Abstract
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan addressing the 54th General Assembly.
It has been a difficult century for organizations seeking world peace. Statesmen scurried across continents forging two such institutions. When they failed to get it right the first time, the price was World War II and the collapse of the League of Nations.
The United Nations has fared better than the League. In its 54 years it has been a buffer, saving lives that would otherwise have been lost. In September, when a Timorese woman gave birth within the U.N. compound in East Timor that was protecting her and thousands of others from the violence outside, the grateful mother named her son Pedro Unamet Rodriguez. Unamet is the acronym for the U.N. Mission in East Timor.
Still, the organization ends the century peering over a precipice, at the mercy of a world order in which one sole megapower, the United States, is inflicting a debilitating financial squeeze on its activities. The United States also sidesteps the authority of the Security Council–as it did in the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Enforcement actions must be authorized by the Security Council, according to the U.N. Charter, which is an international treaty, and according to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Annan also believes the United Nations must change to keep up with changes in the world. “While the genocide in Rwanda will define for our generation the consequences of inaction in the face of mass murder, the more recent conflict in Kosovo has prompted important questions about the consequences of action in the absence of complete unity on the part of the international community,” he told world leaders in September on the opening day of general debate in the 54th General Assembly.
It is up to the Security Council, he said, to save people from “massive and systematic violations of human rights–wherever they may take place.” But it is more difficult, he acknowledges, to apply the U.N. Charter's principles in “a new era, when strictly traditional notions of sovereignty can no longer do justice to the aspirations of peoples everywhere to attain their fundamental freedoms.”
His much-debated opening-day speech could be Annan's trial balloon for the next century–an argument that sovereignty can be ignored when people are being abused. But that idea does not go down well with the Russians, who feared NATO's intervention in Kosovo could set a precedent and that they could be the next victims. Yet Annan warns that unless the Security Council defends the common interest, “there is a danger that others could seek to take its place.” And that could mean the end of the world's second attempt to build a world organization for peace.
Also undermining the United Nations these days is the U.S. refusal to pay its dues. The United Nations finds itself whipsawed by U.S. policies that reflect domestic political battling between political parties. “We all have political opposition, some that oppose the United Nations,” says a diplomat from a Western ally of the United States, “but we still manage to pay the money we owe.”
Sir Brian Urquhart, former undersecretary-general for peacekeeping and adviser to four secretary-generals, underscores the somber mood. “Until Washington changes, there is not much hope for the future of the United Nations,” he told the Bulletin. Urquhart, now retired, believes the United Nations is still indispensable as an institution and as an idea. “I am not at all pessimistic, only realistic,” he insisted.
U.S. officials routinely proclaim U.S. support for the institution, despite actions that undercut it. Such statements are made to reassure a U.S. public that, according to polls, continues to favor the United Nations. On September 5, his first day at work, the new U.N. ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, insisted on America's “high and continuing commitment to the United Nations and to the work that it does.” But Holbrooke could not guarantee that the $1.7 billion the United States owes would be forthcoming–nor could President Bill Clinton, who spoke to the General Assembly on September 21.
Despite its problems, the organization is embarking on unpredictable and complex tasks. In Kosovo it runs the civilian part of the nato-U.N. protectorate. In East Timor it set up and monitored the August 30 elections. If the chaos that followed the vote subsides and Indonesia permits the East Timorese to enjoy the independence they voted for, the United Nations will administer the territory and prepare it for self-rule. But Annan and the world community were shocked at the intensity of the violence that followed the vote.
“We knew it would be difficult. We knew there were security problems, but not the carnage and chaos we have seen with the military and police totally unable or incapable of doing anything,” Annan said.
In the case of East Timor, the Security Council was able to quickly authorize a transnational force, thanks to the Australians who volunteered to lead it. But how the Timorese would react to the presence of the Aussies over the long run was difficult to predict at the time of this writing. Australia was the only government in the world that recognized Indonesia's 1975 annexation of East Timor. The United Nations never did. In 1989 the Australians joined the Indonesians in the joint development of the oil-rich Timor Gap. Once East Timor is independent, the Timor Gap oil agreement may be renegotiated, with East Timor taking over Indonesia's share. Australia is now eager to be seen as East Timor's benefactor.
During Nato's air war in Kosovo, Annan, who was Washington's candidate to replace former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali, said little. Other people working in the U.N. building at the time felt a sense of futility. The corridors were unusually quiet. Ambassadors of the 15-member Security Council waited, aware that there was little they could do until decision-makers elsewhere stopped the bombing and wrote the resolution the Security Council would be expected to pass.
