Annan faces testing time on visit to Washington

WITH the stakes as high as they are ever likely to be both for him personally and for the organisation that he heads, the United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, began a testing two-day visit to Washington yesterday.

Ushered in for talks with President Clinton and the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, Mr Annan might have expected to have been met with back-slapping and glory. It has, after all, only been two weeks since he did his deal with Saddam Hussein that brought America back from the brink of war.

His relations with Washington, however, are altogether more complicated and tense. He was not scheduled to brave Capitol Hill at all this time and for a good reason - his friends in Congress are few and embattled.

Mr Annan, who will shortly also visit London, has two principal issues to discuss in Washington - they are the Iraqi deal and American dues to the UN. Unhappily for him, the two have become inextricably linked.

Getting money out of the US has been hard enough anyway. The Saddam deal is likely to make extracting the US dollars more difficult still. Republican members of Congress especially have accused Mr Annan of giving Saddam special treatment and stopped barely short of labelling him an appeaser.

Most diplomats in New York concede that renewed antagonism toward the UN is unlikely to help efforts this year to persuade Congress to release at least some of the roughly $1.6bn now owed by Washington to the UN. "There is general apprehension that this is not going to help," remarked one.

Nor will it ease negotiations in New York on reducing America's share of the UN budget from 25 per cent to 22 per cent, which Congress has set as a condition for paying up. There had been hopes that this would have been settled last year. Getting it done this year now seems most unlikely.

Arriving in Washington, the Secretary General insisted that as regards Congress's other main condition - that the UN reform itself - much progress had been made. "We have delivered and I want to know when they will deliver", he said.

Wisely or otherwise, Mr Annan previewed his trip with a sharply worded comment piece in Monday's New York Times. "Our doors are kept open only because other countries in essence provide interest-free loans to cover largely American-created shortfalls". Such countries, he went on, include Fiji.

The greatest disaster that could befall Mr Annan, of course, would be the collapse of the Saddam deal. So far, the signs seem good, though sceptics wonder how long it will last. The first visits to presidential sites by weapons inspectors, accompanied by diplomats, should happen within two weeks.

But even the US administration, which has come to terms with the provisions of the Saddam deal, is uncertain about the other steps being taken by the Secretary General to open up communications between himself and the Iraqi leadership. Steps that to some looking like Annan going soft on Iraq.

Mr Annan this week appointed an Indian diplomat, Prakash Shah, to be his special representative in Baghdad. He has also passed onto the Security Council a request from Moscow that a Russian be appointed as co-deputy of Unscom, the commission that runs the inspections. Washington is appalled.

These are suspicions, meanwhile, that should be viewed against a background of rapidly shifting sentiments with the UN Security Council. The Washington view, largely shared by London, that Saddam be given no leeway whatsoever until post-Gulf War resolutions are honoured, has in recent months been eroded by the less stringent positions of Russia, China and France.

Sources close to the Secretary General say he is sensitive to the shift and that he does not himself believe that the sanctions regime can go on ad infinitum.

Even so, you could forgive Mr Annan for feeling unloved by Washington. He got Mr Clinton out of a bind on Iraq at least in the short term. And it was the Americans, after all, who pushed so hard to have him at the head of the UN instead of the predecessor they truly did not trust, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.