Nobel Peace Charade

Surely the Norwegian Nobel Committee meant well in awarding this year’s Peace Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). But for all the courage of OPCW inspectors now working in Syria, this award is like giving the mob a medal for gun control. Not only is the OPCW ill configured to rid the globe of chemical weapons; in practice it serves as a clubhouse conferring a false stamp of legitimacy on such alleged violators as Russia and Iran.

Based in The Hague, with an annual budget of $100 million and a staff of 450, the OPCW is the body set up to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which entered into force in 1997. With Syria’s accession to the treaty, the OPCW now has 190 members, and boasts on its web site that they account for 98% of the world’s population and chemical industry.

If that sounds promising, the problem is that OPCW inspectors do not actually run around the world ferreting out chemical weapons wherever they might be hidden and destroying them. Rather, with moral indifference verging on blindness, the OPCW relies on the honor of its individual member states to declare in full their chemical weapons facilities and stockpiles. The OPCW then inspects and monitors the declared stockpiles; and when they are destroyed, verifies their destruction. Even this limited exercise has entailed problems. Both Russia and the U.S. missed a 2012 deadline for destroying their declared stockpiles, and needed extensions. The lags, however, have not been equal. The U.S. has destroyed 90% of its declared stockpile, while Russia, which began with a declared stockpile about one-third larger than that of the U.S., has to date destroyed only about 76%, according to OPCW officials.

But among members of the OPCW, the more ominous problem is that of undeclared stockpiles. On this front, the OPCW setup favors the world’s more repressive and potentially malign regimes. The less free a country, the easier it is for the government to hide a stash of chemical weapons, or dodge accountability at home for cheating. In this category of deceivers, one of the prime suspects is Russia. That warrants special attention, because Russia is both a founding party to the CWC, and chief broker of the September deal under which the OPCW in tandem with the United Nations is now supposed to dismantle Syria’s chemical arsenal.

This past January the U.S. State Department judged, as it has repeatedly since Russia joined the CWC in 1997, that Russia’s declaration of its own chemical facilities and munitions “is incomplete.” Reporting more explicitly on this problem, back in 2001, State said the U.S. believed Russia’s declaration “to be incomplete with respect to CW production, development facilities and chemical agents and weapons stockpiles.”

At the OPCW, Russia’s alleged cheating makes no difference. Along with such free societies as the U.S., Canada and Germany, Russia holds one of the 41 seats on the OPCW’s chief governing body, its executive council. At the OPCW’s General Conference last November, Russia’s Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade, Georgi Kalamanov, without blushing, praised the Chemical Weapons Convention as “without a shadow of a doubt one of the most effective international instruments in the field of disarmament and nonproliferation.”

Libya under the late dictator Muammar Qaddafi provided a clear case of how easy it is to cheat. When Qaddafi’s regime acceded to the CWC in 2004, Libya submitted to the OPCW what was supposed to be a complete declaration of all its chemical weapons facilities and stockpiles. Seven years later, when Qaddafi fell, not only was the destruction of the declared stockpiles still incomplete, but the successor government found stockpiles that Qaddafi had never declared.

Or take the case of Iran, which is under United Nations sanctions for its rogue nuclear program, and is listed by the U.S. as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Like Russia, Iran has been a State Party to the CWC and a member of the OPCW since 1997. Upon joining, Tehran admitted that it had developed a chemical warfare program during the 1980s, but said it had since “terminated” the program, destroyed its stockpiles and had nothing further to declare.

The U.S. government has long judged that Iran is lying. Just this past January, in a report on compliance with the CWC, the State Department warned that Iran may have “a clandestine offensive CW production capability,” and further reported that “due to irregularities in the Iranian declaration and insufficient clarification from Iran,” the U.S. government “cannot certify” that Iran is in compliance. The same concerns have surfaced in State compliance reports on Iran going back a dozen years. In 2001 and again in 2005, State more explicitly asserted: “The United States believes Iran has manufactured and stockpiled blister, blood and choking chemical agents, and weaponized some of these agents into artillery shells, mortars, rockets and aerial bombs.”

