Vol 10 2006 - Article

Hans Blix as a Classic Swede: Understated Toughness and Wry Humour

Author: Sue Matters

Hans Blix

In January 2000 the United Nations Security Council formally announced the appointment of Dr Hans Blix to the position of executive chairman of the newly created United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). The selection of an executive chairman was the first step toward implementation of the Security Council’s Resolution 1284 which authorised the creation of UNMOVIC to replace the embattled United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM). The demise of UNSCOM took place amidst Baghdad’s continued refusal to fulfil disarmament obligations and the widening rift within the UN Security Council over how to deal with the government of Saddam Hussein. Operations in Iraq had been suspended since the US-British air missile attack in December 1998, and Australia’s Richard Butler resigned from the position of executive chairman of UNSCOM in June 1999. Blix took up his duties in March 2000, with his first task being to develop an organisational plan for UNMOVIC and outline the key disarmament tasks for Iraq to address. In November 2002, soon after the Security Council passed a tough new resolution (Resolution 1441), authorising ‘serious consequences’ for Iraq’s non-compliance, his inspectors returned to Iraq for the first time in four years. Since this time, Blix, as the man with the job of reporting on whether or not Iraq was complying with the new disarmament resolution, has been the focus of considerable media attention.

This paper provides a profile on the reputedly unassuming ‘mild-mannered’ Swedish ex-diplomat, who has, albeit not through choice, assumed near ‘celebrity’ status. Who is Hans Blix? What are his qualifications? Why was he recalled from retirement to head UNMOVIC? These and other questions will be answered, along with some discussion of pertinent aspects of Swedish history. Owing to the dynamic nature of this subject which involves attempting to analyse or describe contemporary events in relation to a particular individual, no claim is made that this is ‘the definitive’ Blix profile. Furthermore, in the absence of any ‘authorised’ or scholarly biography of Hans Blix, a great deal of information has been obtained from newspaper reports, with the inherent problems of bias and accuracy that this source inevitably carries.

Hans Blix was born in 1928 in Uppsala, a provincial Swedish university town in the middle of the Malar valley in central Sweden. Uppsala is noted as being the birthplace of six Nobel Prize winners and several distinguished Swedes including Carolus Linnaeus and Anders Celsius. The son of a linguistics professor, Hans grew up among the academic elite and attended formal dinners in the family home that had pink walls, green shutters, a piano and ancestral paintings. He entered Uppsala University - founded in 1477, and for centuries one of only two “traditional seats of learning in Sweden” - at eighteen years of age, a year earlier than usual, already having learnt English, French and German.

Blix is a specialist in international law and his academic career includes study at Columbia and Cambridge Universities and the teaching of international law at Stockholm University. He holds a double doctorate from Uppsala and Cambridge University. In 1959 Blix became Doctor of Laws at the Stockholm University and in 1960, at age 32, he was elected to the chair of international law at Stockholm. His early books include a work on Neutrality and the Nation State, and he is still considered to be a leading scholar of Sweden’s neutrality policy. He has also written several books on subjects associated with international and constitutional law. During his student years Blix was president of the World Federation of Liberal and Radical Youth, which, note Bone and Boyes, “sounds more revolutionary than it really was.”

For a time Blix’s involvement in the Liberal Party seemed to indicate his interest in a political career. However, he accepted an offer to be a senior adviser on international legal disputes to the Foreign Ministry. It was soon after joining the foreign ministry that Hans met his wife Eva Kettis, a Swedish Foreign Office official. The couple have two sons, Marten, an economist at Sweden’s Central Bank, and Goran, a graduate student in French literature at New York’s Columbia University. Until her recent retirement, Kettis was the Swedish official responsible for the Artic and Antarctic. This explains why Blix and his wife were on a voyage to Antarctica when he was recalled from retirement in order to head UNMOVIC – “I was taken out of the refrigerator, literally,” joked Blix.

From 1963 until 1976 Blix was Head of Department at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and served as Legal Adviser on International Law. In 1976 he became Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in charge of international development co-operation. He was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs in October 1978, after the Liberals briefly came to power in Sweden as part of a minority coalition Government.

