UNITED NATIONS: U.S. Groups Press Congress for U.N. Funding

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 27 1997 (IPS) - A coalition of 138 U.S. organisations has written to their Senators and representatives in Congress, demanding full funding of the United Nations.

“We raise an urgent call for responsible U.S. leadership in the United Nations, and fulfillment of our legal, financial, and moral obligations to the world body,” says the letter addressed to all 535 members of the U.S. Congress.

The coalition says that during the past year, the United Nations has undertaken “constructive reform” to make the organisation “more effective, more efficient and more responsive to the collective needs of member states.”

“The United Nations has cut staff, adopted increasingly stringent budgets, instituted management reforms and adopted new personnel performance standards,” the coalition writes.

Led by the New York-based U.N. Association of USA (UNA-USA), the coalition cuts across a broad spectrum of U.S. society, including ethnic, religious, academic, business, labour, and women’s groups.

The signatories include the War and Peace Foundation, the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, the Institute of World Affairs, Save the Children, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the American Jewish Congress and the U.S. Committee for Refugees.

Washington currently owes about 1.6 billion dollars to the world body. But influential members of the right-wing dominated Congress say funding should not be approved until Secretary- General Kofi Annan has radically restructured the U.N. system.

Reforms being sought include additional drastic cuts in staff and U.N. programmes and the elimination of U.N. bodies and agencies perceived as redundant.

Just week’s ago, President Bill Clinton sought Congressional approval to pay more than one billion dollars in accumulated dues to the United Nations. Clinton’s initiative calls for an initial payment of 100 million dollars in 1998 and 921 million dollars in 1999.

But Clinton’s initiative falls far short of the world body’s urgent needs, says Alvin Adams, President of the UNA-USA. “We feel a larger payment should be made in the first year of the plan,” he says.

A former U.S. career diplomat, Adams says the United Nations serves important interests, “both in terms of our ability to exercise global leadership as well as to advance important foreign policy objectives.”

Recent examples of U.N. involvement, he said, include the ending of insurgencies in three Central American republics; the restoration of democracy in Haiti; the dismantling of Iraq’s chemical and biological warfare capabilities; and a permanent extension of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Senator Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and several other Republican Congressmen are also seeking to impose “benchmarks” as a condition for the payment of U.S. dues. These benchmarks are specific, verifiable reforms which the United Nations would have to conform to before Congress released U.S. dues.

In a letter to members of Congress, however, Adams says that benchmarks and conditions are “counter-productive in today’s environment at the United Nations.”

“Furthermore, payment of our assessed contributions is a legally binding treaty obligation. Our continuing delinquency compromises the integrity of the rule of law which the U.S. has upheld so consistently throughout its history,” Adams says.

But Bert Schaefer of the right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, says Congress is still sceptical of the United Nations’ commitment to reform.

“For years, the U.S. paid its dues while waiting for promised reforms, yet little was done to shrink the U.N’s wasteful bureaucracy or cut its ballooning costs,” he said. “The best way to spur reform at the United Nations is to promise cash on delivery,” he added.

Meanwhile, the head of the United Nations’ highest policy making body says the current “cold war” between the United States and the United Nations is hurting an organisation which Washington cannot do without.

“The U.S. cannot handle by itself global problems such as international terrorism, narcotics trafficking, refugees, nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation,” says Ambassador Razali Ismail of Malaysia, President of the 185-member U.N. General Assembly.

Razali says the areas in which the United Nations has made the greatest difference — decolonisation, human rights, environmental protection, population, humanitarian relief, peacekeeping and election monitoring — have been those in which Washington has been willing and able to play a leading role.

Addressing the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington-based think tank, Razali said Wednesday that the U.S. refusal to pay its dues to the world body had created a deep sense of frustration throughout the U.N. system.

Some argue that the rule of international law is being undermined as the legislative body of one member-state withholds dues to an inter-governmental organisation and issues conditions for payment.

“Member-states do not consider it legal or appropriate to set such a precedent, even if Congress holds the purse strings,” Razali said. Despite a new Secretary-General, and some positive signs over recent weeks, there remains a real risk that already strained U.S.-U.N. relations “could plunge into a destructive downward spiral of mutual recriminations.”