UNITED NATIONS: World Body Celebrates Bleak 51st Birthday

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 23 1996 (IPS) - What a difference a year makes. One year ago, world leaders flocked to the United Nations to discuss a vision for the world body’s next 50 years, while U.S. President Bill Clinton toasted Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s leadership.

But as the United Nations prepares to mark its 51st anniversary on Thursday, the mood is considerably more sombre, with the world body owed some 2.5 billion dollars by its member states and Washington threatening to block Boutros-Ghali’s re-election as U.N. chief.

The past year has also seen a decrease in U.N. presence worldwide: in Bosnia, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has largely displaced ineffectual U.N. peacekeepers; in Rwanda, where a U.N. force withdrew after years of frustration; and in Haiti, where U.N. troops are ready to leave, even amid increased crime and insecurity.

Clearly, as married couples know, the 51st anniversary is anticlimactic compared with the 50th.

In fact, Boutros-Ghali has sounded like a weary husband, as when he recently returned from a vacation to tell his aides it was more fun to be in office, where he could demoralise his staff and command black helicopters — two notorious accusations leveled by some U.S. politicians.

(U.N. spokeswoman Sylvana Foa said the Michigan Militia, one of the propagators of the conspiracy theory that unmarked U.N. helicopters are conducting clandestine manoeuvres in the United States, plans to protest the raising of the U.N. flag in the state’s capital Thursday.)

In some ways, the main problem here is that the United Nations has lost credibility in the White House, despite Clinton’s early support for multilateralism and U.N. peacekeeping.

The United States, which is assessed to pay a quarter of the yearly U.N. budget, owes about 1.5 billion of the 2.5 billion dollars in arrears to the world body.

As a result, U.N. Under-Secretary-General Joseph Conner said the United Nations is “forced to borrow from peacekeeping funds” to pay its regular operating expenses, leaving nations that contribute U.N. troops holding the bag.

U.N. staff has been cut by 11 percent over the past two years, and other crucial operations, such as human rights offices in Haiti and Guatemala, still lack funding.

Although Clinton has promised to pay U.S. arrears, a thornier problem has emerged for the White House: Washington is convinced it cannot win approval for substantial U.N. funding from the currently Republican-led Congress unless Boutros-Ghali is gone.

“The decision to dump Boutros-Ghali is a firm policy decision, based on the idea that Clinton needs to show to Congress that the United Nations has really changed,” said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It won’t change after the (U.S. presidential) election.”

That presents a problem for U.N. officials, many of whom contend that Boutros-Ghali, whose five-year term expires on Dec 31, can negotiate a deal to stay on if Clinton is re-elected on Nov 5. As one U.N. official puts it, “Nothing is decided until we can talk (with U.S. officials) again in November.”

But other diplomats here already are wary that Clinton plans to stand firm against Boutros-Ghali, who has earned praise for his reforms, but is the butt of jokes for many U.S. politicians, including Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole.

In recent days, a wide range of candidates has been advanced to take over the Egyptian diplomat’s seat — from Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and Irish President Mary Robinson to Under-Secretary-General Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian, and U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, a Japanese.

But Boutros-Ghali may still survive U.S. criticism. African leaders rebuffed U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s pleas to dump the incumbent secretary-general during his tour of several African states last week.

For some leaders, the United Nations’ dilemma is not restricted to a struggle over U.N. leadership or the financial crisis. As French Foreign Minister Herve de Charette argued in an address to the General Assembly last month, globalisation may have harmed the world body by concentrating power in the richest nations.

“If we are not careful, we are going to be living in a world without criteria, without values, without references, where some — the strongest and the richest — will be in a position to decide alone on the future of the planet,” he warned. “It should come as no surprise that in these circumstances the United Nations has many detractors.”

Yet de Charette defended the world body, arguing, “Whatever some may say, the United Nations is still one of our best chances for building a better world. Let us not spoil it.”

Clinton agrees, despite his provisos. The U.S. president has recognised that several polls indicate that at least two-thirds of the U.S. public supports and is willing to fund the United Nations.

“The vast majority of Americans support the United Nations, not only because it reflects our ideals, but because it reinforces our interests,” he told the General Assembly as it opened its 51st plenary.

Those words may be comforting as Boutros-Ghali and his staff prepare to solve both the leadership and financial crises in the coming weeks. But they also point to still another problem: many developing nations, including Iran, Iraq, Cuba, and Libya, worry that the major industrialised states — especially the United States — already have too much influence here.

One U.S. leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the black nationalist Nation of Islam group, made that argument here last week, telling U.N. diplomats they should be ashamed of the continuing sanctions on Libya and Iraq. If they did not stand up to Washington, they would be little more than “parasites and prostitutes,” he said.

In recent days, Farrakhan argued, the United Nations has been “leading towards war, and not away from war.” He urged African and Muslim nations in particular to rise up against what he deemed Western domination of the United Nations and world politics.