March 26, 2009 | Forbes.com
The U.N.’s ‘Alliance of Civilizations’
Obama has chosen a murky venue for his venture into Middle East politics.
President Obama is expected to travel early next month to Istanbul, where he will attend a meeting of a United Nations-spawned outfit called the Alliance of Civilizations. Under that grand title, hundreds of worthies will gather to pursue various aspects of “engagement.”
Among those expected are Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, officials of Alliance co-sponsors Turkey and Spain and a former Portuguese president now heading the Alliance, Jorge Sampaio–and, though the Alliance this week would neither confirm nor deny, it's a good bet there will be representatives there from Iran.
Many activities are on offer. Obama can rub shoulders at working sessions on enhancing dialogue, bridging divides, reporting across divides, bridging cultures, strengthening bonds and building peace, as well as a session on “Islamic and Muslim Contributions to European Culture.” (This appears to be a one-way bridge; there is no corresponding session listed on European contributions to Islamic culture).
But it is a well-known aspect of many U.N.-related events that the real agenda is not always fully explained in the official program. So, as a possible aid–if not to Obama, then at least to Americans who might be curious about this venue, which he chose for his first presidential full-body foray into the political mine fields of the Middle East–here's a brief unofficial history and guide to the real Alliance of Civilizations.
Headquartered across the street from the U.N.'s main offices in New York, the Alliance might more appropriately be called a U.N.-approved Slush Fund for Advancing Iranian and Other Islamic Interests. Both high profile and hard to pin down, it is first and foremost an Iranian brain child, which came to the U.N. by way of an earlier venture pitched in 1998 by Iran's then-president Mohammad Khatami for a “Dialogue of Civilizations.”
With the eager support of former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the U.N. General Assembly adopted Iran's proposal, proclaiming 2001 the Year of the Dialogue of Civilizations. To run the Dialogue, Annan appointed a former U.N. official and old Iran-hand, Giandomenico Picco–whose adventures offer a hint of the kind of intrigue surrounding today's Alliance and its precursor, the Dialogue.
An Italian national, Picco served as a U.N. go-between for Baghdad and Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war. When that ended, in 1988, Picco stayed on at the U.N. for a few more years, serving as the secretary-general's point man for catering to the hostage politics of terrorists. Specifically, Picco specialized in trying to broker U.S. favors for Iran's mullahs as quid pro quos for the release of Western hostages snatched by Iranian-backed terrorists in Beirut.
One of Picco's final acts while working during that same period at the U.N. was to lead a round of talks in 1992 on early plans to set up what became the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program, which ran from 1996 to 2003 and was aimed at helping the people of U.N.-sanctioned Iraq. Picco then left the U.N. and set up a private consulting business in midtown Manhattan.
According to a 2005 Senate subcommittee report, Picco provided his services on a number of occasions from 1997 to 2003–overlapping with his Dialogue appointment as a U.N. special representative and undersecretary-general–as a consultant on Oil-for-Food to Bayoil, a company owned by Houston oil man David Chalmers. In 2007, Chalmers pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to conspiracy to pay millions of dollars in illicit Oil-for-Food kickbacks to the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Picco, for his part, has not been accused by U.S. authorities of any wrong-doing. But in the matter of U.N. oversight of its own ventures, it sets a disturbing precedent that to this day, the U.N. has not raised any serious objection to Picco having served as a U.N. undersecretary-general running the U.N.-hosted Dialogue while simultaneously providing private consulting services to Chalmers on the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program.
Apart from much jetting around and private palaver among eminent people under U.N. auspices, the chief visible product of the Dialogue was a report, released in book form in the fall of 2001. Last I checked, a copy of that document was reposing deep in the U.N. library, its nearly indecipherable jargon overshadowed by the realities of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. For a few more years, the Dialogue chugged along with meetings here and there, including one in 2004 in Tehran. Today, the Dialogue still enjoys prominent billing on the Web site of Iran's Mission to the U.N.
For U.N. purposes, the Dialogue of Civilizations faded away in early 2005, only to be replaced that same year by the current Alliance of Civilizations.
To help organize and launch the Alliance, Annan turned to his former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza. After a long U.N. career, Riza had resigned in disgrace just a few months earlier, after disclosures by Paul Volcker's Oil-for-Food inquiry that Riza, in violation of his own orders to staff, had overseen the shredding of three years worth of U.N. executive suite documents of “potential relevance” to the investigation.
For Riza, the Alliance became a vehicle for quietly returning to the U.N., where he has kept a low profile, but remains to this day as a special advisor on the Alliance to Ban Ki-Moon.
A Pakistani national, Riza began his U.N. career in 1978 as secretary of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. In the 1990s, Riza rose in tandem with Kofi Annan. In 1994, Riza was serving as Annan's deputy when Annan chose to dismiss a request from peacekeeper Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda to try to head off the imminent genocide in which the U.N. stood by while some 800,000 people were killed.
