Monitoring Policy Making at the United Nations |
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Ian Williams: "Default is in Ourselves" Ian Williams: "Default is in Ourselves"
The Nation magazine, New York
August 11-18, 1997
When U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered a reform package on July 16 instead of slash-and-burn cuts, the Congressional grinches attacked it with their usual gracelessness. Acknowledging that there are 184 other members of the organization, Annan's plan aims at increasing administrative efficiency but would direct the savings to development efforts. A Congress that thinks reform is spelled C-U-T has already expressed its unhappiness. One of the suggestions they like least is Annan's proposal for a billion-dollar revolving fund to be financed by unnamed member states. Its clear purpose is to disarm Congressional attempts at unilateral leverage over U.N. policy.Ambassador to the U.N. Bill Richardson says the Administration has reservations about this item as well. So do the Europeans, who object to picking up the tab for a country that has the lion's share of appointments, power and contracts from the U.N. but reneges on its debts. But the Europeans would be wise to reconsider their opposition. By the simple expedient of paying next year's dues into the revolving fund, they would have the satisfaction of riling the xenophobes in Congress and reducing the baneful influence over the U.N. that Washington's $1.6 billion in arrears gives it.
In a world where there are more people, countries and disputes than ever before, a rational observer would assume that there is ample justification to expand international organizations like the U.N. Indeed, an organization that costs less per year than one Stealth bomber (many of which Congress keeps forcing on the Pentagon) is clearly a bargain, even if it provides only a meager increase in peace and security.
It must be said that the U.N. does need reforming -- badly. Often at the insistence of the great powers, it has chosen appointees of dubious qualifications. Member states are to blame for much of what has gone wrong in Bosnia and Cambodia, but they did not make Under Secretary General Yasushi Akashi comment that "boys will be boys" about peacekeepers in Cambodia committing statutory rape of child prostitutes or quip about "safe areas for animals" at Milosevic's hunting lodge while the corpses of Srebrenica still littered the outskirts of town.
The U.N. does need a major shakeup, but it needs more resources and more people, not fewer. As it is, even sensible U.S. reform proposals are understandably discounted by the rest of the world when accompanied by the type of rabid paranoia that Congress sets for "benchmarks" and when an Administration that knows better lets it pass unchallenged. An instructive contrast is that this year the World Bank asked for, and got, almost half a billion dollars, a third of it from the United States, to finance its reforms. The difference is that the bank is under U.S. control.
So, the perennial U.N. complaint about Capitol Hill is not really about money. It's about power. Sometimes it's because -- as with the July 15 vote on Israeli settlements, for which the United States and Israel could recruit only client-state Micronesia to back them up -- the United States loses votes in the U.N. However, often the real target is not the U.N. at all but the prerogatives of the White House on foreign policy. There the Republican right has been pushing at an open door. President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright clearly have no appetite for a fight with Congress over foreign policy and especially not against Albright's buddy Senator Jesse Helms. When asked why the Administration had not backed Senator Richard Lugar's proposal to pay the debts honorably, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Princeton Lyman explained in disingenuous Clintonian fashion that this was because Lugar's proposal did not have enough support -- it got twenty-four votes even though the Administration was militating against it in favor of Senator Joseph Biden's capitulation to Helms.
Indeed, this Administration has yet to acknowledge on the record that its debts to the U.N. are a legal obligation, even though the Kennedy Administration secured an advisory judgement from the International Court of Justice in The Hague that dues and peacekeeping assessments are binding on member states. In 1964 Adlai Stevenson pontificated, "The Charter cannot be ignored. Faith cannot be broken. Commitments must be met. Bills must be paid." But then, it was the Soviets who were in default.
The "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" that compelled the Founding Fathers to write the Declaration of Independence suggests that this Administration should at least uphold the decision secured by its predecessor. Otherwise the opinions of the rest of mankind about its foreign policy will continue to plummet.
