THE Bush administration鈥檚 campaign to scupper a host of international treaties has just got personal.
This week in Geneva, the US will seek to stamp its authority on negotiations to limit global warming by replacing the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with a candidate it sees as less of a threat (see Too hot for head of climate panel). And next week in The Hague, it will mount a bid to sack the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Brazilian Jose Bustani.
Since George Bush became president, the US has taken an increasingly isolationist stance on international treaties. It has torpedoed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and a deal to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention.
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Now it appears to be trying to oust Bustani in a bid to influence the monitoring of chemical weapons. On the surface, the US case against Bustani seems damning: it claims the OPCW has neglected inspections, and is paralysed by financial mismanagement and plummeting staff morale. But New 杏吧原创 has discovered that few of the accusations stand up to scrutiny.
Bustani has run the OPCW, which performs inspections and other activities demanded by the Chemical Weapons Convention, since its launch five years ago. Despite criticising member states for failing to help the OPCW meet its commitments, Bustani was re-elected by a unanimous vote of member states in May. But in March this year, Washington called for a no-confidence vote by the Executive Council of member states, which oversees the organisation.
A decision on his future will be taken next week. But this month the US State Department posted a list of complaints about him on its website, even though Gordon Vachon, Bustani鈥檚 spokesman, says the US has made no formal accusations beyond complaining about his 鈥渕anagement style鈥�.
The US says the organisation had less money than it should have had in 2000. But Vachon counters that this was because Russia never paid an expected sum to the OPCW to supervise the destruction of its chemical stockpile鈥攁 plan that failed to go through partly because the US withheld technical assistance.
The Bush administration also says that OPCW inspections of chemical plants fell in 2001. But Bustani鈥檚 office says there wasn鈥檛 enough money to pay for them because of late payments by member states, including the US. The US is $1.4 million behind in its dues to the OPCW and has blocked any increases to the organisation鈥檚 budget.
The US also claims it has been unfairly targeted by the OPCW, which has recently performed a spate of inspections at American chemical facilities. However, those inspections couldn鈥檛 have happened any earlier because the US submitted its list of facilities three years late, says Vachon.
鈥淢orale in the OPCW has plummeted,鈥� agrees Jean-Nicolas Gilliquet, formerly a senior OPCW officer. But he says this is a result of budgets being squeezed and uncertainty about the organisation鈥檚 future鈥攏ot Bustani鈥檚 leadership.