NZ playing the honest broker card

By FRAN O'SULLIVAN

The Government is positioning New Zealand for an "honest broker" role as the end-game in the Iraq war approaches.

United States President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday endorsed a "vital role" for the United Nations when the conflict is over, but neither spelled out the UN's exact role.

Prime Minister Helen Clark has stressed that New Zealand is prepared to aid the UN-led peacekeeping effort with mine-clearing operations - part of the price of her peacemaking efforts with the Bush Administration after her disparaging comments on the conduct of the war.

Foreign Minister Phil Goff is now running interference for Clark as Opposition politicians continue to probe her diplomatic faux pas. He confirms that a letter was sent by New Zealand Ambassador John Wood to the official on the National Security Council who had raised concerns with New Zealand officials in Washington.

Bush chairs the council, which also includes Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has operational responsibility.

Goff has yet to release the letter, but speculation in Wellington is that it contains details of the practical help New Zealand is now willing to make to peacekeeping in Iraq - irrespective of whether the US or UN runs the immediate postwar administration.

Blair has struggled to get Bush to fully accept the strategic importance of the UN to global multilateral relationships. Clark is also a committed multilateralist. In an interview before her apology to the US, she agonised on the challenges for international diplomacy, and spoke warmly of the work Secretary of State Powell was doing to reinstate the multilateral approach in the reconstruction of Iraq.

"Firstly you have got the US and the UK talking, with the UK desperate to get the UN to the maximum involvement. Within the US itself you've got Powell and the State Department wanting that, but Pentagon and NSC basically saying, 'Dammit, we've prosecuted this bloody war, we'll do the end of it'."



It was Clark's usual acute political analysis, but lacking the personal overtones which led to the dust-up with senior White House officials.

In 10 days she begins a lengthy trip to Europe. The timing could not be more apposite: it is New Zealand's turn to chair the annual OECD ministerial meeting, and she had taken the opportunity to schedule her first visit as Prime Minister to the European Union in Brussels.

But there is now a much bigger picture to address - "I think it's a fascinating time to be going," she says.

Meetings are scheduled with three world leaders: Blair, French President Jacques Chirac and his Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt.

Clark sees her trip as a time to assert New Zealand's interests in a world that does work through multilateral processes.

"We really do not want to see a repeat of what's happened,"she said. "It just has appalling implications in every sense - I never say whom I am thinking of when I say, 'Think of the precedents that this can create,' but it's not good to go back to a 19th century world where might is right.

"There is no security in that for anybody - so we have an interest in asserting that and asserting New Zealand's interests as a small, open economy ... prepared to play a good role internationally."

New Zealand has vital issues at stake in Europe. Ten eastern European countries are poised to join the EU, creating a Mega Europe, but New Zealand has no diplomatic representatives on the ground. This is time to raise the profile of New Zealand's own agricultural access.

Since Clark's trip was scheduled, the game has changed. The big challenge now is whether the EU looks outwards or inwards. What sort of common defence and security policy it adopts to act as a counterweight to the superpower status of the US.

"Everyone will be preoccupied by how theworld order will be reshaped," she says.

In Europe she will find herself in like company.

"Belgium is in exactly the same position as we are too - strong views."

Clark wants to assert that New Zealand's interests lie in a world order that works through multilateral processes.

She says there is bound to be debate on the big issues of the day: "Everyone's looking at, is there going to be Franco/German/Russian linkup with good links through to the Chinese against what we have which looks like a small Anglo-American group - so it shifts the whole dynamic.

"Is Britain's future with Europe or is it transatlantic? They are very interesting questions."

The Clark agenda is not just to engage the big EU players, who still have to mend their own rift on Iraq. The Government is also working with "like-minded" nations such as Canada, Norway, Chile, and Mexico.

They all belong to the Eight-Nation New Agenda Coalition, which has been spearheading an agenda at the UN for complete nuclear disarmament. Mexico and Canada have a free-trade pact with the US, others are engaged in Nato. None have committed troops to the Iraq conflict.

"We haven't sort of put ourselves in a group with the French, Germans and Russians at all," notes Clark. "Everyone in this group has a big interest in the US relationship and want to find a way to get them re-engaged.

"What specifically brought us together is to try and push for the maximum possible UN role at the end of the conflict. And I personally think the US really needs that, or otherwise we face a sort of Palestine."

Blair has invited Clark to London in June for a meeting of the Progressive Governance Group of centre-left world leaders.

"Providing Tony's still there ... and everything's on track, I will go and of course who will be there but the Chilean President, Chretien [Canada], Schroeder [Germany] and Persson the Swede, who's also in this little group I have been talking about. We're going to meet in London at Tony's invitation, but we'll all go because we've got to get this back on the rails."

Clark stresses that the agenda is to reconstruct multilateral ties so the next crisis is handled differently.

"The more I see of this, the more convinced I am that we were right to go right to the end for a diplomatic solution based on inspection, surveillance, etc, because it is so unedifying. I don't say that as a pacifist, because I am not a pacifist, but I don't think it will be easy to put back Humpty together on the ground."

New Zealand has already chipped in with $3.3 million in humanitarian aid to Iraq since war began.

Regardless of how negotiations between the US and UN finally pack down and the size of the UN's role, Goff says New Zealand will continue to respond to the humanitarian need.

"It would be churlish to say, 'Well, we are not going to provide it unless it's done.' We have signed the cheque and passed it across - we will be giving further assistance in that way.

"Regardless of what the governance structure is in Iraq, we can still contribute through multilateral agencies. We will be having discussions on reconstruction - trying to establish governance arrangements where we can contribute.

"But we would want to have a mandate of the UN to do so, otherwise we would simply be seen as part of an occupying force, and for obvious reasons we and most other countries don't want to be seen under that particular umbrella."

Asked whether there were any circumstances in which New Zealand would take a peacekeeping role in a bridging sense while the US was still there, Goff replied: "Well, you've got to look at the circumstances that might arise. In the first instance, you'll have a direct military rule and Tommy Franks will be in charge and they won't want - and we won't be offering - peacekeeping forces.

"There will be the view that there will be a UN co-ordinator ... and we would look at the situation on the ground, but it is important to distinguish between what you may do and be seen to be doing as part of an occupying force.

"You know, once the conflict is over - well, let's hope it can be as brief and take as few lives as possible - the US is going to want to engage with the whole range of countries including those with whom they have had quite a distinct falling-out."

Besides, other issues loom, particularly North Korea, which the Government has defined as New Zealand's most important regional security issue.

Its strategy is to encourage Britain, France and the EU to put bad feelings over Iraq to one side and adopt a common front.

"A lot of hard things have been said by a lot of people," Clark observes. "Somehow you have got to get it back - most pressingly I think - so that this if at all possible can have a ring put around it as a one-off rather than a precedent.

"Because the precedent cannot be applied to North Korea because North Korea does have missiles that can reach Seoul, does have missiles that can reach Tokyo, and it can't be a precedent that applies to Iran."

Herald Feature: Iraq war