Riza later offered himself as the fall guy for Annan's decision, but neither paid any penalty. Instead, when Annan in 1996 was promoted to the U.N.'s top job of secretary-general, he brought Riza along to be his chief of staff. In that position, according to the 2005 Volcker findings on Oil-for-Food, Riza became aware of both the smuggling and kickback schemes that massively corrupted the program but withheld this information from the U.N. Security Council.
Riza's role in setting up the Alliance was intertwined at least briefly in early 2005 with Giandomenico Picco, whom Annan also tapped as a link between the old Dialogue and the new Alliance. Picco quietly left a few weeks later, however–about the time that a scandal flared up in the media over a corrupt U.N. procurement officer, Alexander Yakovlev. A Russian who later pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to charges arising from taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks on U.N. procurement deals, Yakovlev had connections to a private company that had been doing business with the U.N. while Picco was serving as chairman of the board. Picco has not been accused of any wrong-doing.
With Riza as special advisor, the Alliance in 2005 set up a secretariat in New York, and enlisted a founding panel of 20 “eminent persons” to further shape its agenda. This group, heavy on eminences from Islamic states, included Iran's Khatami–proposer of the original Dialogue. The “inclusive” list also featured one member from China, one from India, a left-wing American rabbi, but–apparently a bridge too far–no one from Israel.
To support this group, Kofi Annan sent a fund-raising letter to various ambassadors to the U.N., decrying a “widening gap” among Western and Islamic societies and blaming this on “extremists in all societies.” Having thus underscored moral equivalence as the basis of the Alliance, Annan explained that a trust fund had been set up to bankroll its activities and invited contributions. From all but a few, the response was, to put it kindly, lukewarm. As of mid-2006, only 10 of the U.N.'s then 191 member states (now 192) had chipped in, for a total of roughly $3.7 million–the top donors being Spain, Qatar and Turkey, as well as $5,000 apiece from Oman and Syria.
Undeterred, Annan further promoted the Alliance by rushing personally to one of its early meetings, in February 2006 in Qatar, which happened to coincide with riots in the Muslim world over Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed. In the name of “dialogue,” Annan issued statements calling for restraint from all alike, as if there were no difference between Danish cartoonists and the militant mobs that were looting, burning and in some places killing their own brethren in the Muslim world.
Also in 2006, the Alliance proved especially handy to Iran–which was presented with a U.N. Security Council deadline of Aug. 31 to end its uranium enrichment program. About the same time, the Alliance was convening a meeting in New York, to which Khatami was invited. Khatami's U.N.-sponsored entry into the U.S. became a springboard for Khatami to embark on a two-week speaking tour of American cities, during which he denounced America and was a guest at a fund-raising dinner in Washington for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. From U.S. soil, thanks to an Alliance entry ticket, Khatami served broadly as a prominent spokesman for Iran's interests–just as Iran was thumbing its nose at U.S. efforts, via the U.N. Security Council, to put a stop to Tehran's pursuit of nuclear bomb fuel.
By the end of 2006, the Alliance was supposed to present an “action plan” for U.N. consideration, and wind down operations. But its staffers, by then entrenched in a roomy Manhattan office, were coy. The Alliance itself became the action plan. When Ban Ki-Moon replaced Annan in January, 2007, he retained Riza as an adviser, appointed Portugal's former president, Jorge Sampaio, to head the Alliance, and has since talked up its activities.
Money, much of it European, has rolled into the trust fund, which as of this month has collected more than $9 million.
And in the four years since it morphed into existence as the latest phase of the Iranian-sponsored Dialogue, the Alliance has become another megaphone for some of the U.N.'s most troubling campaigns. In deference to Islamic anti-blasphemy laws, the Alliance favors a global gag on free speech. One of the Alliance's repeated themes is to focus prime blame for world tensions on the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel–which at the U.N. tips over almost invariably into singling out for condemnation the state of Israel.
The Alliance has to date acquired a “group of friends” consisting of 99 members. Along with various sovereign states, these “friends” include the Organization of the Islamic Conference (or OIC), the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (set up by the OIC), the Arab League, plus the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization.
There is no representation from Israel.
This is the U.N.-fostered outfit providing the framework Obama, the American commander-in-chief, will dignify with his present at its April 6 and 7 meeting in Istanbul.
There are many ways one might describe this Alliance: An Iran-spawned Islamic-themed club; another U.N. exercise in equating the desires of despotic regimes with the principles of free societies; a curious vehicle for U.N. officials with odd spots in their past; a diplomatic bordello providing dark nooks for backroom deals. But an alliance of civilizations it is not.
Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.