Dr Blix also served as a member of Sweden’s delegations to the United Nations General Assembly from 1961 until 1981, and the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva from 1962 to 1978. During these delegations he participated in drafting the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties in 1969, which defined the term ‘material breach’, and the Stockholm Declaration on the Environment in 1972. It was involvement in this Declaration that drew him into the issue of nuclear power and he became politically involved in supporting Sweden’s nuclear energy program. By the 1970s the Swedish electorate was alerted to the dangers of the nuclear industry. Olof Palme’s Social Democrats fell from power in 1976 largely over the nuclear power issue. The election was won by Thorbjorn Falldin’s Centre Party which campaigned on the slogan ‘No to nuclear energy – Yes to safe, secure energy sources’. As Griffiths points out, this meant the end of a forty-four-year reign of social democracy in Sweden, “and the importance of this watershed is difficult to exaggerate, although perhaps it was comparable to the end of the Kekkonen era in Finland”. Rather ironically, the nuclear power debate certainly shook Swedes out of the ‘complacency’ deplored by Palme in the late 1960s – “almost unthinkably in Sweden, the opinions of the technocrats were challenged, and the traditional high esteem of bureaucracy further undermined”. In 1978 Falldin proposed a nuclear energy referendum, but without the support of his coalition, he had to wait until the 1979 elections were held and he was returned to the position of prime minister.

Sweden’s nuclear power referendum was held on 23 March 1980 and had three alternative proposals: that of the Moderate Party which proposed that no more than twelve nuclear power reactors be used and that no further development should take place; the Social Democrats and Liberals proposal favouring retention of the Swedish nuclear program and calling for environmental and safety improvements at nuclear power stations and energy conservation; and the combined Centre Party and Communist proposal which entailed an end to nuclear power, no uranium mining in Sweden and work against nuclear weapon proliferation. Blix led the Liberal Party’s referendum Campaign Committee. The results of the referendum revealed very little difference in the votes for proposals two and three, and a non-binding agreement to phase out all twelve nuclear reactors by 2010 was put in place.

However, in 1997 this target was abandoned as officials acknowledged that it was unrealistic due to the unavailability of sufficient energy sources to replace that from the nuclear plants. Sweden does not have its own resources of coal or oil, and nuclear power accounts for just under half of Sweden’s energy supply. In June 2002 the Swedish parliament endorsed the government’s plan to phase out nuclear power over the next 30 to 40 years in a bill approved by the ruling Social Democrats and the ex-communist Left Party as well as the Centrists. The conservative and liberal opposition, a majority of whom are favourable to nuclear energy, as is Blix, opposed the programme. Interestingly, according to a recent poll, a majority of Swedes may now be in favour of maintaining or even expanding Sweden’s nuclear power facilities. Following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the number of Swedes in favour of a nuclear phase out had jumped to almost 80 per cent. The fresh survey reveals that of 1,000 Swedes questioned in mid-January 2003, 55 per cent want nuclear power maintained or expanded, 34 per cent are in favour of a gradual phase-out, and 7 per cent would like it abolished as soon as possible. Analysts attribute the change in opinion to the fading memory of Chernobyl, the increasing threat of global warming (linked to the burning of fossil fuels), and the fact that no economically realistic energy alternatives are in sight. Obviously, debates regarding nuclear energy production remain a preoccupation for Sweden, as do the many complex issues surrounding the use of nuclear energy continue to be the focus of international concern.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was founded over forty years ago as the international instrument by which the benefits of peaceful civil deployment of nuclear energy could be made available to all countries while restricting their access to nuclear weapons. The IAEA is charged with administering the nuclear ‘safeguards’ regime of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), a treaty that 188 member countries, including Iraq, have signed. In 1981 the election of a new Director General for the IAEA became deadlocked. Hans Blix was the candidate whom all could support and he was appointed to the position, a post he held until his retirement in 1997. During the period Blix served as Director General of IAEA he received an Honorary Doctorate from Moscow State University and was the recipient of the Henry de Wolf Smyth Award (1988).

Acceptance of this appointment necessitated a move to Vienna and his wife chose not to accompany him, continuing her own career first in Brussels and then in Stockholm. This has resulted in over two decades of frequent and long separations for the couple who enjoy joint family holidays at their chalet in the French Alps, and, in common with many city-dwelling Swedes, who in summer escape to lead a ‘simple’ life close to nature in cottages by the sea or lake, “at Dr Blix’s preferred retreat: the summer house they keep on the wind-swept island of Graso.” In fact, it was only a few months ago that Hans Blix joined his family for Christmas at the French Alps chalet. Blix, famed amongst his friends for his traditional Scandinavian fish dishes, stayed inside while the rest of the family went skiing and indulged in his love of cooking.

The IAEA under Blix continued its programme of scientific meetings of experts in all aspects of nuclear energy, and of the training and publication of academic and research work at the ‘cutting edge’ of nuclear science. The public speeches and official statements of Blix during this period include a vast number of addresses to international meetings, and statements to the IAEA General Conference, United Nations General Assembly and United Nations Security Council. Even a brief look through this list reveals Blix’s wide knowledge and meticulous research in all areas pertaining to promoting the peaceful and safe use of nuclear energy.

