Abstract
On august 3, peter goosen, the head of South Africa's delegation to the Geneva talks on a bioweapons treaty verification protocol, let out a sigh. “Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I have sat in this room listening to this debate today and I must admit to being overwhelmed by a sense of surrealism.”
Goosen's remark came nine days after the United States rejected the draft text, when the negotiations were becoming an exercise in diplomatic mud-wrestling. Fourteen days later, the talks simply imploded. Despite broad support for a new protocol establishing a mechanism for monitoring compliance with the 1972 Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention (BWC), in the end the delegates could not even agree on the wording of a report of the meeting.
The 144 state parties to the treaty will have to try somehow to salvage the wreckage when they come together for the treaty's Fifth Review Conference, which will be held November 19 to December 7 in Geneva. But the fiasco in the negotiating group will make it very difficult.
Most delegates agree that the treaty and a verification regime is needed now more than ever. The science of biotechnology is making progress on an exponential scale, and the possible misuses of biotechnology seem obvious. The consequences of the use of biological weapons would be horrific.
Unlike the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, the bioweapons treaty was established without a mechanism for detecting or deterring violations. The revelation of a major, clandestine Soviet biological weapons program in the early 1990s shocked the international community into action. In 1992, Verex, a group of governmental experts established in 1991 by the Third BWC Review Conference, began considering 21 possible verification measures. These negotiations gained a greater sense of urgency as details of the Iraqi bioweapons program became known after the Gulf War.
Formal talks on a protocol began in 1995. Since then, the Ad Hoc negotiating group of about 50 states had been gradually moving toward agreement before their self-imposed deadline, the Fifth Review Conference. The chairman, Hungarian Amb. Tibor Tóth, felt he had captured the political momentum in a “composite text” he suggested in March 2001.
Using the wrong yardstick
The group's July meeting (its twenty-fourth) opened with nearly all delegations endorsing an agreement on the basis of the chairman's text. That agreement came in spite of the fact that they expected the United States to reject the language–the negative outcome of the Bush administration's policy review on the issue had been leaked to the New York Times in April.
What derailed the negotiations was not that the United States rejected the text on July 25–the real bombshell was the Bush administration's conclusion that no verification regime would be of any use.
U.S. Amb. Donald Mahley announced that, after a thorough review of the results of the negotiations, the U.S. government was “forced to conclude that the mechanisms envisioned for the protocol would not achieve their objectives, that no modification of them would allow them to achieve their objectives, and that trying to do more would simply raise the risk to legitimate United States activities.”
This statement effectively marked the complete withdrawal of the United States from the negotiations, signaling a radical departure from its previous policy of working with other delegations (although reluctantly at times) to try to find common ground.
The new U.S. position was disingenuous at best. Mahley argued that the protocol was intended to establish a verification regime that would provide the same degree of security as nuclear safeguards or the chemical weapons verification provisions. Although the approach used in the talks was relevant to non-biological areas, he added, it simply did not apply to biology.
But Mahley, who has participated in talks on the protocol since the days of Verex, knows better: Almost from the first, negotiators in Geneva aimed for something that may have seemed outwardly similar but was different in purpose, scope, and shape to the chemical treaty's verification regime.
Early on, for reasons that were partly practical, partly political, delegates abandoned approaches based on material control or comprehensive monitoring of all relevant facilities. Instead, the draft text required member states to declare their most relevant facilities, where on-site transparency measures (aptly named “visits,” not inspections) could take place. Short-notice, intrusive investigations could be requested if breaches of the convention were suspected. Many of the measures were weaker than desirable from a verification point of view. But they represented the participants' political middle ground.
The United States, however, no longer cared. According to Mahley, the Bush administration's review, conducted “at the senior-most levels,” had concluded that not even the most intrusive and extensive on-site activities physically possible would be able to uncover telltale traces of clandestine activities. That statement shut the door on any continuing U.S. participation.
Having learned a lesson in Bonn, where its blunt rejection of the Kyoto Protocol left the U.S. delegation utterly isolated (and in the end, booed out of the conference room), Mahley pretended to be constructive. He argued for “new and innovative ideas” to strengthen the treaty and urged negotiators to “think out of the box.”
At a later press conference, though, it was clear that Mahley had been bluffing. He suggested stronger export controls, international vaccination programs, and urging more countries to join the convention. These proposals did not strike anyone as novel, and while they might serve as a supplement to a protocol, they were no substitute.
Since then, revelations about the scope of U.S. bioweapons research have highlighted the need for verification. On September 4, the New York Times reported that, unknown to the outside world–and in part unknown to the White House–the United States has three clandestine defensive projects that mimic a complete bioweapons program. They include the development of a novel warfare agent, the construction of a weapon agent production facility, and even a bomb for delivering the agent. Some experts question whether this program has violated the treaty, and some suggest that the United States blocked agreement in Geneva to keep these projects hidden from international scrutiny.
On the other hand, defensive programs can always be perceived as violating the treaty, so the best way to avoid damage to the norm against bioweapons is to ensure maximum transparency.