One might suppose such continuing allegations would be of extreme interest to the OPCW, especially given Iran’s supply of military equipment and Quds Force shock troops to Syria’s embattled Assad regime — which just two months ago carried out the worst chemical weapons attack since Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in Halabja 25 years ago. But Iran has declared itself clean. So the OPCW contents itself with recording that Iran has fully implemented domestic legislation to comply with OPCW provisions, and regularly submits declarations that it has nothing significant to declare.

In other words, whether Iran cheats with undeclared manufacturing facilities and stockpiles is somebody else’s problem, not the OPCW’s. In theory, by presenting persuasive evidence of CWC violations, one OPCW member state can trigger a snap “challenge inspection” of another member state, anywhere, anytime. In practice, during the 16-year history of the OPCW, there has not been a single challenge inspection. According to former State Department arms control official Stephen Rademaker, “There’s a lack of confidence in the challenge inspection regime.”

Meanwhile, Iran avails itself to the hilt of every privilege that the OPCW accords its member states — regularly crowding out others for the rotating seats on important bodies. Currently, Iran holds a seat on the OPCW’s executive council, a spot on which it has had a lock every year since 1998. Iran sits on all three of the OPCW’s main subsidiary bodies: the budget advisory panel, Scientific Advisory Board and Confidentiality Commission. Iran also currently serves as one of the 10 vice chairs of the OPCW’s General Conference.

The OPCW also routinely employs Iranian nationals on its staff.  According to a U.S. State Department cable published by Wikileaks, in 2009 the OPCW roster of weapons inspectors included an Iranian national who had previously worked for Melli Agrochemical Company, an Iranian pesticide manufacturer blacklisted by the European Union, Australia and the U.S. as a buyer of nerve agent precursors for Iran’s defense ministry. Asked recently if this Iranian inspector is still on the payroll, an OPCW spokesperson said the organization does not disclose such information.

Iran uses its bully pulpits at OPCW meetings to hector the U.S., and denounce Israel, which Iran’s envoys refer to as “the Zionist entity.” Israel, which has signed but not ratified the CWC, is one of six countries that do not belong to the OPCW, the others being CWC non-signatories North Korea, Egypt, Angola and South Sudan, along with Burma, which has signed but not ratified. In this list, Israel stands out as the only thriving democracy. For that reason alone, Israel is probably the least likely to replicate such Syrian horrors as the use of poison gas. Something the tyrants of Tehran do not mention is that in modern times, it is dictatorships, not democracies, that have broken the chemical weapons taboo.

Israel also stands out as the only country under direct existential threat from a nuclearizing Iran, whose officials have said they would like to wipe Israel off the map. That could help explain why Israel would prefer not to submit to the ministrations of an OPCW that seats Iran’s envoys at its high tables, and dignifies Tehran as the moral equivalent of Oslo.

At the OPCW, Iran’s envoys routinely call for all nations to join the chemical weapons treaty. But they skip right past such holdouts as totalitarian, nuclear-testing U.N.-sanctioned North Korea, one of Iran’s chief partners in missile proliferation, and for years a supplier to Syria’s Assad regime of chemical weapons equipment and technology. Instead, Iran’s envoys devote their energies to whipping up hostility toward Israel. Typical of Iran’s style was a statement by Tehran’s Ambassador Kazem Gharib Abadi at the OPCW’s General Conference last November, demanding that the “international community” pressure the Middle East’s “most dangerous case…the Zionist regime” to accede immediately to the CWC and “put its facilities under the OPCW verification regime.”

Iran also tries to recruit support among developing nations by demanding, as it did this past April, that developed countries lift all trade restrictions in order to lavish technology and equipment on countries such as Iran, “for peaceful purposes in the field of of chemistry.” That’s a message likely to resonate with such fellow members of the OPCW as Sudan, Bolivia, Ecuador, Algeria, Cameroon and Pakistan — all of which currently sit alongside Iran and Russia on the OPCW’s executive council.

In the aftermath of the August 21 chemical weapons attack that killed on a mass scale in Syria, it’s understandable that the Norwegian Nobel Committee would wish to — in the words of their press release — “contribute to the elimination of chemical weapons.” Honoring the OPCW’s thug-infested disarmament charade is a strange way to do it.

Claudia Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and heads its Investigative Reporting Project.