In 1997, at its Twenty Second Annual International Symposium, the Council of the Uranium Institute awarded Blix the biannual Gold Medal “for outstanding contributions which have facilitated the deployment of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes”. On presentation of the medal Tokio Kanoh pointed out that, unlike previous medal recipients who had careers in the development of their respective countries’ nuclear power programmes, Dr Blix’s success lay in the domain of international cooperation and that he was to be congratulated on the achievement of developing the IAEA into the most outstanding of all the specialised agencies in the United Nations family. According to Kanoh, when Blix took over the organisation it was beset by political troubles including the cold war, rivalries of the superpowers and the Arab-Israeli dispute. The arms race was in full flood and the organisation was drifting. It is a measure of Blix’s success, he adds, that after sixteen years of his leadership, the organisation is “riding high” - the extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty has expanded its membership until it is almost universal and the international safeguards system has been strengthened considerably.

At this Symposium, Blix then 69 years old, announced that he was handing over the “central management of the agency [IAEA] after 16 years to a younger person”. He noted the close working relationship and many common goals between the two organisations, mentioning that a Swedish friend, Erik Svenke, a distinguished nuclear engineer, had introduced him to the Uranium Institute in 1982. Perhaps, suggested Blix, the agencies share a rationalistic attitude to nuclear energy and nuclear techniques, which “naturally leads to an interest in using nuclear energy for the benefit of mankind … to ensure that the peaceful uses promoted are not misused for military ends.” In keeping with his avowed convictions regarding the use of nuclear energy, Blix took the opportunity to convey his certainty of nuclear power’s revival despite an almost total absence of nuclear power construction in the Western industrialised countries, and expressed the optimistic view that the era of nuclear weapons was drawing to a close. “Ending the era of nuclear weapons”, will stated Blix “make it easier to enter the era of expanded nuclear power, which will be needed for a better life for the world’s population and for protecting our environment.”

Clearly then, Dr Blix’s career shows that he has extensive knowledge of the nuclear energy industry and that he is deeply concerned with promoting and further consolidating the non-proliferation regime. Highly qualified, and dedicated to these ideals, “above all, he is a man of duty.” Blix did not volunteer for his current position: “when UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked him – in desperation – to take it, he felt he had to say yes.” In fact Annan had considered nearly 25 candidates before settling on a distinguished Swede with disarmament experience: the ‘hard-nosed’ former UNSCOM chief Rolf Ekeus. However, Russia, France and China vetoed Ekeus, with overriding concerns appearing to be the desire to make a clean break from UNSCOM and the likelihood of an Iraqi refusal to cooperate with an UNMOVIC headed by Ekeus. In subsequent Security Council discussions Blix emerged as a compromise acceptable to all sides, and on 26 January 2000, the president of the UN Security Council Richard Holbrooke announced that the panel had unanimously agreed on 72-year-old Blix. Annan’s reaction was reportedly one of relief that the council had agreed on an expert as qualified as Blix.

As a BBC News report states, “one of the reasons why UN Secretary General Kofi Annan plucked [Blix] out of retirement” could well have been because the veteran diplomat “has made a career out of keeping his cool” and was unlikely “to let the pressure of the politics bearing down on him or the emotion of the moment” distract him from calmly doing his job. Blix has certainly needed all his experience and pragmatic personal qualities. As Rice, reporting on the consensus for Blix in January 2000, prophetically noted: “The battle over UNMOVIC’S executive chairman may foreshadow additional struggles as the fledgling organization attempts to define itself. In addition, though Iraq is legally obligated to comply with Resolution 1284, UNMOVIC’s work ultimately depends on Iraqi accession to additional inspections.” Furthermore, while Iraq did not openly reject the appointment of Blix, Iraqi UN Representative Saeed Hassan immediately dismissed the possibility of change in the Iraqi position. “Whether a devil or an angel, the new chairman will not change much in the scheme that has been prepared by the United States,” Hassan told reporters. “This resolution is not implementable, is not working and it will not work. We are not cooperating with this resolution” As John Rich, a former US diplomat, has perceptively remarked, Blix was always in the invidious position of being, from the Iraqi, Bush administration and pacifist perspectives, “too demanding”, “too judicious” and “too uncompromising.”

