By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 23 1996 (IPS)

The United Nations will look leaner — and perhaps meaner — sometime next year if some of the proposals currently before the organisation find widespread support among the 185 member-states.

The proposals include downsizing the Secretariat staff, cutbacks on U.N. meetings and conferences, and a reduction in the reams of paper the world body cranks out every day.

“I am confident the reform process will be on track next year,” predicts Ambassador Razali Ismail of Malaysia.

Critical of the secretive nature of the selection of the Secretary-General by the Security Council, Razali says the process is so open to criticism that “it does not give the United Nations a very good reputation.”

Malaysia has called for a new selection process which will ensure that the most competent candidate is picked by the Security Council in conjunction with the General Assembly. He spoke just days after the United Nations picked Kofi Annan to replace Boutros Boutros-Ghali as secretary-general.

The Secretary-General is selected at closed-door meetings of the Security Council. That body “recommends” the candidate for ratification by the General Assembly. France insisted last month that it would veto any candidate for Secretary-General who was not fluent in French.

“The Secretary-General should not be just a guy who knows his French or his English,” Razali told IPS.

Razali said that five U.N. Working Groups will begin negotiations in early 1997 to discuss reform of the Security Council, the restructuring of the U.N. Secretariat and ways to deal with the current cash crisis. As part of the changes, Malaysia is pushing for a one-term Secretary-General so that the head of the world body will not be vulnerable to manipulation by the major powers.

On the financial front, Razali told delegates recently that he had saved more than 410,000 dollars since he assumed the Presidency of the General Assembly in September, just by holding fewer meetings.

“In the last few months, we have made significant strides to enhance efficiency, increase productivity and reduce wasteful practices,” he said.

The U.N.’s Efficiency Board said in a report released in September that if the opening of every U.N. meeting held in New York was delayed by 10 minutes, it would cost about 875,000 dollars a year in wasteful expenditure as highly paid interpreters sit idle in their booths.

“I think all the members, both North and South, like the United Nations to be efficient and have a delivery capacity of some consequence. At the moment we are being lambasted for not being able to do that,” he said.

And on top of that, Razali said, the United Nations has no resources. “It is not able to identify resources, and is not able to marshal resources. And that is a weakness,” he said.

One of the proposals before the Working Group on Finances is a plan to impose a series of international levies, including an air travel tax and a pollution tax, to raise funds for the world body. But that proposal is strongly opposed by the United States which insists that funding for the United Nations should come only from member states.

In his farewell speech, outgoing Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali blamed deadbeat states for the cash crisis. The United States is the biggest debtor by far, owing more than 1.3 billion dollars.

The financial crisis, said Boutros-Ghali, is not the result of mismanagement. “It is the refusal to fulfill a treaty obligation.”

The Bill Clinton Administration had said early in 1996 that as long as Boutros-Ghali was Secretary-General, it would be difficult to persuade the U.S. Congress to release monies due to the world body.

“Now that a new Secretary-General is being appointed,” Boutros-Ghali told the General Assembly last week, “all arrears should be paid at once, as has been promised so often in the past few months.”

Others have the same expectation.

Bill Pace of the New York-based World Federalist Movement, a non-governmental organisation promoting U.N. interests, says that “since there is a new Secretary-General now, there will be great pressure on the U.S.” to pay its bills. If the U.S. does not meet its financial obligations, Pace says, “it will damage the credibility of the U.S. as a world leader.”

Even the U.S.-backed Annan says Washington should now pay:

“It offends friends and foes alike. The United States needs the United Nations and the United Nations needs the United States. We cannot operate effectively and efficiently without a sound financial basis.”

Among the many proposals before the United Nations is one from the 15-member European Union (EU) which wants to penalise countries that do not pay their dues by barring them from lucrative business contracts or jobs in the U.N. system.

The EU has also bluntly accused the United States of taking more money out of the United Nations even as it gives less and less to the financially crippled organisation.

Ambassador Bilahari Kausikan of Singapore says his country is a strong supporter of incentives and penalties for non-payment.

“In your own personal life, if you don’t pay your credit card bills, you pay a penalty,” he told IPS. “In everything you do in life, you are penalised if you don’t pay on time.”

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