The former director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which won the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, declared Sunday that he was ousted from the organization’s helm over a decade ago for making plans to investigate Iraq’s weapons stocks, thereby limiting the Bush administration’s ability to build justification for invasion on unverified weapons claims.
The public statements are likely to cast a further pall over a Norwegian Nobel Committee decision that, many have charged, fails to stand up to U.S. power and aggression.
Former director general José Bustani, now France’s ambassador to Brazil, told the New York Times in an exclusive interview published Sunday that efforts to unseat him date back to late 2001, when Iraq showed interest in joining the Chemical Weapons Convention, which OPCW oversees. As one condition of joining, countries must open their doors to weapons inspection and destruction. Under Bustani, OPCW inspectors made plans for Iraq weapons inspections in 2002.
Bustani says those plans caused an “uproar in Washington” and unleashed a torrent of threats against him. “By the end of December 2001, it became evident that the Americans were serious about getting rid of me,” he stated. “People were telling me, ‘They want your head.’”
Bustani says he received a call in 2002 from then-U.S. Under Secretary of State John R. Bolton that he had 24 hours to resign. When he refused, his ouster was put to a vote, and after a U.S. pressure campaign, he was pushed out. “He was reportedly the first head of an international organization to be pushed out of office this way, and some diplomats said the pressure campaign had made them uneasy,” the New York Times reports. One of the pressure tactics the U.S. used to achieve Bustani’s ouster was to threaten a cut to the OPCW’s budget, 22 percent of which was controlled by the U.S., and warning other countries would do the same, diplomats told the New York Times.
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