Blix is not without his critics. Detractors point to the fact that he was a “compromise choice”, and that Washington was opposed to the appointment of a man who believes in training members of his organisation in “cultural sensitivity” and has insisted on reporting only to the Security Council. In making an assessment of his career there have been those such as Sweden’s former Deputy Prime Minister, Per Ahlmark, a political rival of Blix’s from decades ago, who have depicted him as being “a little too accommodating to dictators.” Ahlmark himself has reportedly described Blix as “politically weak and easily fooled.” The editorial section of one newspaper went as far as stating: “To choose Blix, 72, to ferret out Iraq’s nuclear secrets is like hiring Inspector Clouseau to do the job.”

One of the first crises faced by Blix during his time at the IAEA was the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Critics note this as the start of a pattern of institutional blindness. A recent article in The Times quotes Professor David Marples of the University of Alberta: “He [Blix] reassured the Soviet public that there would be few significant health effects from Chernobyl … It took a further six years however before the IAEA, still under the leadership of Blix, declared the Chernobyl plant to be fundamentally unsafe.” More attention has been drawn to the fact that Iraq managed to pursue an undetected nuclear weapons program while Blix was head of the IAEA. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, who worked alongside the IAEA when Blix led it, says that “Blix was fooled for years … He ran a toothless agency, and despite many reports that Iraq had a nuclear program, they didn’t do anything.” According to David Kay, a former IAEA official and UN inspector, Iraq perfected techniques for hiding its nuclear bomb programme from Dr Blix’s inspectors. In an often-quoted article in the Washington Quarterly in 1995 Kay wrote:

Soviet and Eastern bloc inspectors and many from the developing world were widely known to seek out the cheapest available accommodations and to enjoy official entertainment as a money-saving strategy. The Iraqis exploited this desire by providing cheap accommodations at a considerable distance from the nuclear research centre at Tuwaitha, and by hosting late evening official dinners for inspectors. The result was that the inspectors were often weary, but happy at the money that they were saving, and not inclined to do more than the limited and minimal official inspections tasks.

Is credible threat of force necessary to get even minimal compliance?

Just as Kofi Annan says, diplomacy may need to be backed up by force.

Inspections may need to be back up by pressure.

So the buildup of U.S. forces actually has helped you?

I don’t think there would have been any inspection but for outside pressure,

including U.S. forces.

What will you do if in the end you don’t get documents as evidence?

I would not say they are guilty. I do not say they have them. I say that I will not

recommend to the Security Council to have any confidence.

There are also questions about whether the quantities of weapons that

iraq originally declared represent the full amount anyway?

You’re hinting at their lack of credibility. Of course they have no credibility. If

they had any they certainly lost it in 1991. I don’t see that they have acquired any

credibility. There has to be solid evidence of everything, and if there is not

evidence, or you can’t find it, I simply say, Sorry, I don’t find any evidence, and

I cannot guarantee or recommend any confidence.

Do you feel any pressure from the us administration to give it a heads Up or to tailor your reports?

It’s a very civilized discussion. Some of things that are said afterward in the

media bear very little resemblance to what has been said.

What about timing? the bush administration’s urgent timetable is

driven by concerns that impending warm weather could derail its

military plans.

I’ve asked. I’ve been told that it’s less easy, but it can be done. It’s not a

decisive factor.

To whome have you asked the question?

That would be indiscreet.

Was there anything about the Feb 14 security council meeting

that surprised you?

Not really, I registered very carefully what the French Foreign Minister was

saying, and he said that he didn’t exclude the use of force. And he said that

essentially it was a question of time.

Do you think an additional three months of inspections is reasonable?

would six months be too long?

If they cooperate fully and spontaneously, then the time should be short. If it’s

moderate amount of cooperation, inch by inch, the verification will take some

time. Would we be able to do that by the middle of March or even April 1? No,

it would take longer than that. My predecessors talked about two years. I would be more optimistic than that. It’s a question of months.
Would it be useful if the us and its allies said, you must give us

information on this, this and this by a specific date. if not, we’re

invading?

Maybe so. I would say that an ultimatum or a timeline is a way of exerting a

very strong pressure. Such a thing without an outside pressure of force is not

very useful. But with the maintenance of what you have, yes, I think that shows

that they cannot drag it on forever.

So you would be comfortable with specific questions and a specific

time frame?

Yes, I’m not uncomfortable with it. As a diplomat, I can’t say I’m comfortable.

Do you think iraq is keeping the world from paying sufficient attention

to North Korea?

I think we have to be able to drive and chew gum simultaneously.

“While we did not succeed [in achieving] verified disarmament in Iraq through inspections, I think it is recognized that we did succeed in building up an inspection organization that was truly international, independent, and effective, one that would not just endorse any evidence submitted but would submit all evidence to critical examination.”