By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 15 1996 (IPS)

Right-wing Republicans in the U.S. Congress have accused the United Nations of conspiring to impose global taxes, trying to establish an international military force and a world government – and even of attemptiong to take over national parks in the United States.

Now, the world body is fighting back.

“There’s so much disinformation being disseminated out there that sometimes, it’s quite frightening,” says U.N. spokeswoman Sylvana Foa.

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Resources last week summoned members of the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) for a hearing on a bill to preserve the sovereignty of the United States over public lands.

The bone of contention was the UNESCO-administered World Heritage Convention, under which an inter-governmental committee is mandated to designate certain international landmarks the common heritage of mankind.

These 469 UNESCO-designated heritage sites around the world include Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty in the United States, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal of India, and the Great Wall of China.

“The nomination of any site onto the World Heritage List can come only from the government of the country concerned,” Nina Sibal, head of the UNESCO Office in New York, told the Committee last week.

The United Nations and its specialised agencies, such as UNESCO, have “absolutely no jurisdiction” over territories designated as heritage sites, she explained. “They remain totally under national jurisdiction.”

Sibal also pointed out that the World Heritage Convention originated at a White House conference in 1965, and that Washington had contributed about 400,000 dollars to the World Heritage Fund in 1994-96.

A bill sponsored by Representative Don Young of Alaska and Senator Conrad Burns of Montana seeks specific legislation to authorise all future UNESCO historic sites.

Foa emphasised that the United Nations was not trying to take over any national parks in the United States. “We simply give plaques and awards, saying what great parks America has. That does not mean that we are now expressing our sovereignty over U.S. parks.”

The politicians have also raised Cain over proposed taxes.

At the United Nations’ 50th anniversary celebrations last year, several leaders from countries such as Malaysia, Pakistan, Sweden, and Australia, proposed ways to finance the world body through an air travel tax, an anti-pollution tax, and a tax on speculative international financial transactions. These taxes would be raised by national governments for global causes.

But several rightwing U.S. politicians, including the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms, accused Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali of trying to collect direct U.N. taxes even from U.S. taxpayers.

“It will be a cold day in hell before we allow the United Nations to directly tax American citizens,” Helms spokesman Marc Thiessen said. “The United Nations is not a world government. We prefer to stick with the present system where member-states make their own contributions to the United Nations,” he said.

Foa stressed that “the United Nations is not trying to take over the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and put in a global tax.”

“A tax on air flights or international transactions, that has nothing to do with the IRS or the American taxpayer, had been proposed as a way of financing U.N. operations, ” she noted. “It is not currently under serious consideration and it is not currently on the table.”

Foa added that if the proposal did come up, the United States had the sovereign right to veto it.

She also refuted reports that the United Nations was planning to establish a standing army of its own, commanded by Boutros- Ghali himself.

The United Nations currently has a “standby arrangement” under which more than 40 countries have agreed to provide troops at short notice for emergency peacekeeping operations.

Patrick Buchanan, who unsuccessfully sought Republican nomination for the U.S. presidency, has said he is opposed to the idea of U.S. troops under U.N. command. “We don’t take orders from Boo-Boo Ghali,” he has said mockingly of the Secretary- General.

The United Nations also came under fire during the Republican convention in California last month where Boutros-Ghali was accused of trying to establish a world government.

“What came out in some of these statements (at the Convention) and in the foreign policy platform showed that sadly, many people are ill-informed about how the United Nations works,” Foa said.

She said it was worrying that a party that would seek to lead America did not know how soldiers were actually committed to peacekeeping operations.

“No country commits soldiers to a peacekeeping operation if they don’t want to, and that the U.S. can veto any peacekeeping operation,” she noted. “Even if it votes for the operation, it doesn’t have to send soldiers to fight in it.”

“The United Nations is not a foreign power,” Foa said, “The United Nations belongs to all of us, it’s ours.”

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