The blame game
The European Union (EU) was a driving force throughout the negotiations. Of the top 10 delegations submitting working papers to the talks, eight were EU members. Before this last session, the Europeans raised the stakes by appealing on all levels to Washington not to wreck the protocol. All 15 EU foreign ministers issued a joint statement, the European Parliament passed an urgent resolution, and–unusual among allies–the EU even sent an official demarche to Washington.
Given these pre-meeting efforts, the failure to reach an agreement after the U.S. withdrawal was puzzling. The first official reaction, delivered the next day by the Belgian delegation, concluded with an ominous threat that the Europeans were “considering all options.”
But it quickly became clear that they did not consider the “Kyoto option”–going ahead without the United States–to be plausible. In fact, the Europeans were deeply divided. The Netherlands and Sweden, long-time proponents of the protocol, argued for a stronger EU role. Others, like Germany and Britain, caved in to U.S. pressure to accept failure.
Some non-aligned countries had long ago distanced themselves from the protocol, which they considered a Western enterprise. But after the United States rejected the agreement, they suddenly showed a remarkable degree of enthusiasm for it. China, India, Iran, Pakistan–even Libya–voiced strong support for a successful conclusion of the talks. This, certainly not by accident, further isolated the United States.
Privately, European diplomats argued that “doing a Kyoto” was not an option because some non-aligned states would reopen negotiations, demanding concessions on export controls and other issues. And the EU did not have the stomach to go into these debates without the Americans by their side.
But other advocates of the protocol did not do much better. The day before the U.S. rejection, a joint statement by a group of 38 nations indicated broad support for Chairman Tóth's text. By August 3 this group had shrunk to just seven states (Brazil, Chile, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, and South Africa), who called for the convening of a special conference on the protocol.
It was the beginning of the end. The last two weeks of the session turned into a “blame game,” with wrangling over how to report the reasons for failure to the Review Conference. In the end, it was the issue of naming the United States in the final report–Cuba and Iran pressed the point and provoked open conflict–that provided the formal trigger for failure. But the underlying reason for implosion was insufficient political support for the protocol in the face of a long-expected U.S. onslaught.
On the wrong side of the line?
A series of articles appearing in the September 4 New York Times revealed some of the reasons why the United States may have wanted to reject the bioweapons treaty's proposed verification protocol. The U.S. government admitted that it had already conducted two separate, clandestine projects aimed at mimicking offensive bioweapons efforts, and that it was planning a third, all in an effort to develop better defenses. They are:
Under
As part of
According to press reports, the agencies operating these projects actively opposed transparency measures like those described in the proposed verification protocol. Experts argue that their fear of disclosure was at least one reason why the United States rejected the proposed protocol.
Whether these projects violated the bioweapons treaty is now being debated by the experts. James F. Leonard, one of the treaty's negotiators, is quoted as saying that the program is “foolish but not illegal,” because the treaty permits defensive work. But Mary Elizabeth Hoinkes, who was general counsel for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1994 to 1999, calls such distinctions “too cute by half.” She believes that the projects unnecessarily blur the line between offensive and defensive programs: “You see a room full of people manufacturing bombs, and they say: ‘I'm only doing this for defensive purposes and I have no intention of ever doing it for real because my heart is pure.’”
By keeping the projects secret, the United States violated a political commitment it made in 1986 to declare the scope and purpose of any such activities under the treaty's confidence-building mechanism. Projects Bacchus and Clear Vision were not listed on any of the annual reports it submitted to the United Nations.
Finishing up
The group's inability to agree on a final report does not bode well for the Review Conference. Everything is up in the air and delegations will have little guidance on how to move forward.
In the worst case, disagreement over the protocol could spill over onto the treaty itself. Unlike most multilateral agreements, the BWC does not call for automatic five-year review conferences. If disagreement over the protocol prevents the conference from adopting a “Final Declaration,” a majority of state parties would have to call for a sixth review.
This kind of uncertainty is in nobody's interest. State parties will need to try to separate discussions on the protocol from the proceedings of the Review Conference. One way would be to schedule a separate meeting, perhaps soon after the Review Conference, to discuss the continuing purpose, scope, and schedule of the Ad Hoc Group. Agreeing to hold a separate meeting to kick-start new talks on a protocol would take many contentious issues off the Review Conference agenda.
The delegations should also try to remember that despite the absence of a formal report, the group did reach a broad consensus on a number of issues. They agreed that:
• Negotiations on verification should continue. Although many delegations stated that “business as usual was not possible,” none called the negotiating process into question.
• The mandate of the talks is still valid. In his closing statement (at 3:30 a.m., Saturday, August 18), Tóth called the fact that no delega-
tion had questioned the mandate his personal “ray of hope.”
• The 300-page rolling text and the 200-page chairman's text should be carried forward, a point that was already agreed to before the talks collapsed.
Charting the political course forward will probably be more difficult than reaching agreement on procedural issues. The Europeans and a number of non-aligned delegations will need to keep the talks alive and press for an agreement. To put the talks into “hibernation,” as some have suggested, will not strengthen international security. Reviving talks after a prolonged intermission often means starting from scratch. There was sufficient agreement on the main elements of a protocol that it should be possible to set a target date in the foreseeable future–but only if governments show the determination to finish the job.