The UN Is At
a Difficult Cross Roads
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON--It was Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest United
Nations Secretary-General thus far, practitioner and
contemplator all in one, who observed that the UN was not
set up to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from
hell.
With its new Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, the UN is
once again feeling its way into a brave new world. It is not
to be, however, the "new world order" of former U.S.
president George Bush who, like his contempory, President
Mikhail Gorbachev, saw at the end of the Cold War a chance
to make the UN what it was meant to be when it was created
out of the ashes of World War 2, a vigorous force in world
peacekeeping.
That prospect was dashed by civil war in Yugoslavia and
Somalia, partly by the tenacity of the warring factions and
partly by President Bill Clinton's unprincipled undermining
of the UN--in Somalia, after the tragic death of 18 U.S.
soldiers, by attempting to shift the blame for an American
command decision to the UN, and, in Yugoslavia, by
side-tracking the near-successful diplomacy of UN mediator,
the former U.S. Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance and his
European Union partner, Lord David Owen.
The brave new world of Kofi Annan is, perforce, more
humdrum, if for the long run just as necessary. It is, for
the time being, less to do with the world and more to do
with the UN navel itself. But in the end it should produce a
UN that is, as the saying goes, leaner and meaner, more
effective and, most important, will carry American public
and congressional opinion with it.
By bringing in the no-nonsense Canadian businessman,
Maurice Strong, to overhaul the UN's internal structures Mr.
Annan at a stroke has both signaled his determination and
identified his likely successor. Mr. Strong, a self-made man
who ran away from home at 16 to make his fortune has been in
and out of the UN for years, doing special commissions for
$1 a year as he is now. He very much wants to be
Secretary-General and he stood a good chance of getting the
job this last occasion, if it hadn't been for the overriding
political argument that it was time for a black African. But
in four years it will be North America's turn and if Mr.
strong can put the UN back on its feet financially as well
as he has done some very big companies he could be a
shoe-in.
A year and a half ago when I edited a book on the UN to
mark its 50th anniversary I invited Mr. Strong to contribute
a chapter: "On making the UN more businesslike." A powerful
blueprint is already set in Mr. Strong's mind, not least a
conviction that "a great deal can be done to make the UN
more efficient in its use of existing resources without
impairing its overall effectiveness."
He argues that as much as one half of the Secretariat's
work is being devoted to areas and issues that are now
accorded marginal priority by member states and should be
chopped. "On the things that the UN does well, acting as a
global forum for leadership that identifies new issues for
the international agenda--human rights, the environment,
population, women's issues, international development
cooperation, peacekeeping, peacemaking, humanitarian issues
and the practice of international law the number of
permanent secretariat members is relatively small--in some
cases as few as 20-30 people for an issue."
"The point is," Strong writes, "is that many of the UN's
most important and successful value-added activities have
involved small numbers of its permanent staff and
correspondingly modest budget allocations."
The job of pairing down the UN, it seems to me, is in a
safe pair of hands. If only it were so for the political
reforms now being discussed, in particular constitutional
change and the balance of power in the Security Council, the
supreme policy making body.
Suddenly the talk that has been going on for many years
of giving Germany and Japan veto-wielding, permanent, seats
side by side with the Second World War's victorious powers
who now dominate it, is bubbling up to serious resolve. The
bargain set to win the approval of the rest of the UN's
membership is that they'll also be joined by India, Brazil
and South Africa. But this seems a very unpolitical way of
going about it. It overly weights the Security Council in a
European direction and it gives India, Brazil and South
Africa something very important for nothing, other than
being countries with sizeable populations. In India's case,
in particular, it throws away the one piece of leverage that
might push it to make peace with Pakistan over Kashmir and
to jointly agree with Pakistan to forsake their nuclear
weapons--indeed to do what South Africa and Brazil have
already done.
Ideally, anyway, the time has come to abolish the veto
and allow the Security Council to work by concensus, as it
does when things work best at the moment. But until that day
arrives there must be a large price for permanent
membership. If the UN in future is going to save us from
hell, the scource of war and in particular nuclear
devastation--and the Indian sub-continent remains the
world's most likely flashpoint--much more thought needs to
be given to these reforms.
April 2, 1997,
LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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