not put forward any money to pay anybody else’s arrears or given them any kind of financial assistance to pay their own bills,” the official said. U.S. officials did urge countries to at least pay enough to restore their voting ability, the official said. “But we didn’t pay them ourselves.” Members more than two years in arrears were ineligible to vote, according to the rules of the conference, and at the vote yesterday, the United States needed to muster the support of at least two-thirds of members present and voting to oust Bustani. Brazilian Press Reports The Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo reported today that several countries that had never participated in the OPCW’s meetings attended the special session and voted yesterday, including the tiny Pacific island state of Kiribati. The Folha also reported that the Federated States of Micronesia, another small Pacific island state and former U.S. trust territory, sent an official letter to the OPCW informing that its delegation would not be able to attend but giving its proxy vote to the United States. OPCW rules barred the move, however (GSN translation, April 23). According to O Estado de Sao Paulo, several hours before the vote, Gabon paid its arrears in cash, giving it the right to vote (GSN translation, April 23). The vote to dismiss Bustani, and his subsequent announcement he would leave, put an end to a three-month public dispute between the arms control director and the U.S. State Department, where each side traded accusations. The department accused Bustani of mismanagement and inappropriate activities, including proposing Iraq submit to OPCW inspections as an alternative to U.N. inspections. Bustani has suggested Washington is motivated by a desire to avoid rigorous inspections in the United States. The United States, the OPCW’s largest donor, and other major donors have withheld funding from the organization in protest of Bustani’s leadership. Bustani Reacts to His Dismissal In several interviews with the Brazilian press yesterday following his dismissal, Bustani said the future of the organization is uncertain given that its credibility has been shaken and warned that the heads of international organizations will from now on have to take care not to offend the United States, undermining their independence. “The United States has enormous firepower,” Bustani told the Correio Braziliense, the Brazilian capital’s daily. “But I am relieved that I did not cede to their pressures until the end.” Bustani said the last two months of his life have been “hell” and that his family had been “threatened.” Calling the vote against him a “summary dismissal,” Bustani said there were no formal charges, no investigation and no judgment. “No one objected to the legality of the conference,” he said, even though the issue required some kind of judgment. “It was a lynching,” Bustani said. Columnist Blasts U.S. Move Bustani’s dismissal drew some criticism of the United States in the international press. George Monbiot, a columnist for the British newspaper the Guardian, wrote that Bustani’s removal demonstrates President George W. Bush’s “contempt for [international] cooperation.” He cited as other examples: the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna for the first time failing to attend a recent meeting on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a Washington Post report the Pentagon told the Central Intelligence Agency to investigate Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, in the hope of undermining his credibility (see GSN, April 16). Also, the British-born chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, outspoken on global warming and against fossil fuel use, was fired last week under U.S. pressure. Monbiot wrote about a meeting he called “illegal” between the U.S. ambassador to the OPCW and U.S. members of the organization’s staff. The ambassador, Monbiot said, explained that if the replacement is “like Bustani we will say ‘screw the organization.’ We’ll dismantle our (chemical) weapons independently and monitor them ourselves.” The ambassador also warned the participants, “if any of this gets out of this room, I’ll kill the person responsible,” Monbiot wrote. Another State Department official today told GSN the United States strongly supports the convention and “will work closely with other concerned member states to restore the organization to a sound financial footing and to overcome the other difficulties that it has faced in recent years.” Changes Ahead? OPCW spokesman Peter Kaiser said the introduction of a new director general should not impact the choices of country sites for inspections. “I don’t think you are going to see any fundamental shift in the way the actual choice of inspections is undertaken, because that should be based upon an entirely impartial, mathematical [procedure], really an algorithm,” he said. Particular sites are selected for inspection not based upon the country, he said, but rather on a risk assessment of facilities using a “risk assessment algorithm.” Inspections will inevitably provoke some controversy, he said, but member states are hoping they can be better managed through better communication between the OPCW secretariat and member states. “I think that was what was raised yesterday evening when a lot of states parties were explaining the way they voted, that they wanted to see the organization go along the path of cooperation and dialogue, so these kinds of crises don’t occur again,” he said. (Note: UN Wire Staff Writer Scott Hartmann contributed to this report.)
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