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CORRECTED REPEAT*/POLITICS: U.N. Security Council Reforms Hit a Roadblock

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 8 2005 (IPS) - After nearly 12 years of intractable negotiations and backroom bickering, U.N. member states remain sharply divided over how best to restructure the most powerful political body in the organisation: the 15-member Security Council.

Long described as an anachronism because of its inequitable geographical representation of member states – and the privileged veto powers conferred on its five permanent members – the Security Council is still the only U.N. body empowered to make war and peace.

Last month U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan decided to force the issue by setting a September deadline – to coincide with a summit meeting of world leaders in New York – for a radical transformation of the United Nations, and more specifically the Security Council.

Predictably, Annan was expecting a positive reaction from the permanent five (P-5), namely the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia, who were expected to be the final arbiters of a new revamped Security Council.

The 10 other non-permanent members on the Council, who are elected every two years on a principle of rotating geographical distribution, have no vetoes and remain mostly politically impotent.

But Annan’s proposal has been unceremoniously shot down by two of the permanent members, the United States and China, in what appears to be a major setback to the secretary-general’s politically ambitious plans to change the world body to meet the needs of the 21st century.

“No reform of the United Nations would be complete without reform of the Security Council,” he said last month.

If this is the deciding factor, Annan’s overemphasis on Security Council reform may unhinge his more grandiose plans for the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission, the launching of a U.N. Democracy Fund and the establishment of a more effective Human Rights Council to replace the existing Human Rights Commission.

While expressing support for Security Council reform, U.S. Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli told the 191-member General Assembly Thursday that Washington would like to move forward “on the basis of broad consensus”.

But she added, “We should not be bound by artificial deadlines.”

Ambassador Wang Guangya was equally insistent that China was not in favour of “setting an artificial time limit for Council reform.”

But China also rejected a proposal to force through any proposals that lacked “consensus”. “The temptation to force a decision at the (September) summit must be resisted,” Guangya warned.

Last month, Annan released a landmark 62-page report, “In Larger Freedom”, described as a blueprint for restructuring the world body. The report backs a proposal made by a high-level panel on U.N. reform, which early this year called for two alternative models:

Model A provides for six new permanent seats, none with veto powers, and three new two-year term non-permanent seats, divided among Africa, Asia and Pacific, Europe and the Americas.

Model B provides for no new permanent seats but creates a new category of eight four-year renewable-term seats and one new two-year non-permanent (and non-renewable) seat, divided among the four regional groups.

The reservations by the United States and China were a great disappointment for four countries (the Group of 4) – Japan, Germany, Brazil and India – who supported Model A, with hopes of finding a permanent seat on the Council table at least by the end of this year.

While Japan and Germany were staking their claims as key industrial powers with major contributions either to the U.N. budget or for U.N. peacekeeping, Brazil and India were representing two regions in the developing world – Latin America and Asia – that are unrepresented among existing permanent members.

Although China is an Asian country with permanent member status, it does not represent the developing world.

Since Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt – and more recently Kenya – are vying for two of the six new permanent seats in the Council, the Africans still remain divided as to who should represent their continent.

But all of their hopes seem to have been shattered by the dramatic new development.

“Let us not fool ourselves,” Ambassador Gunter Pleuger of Germany told the General Assembly Thursday. “Everybody knows that consensus on this complex issue is not possible.”

The secretary-general, therefore, is right when he says that “consensus might be desirable but its absence should not be taken as a pretext for inaction.”

Ambassador Kenzo Oshima of Japan, another aspirant to the Security Council, was equally blunt: “History tells us that important progresses are rarely made through consensus, but through bold decisions.”

He pointed out that the decision to expand the membership in the non-permanent category back in 1963 was made by a vote in a divided Council.

Speaking at a seminar sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung on Thursday, Ambassador Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury of Bangladesh said the question of equitable representation of and increase in membership of the Security Council was first inscribed on the agenda of the 1979 General Assembly session at the request of 10 countries, including his own.

Chowdhury said there were several views currently being articulated on the reform of the Security Council. One view is that expansion in numbers is not synonymous with reforms. Another view is that the biggest challenge before the Council “is a modus vivendi with the sole superpower,” namely the United States.

“Views such as these are often necessary to provide the dialectical content in our thinking processes, so that the ferment they produce will take us to better and superior results,” he added.

Chowdhury said there is also the dominant view that the “constellation of forces is in favour of reform now more than at any time in the recent past. This is the ‘now or never’ school.”

Ramesh Thakur, senior vice rector at the U.N. University in Tokyo who has written extensively on U.N. reforms, says that opposition to Security Council reform comes from three groups: those with a vested interest in the status quo, especially the permanent members; the regional rivals of each of the leading candidate countries; and a large group who would see their status diminished still further with the growth of permanent members, from the present five to 11.

All three groups, he says, have found it expedient to adopt the tactic of divide-and-rule, convincing the leading contenders to compete with one another.

Only very recently, he said, have Brazil, Germany, India and Japan (the Group of Four) woken up to the realisation that either they will all become permanent members in one major round of reforms, or none of them will, Thakur said in an article published in Japan’s Daily Yomiuri.

Asked if, despite the constraints and pitfalls, whether the expansion of the Security Council “will ever take place in our generation, let alone before the September summit,” Thakur told IPS: “Good question. To recall (former U.S. President) Ronald Reagan, all we can do is hope for the best but be prepared for the worst.”

*Amends paragraph 17 in relation to Asian representation on the Security Council.