Posted on 03/27/2005 1:09:31 PM PST by naturalman1975
Kofi Annan is driving a reform agenda crucial for the world body's future, writes Tony Parkinson.
The 60th anniversary summit of the United Nations in September is expected to bring together the largest gathering of world leaders ever to meet under one roof. If Kofi Annan has his way, they will not be there just for the photo-opportunities.
This week, the UN Secretary-General has unveiled his agenda to reinvent an organisation enduring perhaps the bleakest episode in its history. Annan is putting the onus on leaders from the 191 member states to decide what future they wish for the UN - front-and-centre of global diplomacy, as its founders intended, or spurned and sidelined as an irrelevance.
Annan's checklist for reform includes the following: prompt, resolute decision-making to stop governments or militia murdering their own people; solid, practical commitments to help fight poverty, disease and environmental degradation in the Third World; positive discrimination for societies striving to build democracy; clear rules on when force may be used to meet security threats; a new-look Security Council that better reflects changes in the global power equation; and precise language to outlaw terrorism, no ifs, buts or maybes.
It is an ambitious agenda, and rightly so. Not even the proudest supporters of the lofty ideals of the UN can deny its organisational culture is in urgent need of an overhaul.
At headquarters in New York, ponderous and repetitive posturing passes for debate, while votes on the floor are too often predetermined by squalid and sometimes corrupt deal-making. The General Assembly is dysfunctional, the Security Council anachronistic and, in debates on peace and security, ideology and self-interest trump idealism every time.
In Geneva, the UN's Human Rights Commission has become a theatre of the absurd, in which serial abusers such as China, Cuba and Sudan stack committees, deny scrutiny of their own conduct, and issue ritualistic critiques of the racism and inequality of the West.
The past three years have brought unparalleled upheaval and scandal. Shaken by Security Council divisions over the US-led invasion of Iraq, the organisation has been further demoralised by reports of widespread sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers and explosive revelations about high-level corruption in the oil-for-food program in Iraq.
Not to mention policy paralysis over ongoing massacres in Darfur.
All this has put Annan, like the organisation he represents, under intense pressure.
The world body needs desperately to clean up its act. But is there anything in the formguide of recent history to suggest the UN can do what Annan is asking of it?
The role of the superpower is crucial, yet many US Republicans suspect any codification of the rules on use of force, for example, will be essentially an attempt to shackle the US.
For their part, developing nations in Asia, Latin America and Africa have apprehensions about the emerging doctrine of humanitarian intervention - or "responsibility to protect" - reflecting yet again the inherent contradiction between the UN Declaration on Human Rights and another of the UN's founding principles - the inviolability of national sovereignty.
And Arab leaders, of course, have long rejected the notion of a clear-cut definition of terrorism, especially as it relates to the Palestinian struggle. They cling to Brezhnev's calculus that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".
As for Security Council reform, there is not one candidate for elevation to permanent membership (specifically, Germany, Japan, India and Brazil) that does not confront opposition from somewhere. For all these reasons, some well-informed UN-watchers are wondering whether this reform debate might go down in history as Kofi's Last Stand.
Yet for all the doom-saying, Annan has been quietly at work building a broad political constituency for change. The key reform proposals have been road-tested by a high-level panel of 16 diplomats, including former Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans.
As a result, Annan's agenda has already survived a rigorous filtering process, and is beginning to gather momentum of its own. Much as there will be a temptation to pick the package apart, the further the process advances, the harder it should be to resist.
So what's it to be for the UN - last chance, or lost cause?
If world leaders choose the latter, they might as well cancel the 60th anniversary celebrations. For if they fail on UN reform this time, the party will effectively be over.
Tony Parkinson is international editor of The Age.
Thankfully this may be the last act of the UN and it will join it's predecessor the League of Nations in it's rightful place -- a minor footnote in the pages of history.
the UN commited suicide when it currupted itself.
failed to follow through on its word
the UN is a joke now and should have its american cash feeding tube removed!
(ok that was in bad taste...sorry)
the UN is an Edsel,(car for the younger generation) its way past its time, and has never been a seller
"Let us have faith that Right makes Might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it." --- Abraham Lincoln, in an address at New York City
Bunp
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