Posted on 02/19/2006 2:08:35 PM PST by voletti
UNITED NATIONS: US Ambassador John Bolton’s drive to crack down on UN fraud and abuse is triggering a backlash from developing nations who fear Washington is trying to wrest control from UN members.
The simmering conflict between Washington and the developing nations that make up a majority of UN members boiled to the surface this week when two US congressmen said nonaligned states had “worked feverishly in New York to block the efforts ... to clean up the institution”.
“We and our colleagues in the House of Representatives have followed, and will continue to follow, your actions very closely, and we intend to hold you accountable for them,” Republican Henry Hyde of Illinois and Democrat Tom Lantos of California wrote South African Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo in a letter circulated at the United Nations on Friday.
Kumalo, the current chairman of the Group of 77, a bloc of 132 developing nations and China, said the group had been “very, very upset” by the letter but had decided at a hastily called emergency meeting not to respond to it.
“They are just one of 191 parliaments,” Kumalo said. “They were upset. We were upset. You can play that game endlessly.”
“The mistake being made by Washington is to assume management reform matters only to Washington. It matters to all of us,” he told Reuters.
Hyde is chairman of the US House International Relations Committee and Lantos its top Democrat. They wrote after Kumalo complained to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that an internal audit of UN procurement fraud had been leaked to the media before the General Assembly, where each of the 191 UN member-nations has a seat and no one has a veto.
While the bloc takes allegations of abuse fraud and mismanagement “with the utmost seriousness”, the leaks and a subsequent press briefing on the matter were “not helpful”, Kumalo said, accusing Annan of bypassing the General Assembly.
Kumalo’s letter did not mention Bolton or the United States, but the message was clear. Christopher Burnham, an American serving as the UN undersecretary-general for management, had given a press briefing on audits into peacekeeping.
Diplomats accused Burnham of damaging the case for UN reform after taking office by telling The Washington Post: “I came here at the request of the White House. It’s my duty to make the UN more effective. My primary loyalty is to the United States of America.” He later apologised.
Developing nations have long suspected wealthy nations, and particularly the United States, of seeking reforms after the Iraq oil-for-food scandal to impose their will on small nations while shielding their own actions. The United States points out frequently it should have a major say in UN operations because it pays for about a quarter of the budget.
Tensions escalated after Bolton, who holds the rotating presidency of the 15-nation Security Council in February, scheduled council meetings next week on procurement fraud and sexual abuse by peacekeepers.
Developing nations protested these were General Assembly matters rather than the council’s, a stand Annan supported.
Malaysian Ambassador Hamidon Ali, chairman of the 116-nation Non-Aligned Movement, warned General Assembly President Jan Eliasson this week of the “dangers of encroachment by the council on issues which clearly fall within the functions and powers of the assembly.”
Eliasson said on Friday he agreed that issues under the assembly’s jurisdiction “should first be pursued in the General Assembly” and had conveyed these concerns to Bolton.
But Bolton denied stepping on the assembly’s toes and invited the assembly to hold its own hearings, saying the two UN bodies shared jurisdiction over the matters. reuters
If leaders of African countries don't like it, that doesn't surprise me at all, cause they're crooks.
I'm going to communicate my complete support to Bolton - keep up the good work, and if certain countries are unhappy about it, you must be doing the right thing!
Of course theyre upset. Theyre one of the reasons the U.N. is broken
They think we are trying to wrest control so as to have more control of the UN? Why would we want to be more involved than we have to be, with that criminal enterprise?
Are they kidding? A whole lot of Americans are trying to GIVE the UN to anyone who will take it. Maybe we need to make that clearer.
The UN is one of the biggest jokes of this and the previous century. Any country who wants to subsidize their incompetence should certainly be given every opportunity.
I wonder if they're shocked enough to actually provide funding for the Kofi-klatch.
More accurate would be the notion that their sense of importance in the larger scheme of things will disappear without the charity or unwilling slavery of the US taxpayer.
Support your own delusions or go back to your hell holes...
hope so because I think Bolton means business. Can he run for President in the next election? He needs to added to the poll -
'Jobs Program for 3rd World Bureaucrats'
Jeanne Kirkpatrick
Well if its pissing off dictatorships like China Bolton is doing the right thing. Flush out the garbage. The permanent security council should only be made up of democracies.
Let me get this straight: the US is cleaning up YOUR waste, graft and corruption and the only response is anger?
There are people STARVING in your home nations while you live in luxury....
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