Annan to withdraw UN staff from Iraq
Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced today he will withdraw United Nations staff from Iraq following the failure of
efforts to achieve united action in the Security Council in ridding the country of weapons of mass destruction.
“I have just informed the Council that we will withdraw the UNMOVIC and atomic agency inspectors, we will withdraw the
UN humanitarian workers, we will withdraw the UNIKOM troops on the Iraq-Kuwaiti border who are also not able to
operate,” Mr. Annan said in a statement to reporters after he informed a closed-door meeting of the Security Council of
his plans.
The Secretary-General said US authorities had informed him, as well as the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection
Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), yesterday “that it would be prudent not to leave
our staff in the region.”
Mr. Annan said the implication of these withdrawals meant that several UN mandates like the humanitarian oil-for-food
programme would be suspended because there would no inspectors to monitor the selling of oil and the distribution of
food required by such programmes.
But he stressed: “This does not mean that should war come to Iraq that the UN will sit back and not do anything to help
the Iraqi population. We will find a way of resuming our humanitarian activities to help the Iraqi people who have
suffered for so long and do whatever we can to give them assistance and support and as you know we have undertaken major
contingency planning to be able to move forward as soon as we can.”
“Obviously we seem to be at the end of the road here,” Mr. Annan said, referring to the disappointment and frustration
of Council members who hoped that it would be possible to disarm Iraq peacefully and to come up with a common position.
In reply to questions Mr. Annan repeated his view that if action against Iraq were to take place without the support of
the Council “its legitimacy will be questioned and the support of it diminished.”
Asked whether today was a very sad day for the UN and the world, he said: “In the sense that we are not able to do it
peacefully, obviously it is a disappointment and a sad day for everybody. War is always a catastrophe. It leads to major
human tragedy, lots of people are going to be uprooted, displaced from their homes and nobody wanted that and this is
why we had hoped that the Iraqi leadership would have cooperated fully and would have been able to do this without
resort to use of force. But the little window that we seem to have seems to be closing very, very fast. I’m not sure at
this stage the Council can do anything in the next couple of hours.”
Mr. Annan said regardless of how the issue is resolved the Security Council is going to have a role to play in
post-conflict Iraq. “The Council will have to give me a mandate for some of the activities that we will need to
undertake. This does not mean the end of the involvement of the UN in the Iraqi situation.”