BLACKBALLED BY BUSH.(Pierre Schori)

The unlikely shared enemy of the Bush Administration and Robert Mugabe's regime, in Zimbabwe, it turns out, is a soft-spoken sixty-four-year-old Swedish diplomat who rides around Manhattan in a Saab, socializes with George Soros, and holds a black belt in judo. Pierre Schori, Sweden's Ambassador to the United Nations, and a former member of both the European and the Swedish Parliaments, had until recently been planning to move his family from the Upper East Side, where they have lived for the past three years, to Pristina, where he expected to become the new head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. But instead Schori, who was not shy about expressing his distaste for the invasion of Iraq ("My cool compatriot gave no mandate for war; instead of Blitzkrieg, we got Blix inspections," he liked to say, alluding to his countryman Hans Blix), has been blackballed by the United States. Despite receiving a unanimous recommendation for the post from the European Union, in May, as well as the full approval of Russia, Schori learned definitively last month that, thanks to White House intransigence, he will not be moving to Kosovo after all.

"I find it so outrageous," Schori said the other day, in his corner office at the Swedish Mission, on the forty-sixth floor of One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, overlooking the East River. "Only twice have I been stopped in my official duty as a European Union representative on a mission for democracy. Once, when I was kicked out by Mugabe in a very brutal way." Schori headed the E.U. election-observer team that was expelled from Zimbabwe in the weeks preceding last year's contested Presidential election. "And the other is this. Zimbabwe was clear-cut. But Kosovo is something else, something more anonymous."

Ostensibly, the Americans' reasons for opposing Schori are that Sweden is not a member of NATO and that Schori lacks the proper experience. This, at least, is what the Swedish foreign ministry was told by the U.S. Ambassador in Stockholm, and again, later, by Colin Powell. Schori has heard from friends both here and abroad, however, that it is, in fact, his lack of support for the Iraq war--and, long before that, his objections to Vietnam and Latin America policies during the Nixon and Reagan Administrations--that makes him unattractive to the powers in Washington. The European press, including the Financial Times, has largely supported this account. Schori, meanwhile, cites personal mementos from Henry Kissinger and John Negroponte as evidence of amiable diplomacy in the face of political differences over the years. (A State Department spokesman last week declined to comment on the reasons for Schori's rejection.)

Schori would not be the first international representative to fall victim to the Bush Administration's seemingly personal agenda. Last April, for instance, Jose Bustani, the Brazilian director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was removed from power with a vote of no-confidence instigated by the State Department, which had threatened to withhold annual budget payments if Bustani remained ...