U Thant, the U.N.'s third secretary-general, said in 1962 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis that one of the organization's most important tasks was face-saving. That is no small thing. It is a role that in itself can avert or stop wars. When the bombing finally forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to accept NATO's demand that its troops occupy the province of Kosovo, he needed political cover for his cave-in. The formula: An “international peacekeeping force” would take over Kosovo–ostensibly under U.N. auspices. On June 10, the Security Council passed a resolution calling for “an international security presence” in Kosovo and a U.N. interim administration to govern the province. Though nato was not mentioned, it was understood that nato troops, not a U.N. force, would be in charge of the military operation.
The U.N. role was to set up the interim civilian administration. But as the security task was farmed out to nato, the organization also farmed out much of the civilian operation, while keeping it under U.N. authority. Institution-building (planning elections and political restructuring) would be handled by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; reconstruction, including commercial activities, by the European Union. Humanitarian affairs would be handled by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. So far, most officials of the U.N. Interim Administration in Kosovo are from nato countries.
Namibia's Foreign Minister, Theo Ben Gurirab, calls himself a “graduate” of the United Nations. Gurirab, president of the 54th General Assembly, began his diplomatic career as a petitioner for Namibian independence in the U.N. Decolonialism Committee. Asked by the Bulletin if Namibia could have achieved its independence without the help of the United Nations, he replied: “It would have been independent, but it would have taken much more bloodshed and a much longer time. The United Nations,” he said, “helped us obtain independence more quickly.”
Today there are 12,360 U.N. peacekeepers in 16 missions. Since the killing of American troops in Somalia in 1993, the United States has backed away from traditional U.N. peacekeeping, although the U.S. operation in Somalia was led by U.S. commanders, separate from the U.N. mission. Often the United Nations is blamed for that tragedy.
The Security Council is being bypassed often in the case of Iraq. Almost daily U.S. and British planes attack Iraqi targets in the “no-fly zones” they established without Security Council authorization after the Gulf War. It is a form of low-intensity war that doesn't require congressional approval. Russia tried to get the Council to condemn the attacks, but the United States and Britain blocked the move. “The Security Council is a market where you can purchase votes with pressure, threats, and promises of loans,” Iraq's U.N. ambassador Saeed Hasan told the Bulletin.
At the same time, and as unlikely as cooperation triggered a massive U.S. British bombing attack–again without Security Council authorization.
For years, Iraq charged that the United States was using UNSCOM for intelligence purposes. A former UNSCOM inspector, Scott Ritter, confirmed the accusation, and Annan admitted that there appeared to be some evidence to back up the story. “I think that there was a measure of justification in those allegations and Washington never denied it,” the secretary-general told BBC television.
Equal damage has been done to the United Nations as a result of Washington's refusal to pay the $1.7 billion it owes. That amount has been held up by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its chairman, South Carolina's Jesse Helms, who for years has demonized the organization. The United Nations, he says, must carry out his demands for reforms before it gets the money. But Annan argues that the reforms he–Annan–has introduced “are the most thoroughgoing in our history.” He adds that he cut the staff from 12,500 in 1990 to today's figure of 8,800. Despite this, he says, the U.S. has failed to pay its arrears.
A U.N. official says that no matter how many reforms are implemented, Helms will never be satisfied. “Eventually there will be a change in the U.S. Congress and this situation will change also.”
Some people bash the United Nations because they don't understand the organization, says General Assembly president Gurirab. “It is not a world government. It is an instrument members use to serve their interests. Without the United Nations,” he says, “we would be living in a wilderness, a world of more wars, more conflicts, a world without cooperation–and that is what we must avoid.” Gurirab added that the United Nations has a continuing role to play, “but it needs support–it needs to have all of its members pay their obligatory contributions. Without resources and support, the United Nations will lose its effectiveness.”
A notable change has taken place, though, among the international civil servants who carry out the daily work. The first generation of U.N. staffers, deeply dedicated to the organization, inspired by the knowledge that they were making a difference, have mostly departed. Says a retired veteran: “It was something I believed in with everything in me.”
Many of today's staffers, while still dedicated, find it difficult to feel the same enthusiasm, and hearing the organization denounced has hurt morale.
Brian Urquhart takes the change philosophically. “There is absolutely no point in assuming that the United Nations will ever return to the spirit it had in the Fifties and Sixties,” he says.
The president of the U.N. Staff Council disagrees. She says the surprising factor is that with all the negative press the organization gets, U.N. workers are still convinced that they work in a humanitarian organization that should command the respect of the whole world. According to staffers, it helps to have a secretary-general who for the first time is a U.N. insider, who came up from the ranks of the organization, who understands the staff's problems, and who knows which levers to push to make the organization work.
But to make it work and before it is too late, Annan wants the world to think about where it truly wants the United Nations to go. There must be an organization with the authority to prevent the world from continuing the horrors of this century into the next 100 years: “The public conscience recoils at the prospect that this violent century could end as it began, with humanity no wiser in preventing conflict and no better at finding means to resolve it.”