United Nations at difficult crossroads

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): It was Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest United Nations Secretary-General so far, practitioner and contemplator in one, who observed that the UN was not established to take humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell.

With the new Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, the UN is once again feeling it's way toward a brave new world.

It is not to be the "new world order" envisaged by former U.S. president George Bush. Like his contemporary, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bush saw a chance to make the UN what it was meant to be when established after World War 2; a vigorous force in world peacekeeping.

That prospect was dashed by civil war in Yugoslavia and Somalia. In part, this was due to the tenacity of the various factions. Partial blame can, however, be laid with President Bill Clinton, and his attempt to undermine the UN. In Somalia, after the tragic death of 18 U.S. soldiers, Clinton attempted to shift the blame for mistakes to the UN. In Yugoslavia, Clinton side- tracked the near-successful diplomacy of UN mediator, Cyrus Vance and his European Union partner, Lord David Owen.

Kofi Annan's brave new world is more humdrum, but just as necessary. For the time being, the UN will be more concerned with self-introspection than world affairs. But in the long run, a UN should emerge which is leaner and meaner, more effective, and most importantly, will carry American public and congressional opinion.

By bringing in the no-nonsense Canadian businessman, Maurice Strong, to overhaul the UN's internal structures Annan has, at a stroke, both shown his determination and identified his likely successor. Strong, a self-made man who ran away from home at 16 to make his fortune, has been in and out of the UN for years. He had very much wanted to be Secretary-General, and stood a good chance this last time. Finally, however, Strong was thwarted by political demands for a black African to head the UN.

In four years time, it will be North America's turn, and if Strong can put the UN back on its feet financially as well as he has done some with some very big companies he could be a shoe-in.

A year and a half ago when I edited a book on the UN to mark its 50th anniversary I invited Strong to contribute a chapter: "On making the UN more businesslike."

A powerful blueprint is already set in Strong's mind, not least a conviction that "a great deal can be done to make the UN more efficient in its use of existing resources without impairing its overall effectiveness."

He argues that as much as a half of the Secretariat's work is devoted to issues that are now given only marginal priority by member states and should be chopped.

"On the things that the UN does well, acting as a global forum for leadership that identifies new issues for the international agenda--human rights, the environment, population, women's issues, international development cooperation, peacekeeping, peacemaking, humanitarian issues and the practice of international law the number of permanent secretariat members is relatively small--in some cases as few as 20-30 people for an issue."

"The point is," Strong writes, "is that many of the UN's most important and successful value-added activities have involved small numbers of its permanent staff and correspondingly modest budget allocations."

The job of pairing down the UN, it seems to me, is in safe hands. If only it were so for the political reforms now being discussed, in particular constitutional change and the balance of power in the Security Council, the supreme policy making body.

Suddenly, long discussion of giving Germany and Japan veto- wielding, permanent, membership of the Council is being seriously considered. The bargain set to win the approval of the rest of the UN's membership is that they'll also be joined by India, Brazil and South Africa.

But this seems a very unpolitical way of going about it. It tilts the Security Council heavily in a European direction. It gives India, Brazil and South Africa something very important for nothing other than being countries with sizable populations.

In India's case, in particular, it discards the one piece of leverage that might induce it to make peace with Pakistan and to jointly agree to forsake their nuclear weapons--indeed to do what South Africa and Brazil have already done.

Ideally, anyway, the time has come to abolish the veto and allow the Security Council to work by consensus, as it does when things work best.

Until that day arrives there must be a large price for permanent membership. If the UN in future is going to save us from hell, the scourge of war and in particular nuclear devastation--and the Indian sub-continent remains the world's most likely flashpoint--much more thought needs to be given to these reforms.