UN servant who believes diplomacy is always better
February 15 2003
Hans Blix has been described as too rigorous for Saddam and too judicious for Bush, writes Ian Traynor in London.
When Kofi Annan was headhunting Hans Blix for the unloved job of chief arms inspector in Iraq, the United Nations Secretary-General's first problem was finding the elusive Swede.
"Blix didn't seek the job," said a former senior official at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna who worked closely with Dr Blix for eight years.
"He's a great hiker and he was way down at the tip of South America. It was hard for Kofi Annan to get hold of him. Then they had to talk him into coming out of retirement."
It is a long way from the icy wastes of South America to the blistering deserts of Iraq, but the 74-year-old Swedish diplomat, international lawyer and UN civil servant embarked on the journey.
Three years after his deep sense of duty persuaded him to pick up the poisoned chalice of investigating Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, Dr Blix's report to the Security Council yesterday was perhaps the climax of a career mostly devoted to the UN, and one that focused in the 1990s on organising the inspections of Iraq's secret nuclear arms program.
"Blix is the ideal person to fulfil this responsibility," said John Ritch, director-general in London of the World Nuclear Association and an acquaintance of Dr Blix from Ritch's years as US ambassador to the UN agencies in Vienna.
"Too rigorous for Saddam Hussein, too judicious for the Bush Administration and too uncompromising for those who want peace at any price. He is neither a warmonger nor a pacifist. He will be a highly professional reporter of reality."
After the UN inspections in Iraq were curtailed in 1998, Dr Blix was named as the new inspections chief in 1999, when the chances of renewed visits to Iraq appeared remote.
But despite the sense of purpose and dynamism that has seized the IAEA headquarters in Vienna since inspections resumed, there is a palpable mood of despondency and futility born of the feeling that Washington is going to war regardless.
If such feelings of wasted opportunity also engulf Dr Blix, he is too disciplined to show them.
"He is both self-confident and self-effacing," Mr Ritch said. "He is a man of the UN and he wants the UN system to work. And I'm sure it saddens him that the Security Council is fraying so badly now."
A trenchant critic of what he sees as the White House's contempt for international institutions, the former US ambassador says the hawks in Washington must share the blame for the UN crisis.
"The Bush Administration is filled with people who have spent careers denigrating the UN system. They are now calling into play a system that they have often acted to undermine."
It would be no surprise if Dr Blix shared that view. Acquaintances note that the Swede, born in 1928, is of a generation of Scandinavian public servants who shifted from unalloyed admiration of the US for its role in defeating the Nazis to a more critical view formed by Vietnam.
"War implies the failure of diplomacy and diplomacy is always to be preferred," sums up the Blix view, says an acquaintance.
Dr Blix was briefly a Swedish foreign minister before becoming head of the IAEA in 1981, where he was popular and accessible.
But if he can appear severe and inscrutable - and if hostile critics sometimes see him as a temporising appeaser of Saddam - he is up-close warm and witty with a taste for fine food, decent wine, and a good joke. He also inspires fierce loyalty among peers and staff.
The Guardian
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