UN-OUTLOOK: Politics Still Divide World Body

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 18 1997 (IPS) - Kofi Annan’s first year as U.N. Secretary-General was intended to be a time when the political infighting under his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, would give way to a more conciliatory mood.

That didn’t happen – not because of any controversy over Annan, but because member nations, and particularly the five veto-holding permanent members of the Security Council, found it increasingly difficult to agree on anything.

Russia and France tussled with Britain and the United States over how to pressure Iraq to comply with U.N. weapons inspections. France objected to having its officers testify to a U.N. war crimes tribunal on the former Yugoslavia. The United States faced off against African and Arab nations who wanted an easing of sanctions on Libya.

Even outside the Security Council, the 185-nation General Assembly was unable to avoid divisive battles on reforming almost every aspect of the United Nations.

Dozens of countries objected to Washington’s efforts to pay less in U.N. dues – particularly after the U.S. Congress failed in November to agree to a deal to pay some 850 million dollars in U.N. arrears. Annan’s ambitious plan for U.N. reform therefore lagged for much of the year, hostage as much to the perception that Washington was pushing for many key reforms as to any item in the plan itself.

More significantly, after coming “tantalisingly close” to revamping the 15-nation Security Council – in the words of former General Assembly President Razali Ismail of Malaysia – the Assembly was unable to adopt any plan to expand the U.N. executive body. This left Council hopefuls like Germany and Japan out in the cold for at least another year.

The United Nations stands at the beginning of 1998 with none of these divisions likely to heal quickly. Instead, the world body, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, faces disagreements among major powers that can breed the sort of inaction for which it was famous pre-1989.

In many ways, 1997 could be a harbinger for such a return, since the past twelve months could easily be summarised as the ‘Year When Things Did Not Happen.’

The Genral Assembly did not agree to expand the Security Council. A special summit on the environment, held by the Assembly in June to review five years of work since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, did not even produce a statement to reflect any consensus after weeks of haggling.

Even the December summit on climate change in Kyoto, which forged an agreement on major cuts by developed nations in greenhouse gas emissions, produced a document which the U.S. Senate is unlikely to ratify.

The U.N. Security Council failed to impose sanctions on the Sudan, despite pressure from the United States to do so. Nor did the Council achieve many other U.S. aims – from maintaining peacekeepers in Haiti to giving a clear signal to Iraq that it would be penalised if it fails to cooperate with weapons inspectors.

Other nations were just as frustrated. Russian Ambassador Sergey Lavrov, unable to win Council support for Moscow’s efforts to provide Iraq with the promise of future easing of sanctions, grumbled last month that the Council was not responding promptly to changing events. German and Japanese diplomats were confounded by the ease with which opponents of Security Council expansion, such as Italy and Pakistan, blocked chances for any vote on the topic in the General Assembly this year.

“I see unilateralism coming in very quickly in the United Nations,” Razali argued. The Malaysian envoy added that he did not just mean U.S. unilateralism in demanding reform from the United Nations while not paying some 1.5 billion dollars in arrears. Other nations – from feuding neighbours India and Pakistan, to the industrialised powers – are holding up U.N. work by blocking consensus on major issues, he said.

Examples of blockage abound. When Kofi Annan was asked this month why the United Nations moved so strongly against Iraq and so weakly against Israel – which many Arab states especially accuse of violating Council resolutions – the secretary-general cautioned that the Israeli resolutions “are not really self-enforcing. The United Nations cannot go and impose peace.”

Instead, Annan added, the world body is dependent on member states to agree.

The Israel deadlock, often aided by U.S. vetoes of any Council action to decide the dispute, has carried on for decades. But now the list of cases where the five permanent members of the Council – Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States – disagree is growing.

China, opposed to Haiti’s ties with Taiwan, successfully forced an end to U.N. peacekeeping in Haiti last month. Now, the world body only fields some 290 police trainers to shore up President Rene Preval’s weak national police force – although, as one U.N. official noted, dozens more U.S. troops performing ‘technical’ work remain on hand if Haiti’s political order collapses.

In Bosnia, France has drawn blame from Canadian Justice Louise Arbour, who contends that Bosnian Serb war criminals feel safe from any threat of arrest for war crimes in French-patrolled zones. France has angrily denied Arbour’s allegations, casting doubt on Paris’s willingness to support the war crimes tribunal.

Britain has tried to show to U.N. observers that two Libyan bombing suspects, Abdul Basset al-Megrahi and al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, can obtain a fair trial in Scotland. But a growing number of leaders, from most of the Arab League to South African President Nelson Mandela, are urging a trial of the suspects in a neutral venue, such as the Hague, following international weariness over a five-year travel ban on Libya.

Even when a crisis erupted in Cambodia, with co-prime ministers Prince Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen fighting each other in a July conflict which led to Ranariddh’s ouster, nations could not agree on whom to support. Cambodia’s U.N. seat remains vacant, with both the victorious Hun Sen and exiled Ranariddh claiming it. Meanwhile, the United Nations forges ahead to support Cambodian elections scheduled – with some uncertainty – for next May.

Amid the constant atmosphere of dissension, the United Nations made some progress this year in its many diplomatic and peacekeeping efforts.

In a few cases, such as elections in Liberia won by faction leader Charles Taylor, the world body could declare victory and leave. In others, like former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s success at steering negotiations on Western Sahara, the United Nations will have to push ahead in 1998 to ensure that a long-planned referendum can finally take place.

At least Annan’s first few months have been generally positive: the new secretary-general won U.N. staff support for his reform plan, and pushed ahead to try to create a U.N. ‘Cabinet’, a deputy secretary-general’s post and a new disarmament department.

He also prodded the new government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to allow U.N. investigation into alleged massacres there – although the investigations fit on the list of things which (so far) have not happened.

Also striking a more conciliatory tone was new U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson, who pushed – although unsuccessfully – for a partial ‘down payment’ on the U.S. arrears. But even his tenure began with a fractious U.N. battle when New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to crack down on U.N. diplomats who accumulate local parking tickets.

Luckily, a lengthy legal battle between the diplomats and New York City was one of the many non-events of the year.