THE PRETENSE OF U.N. REFORM
By AMIR TAHERI
December 3, 2004 --
nypost.com
A PANEL appointed to study reform of the United Nations has just issued its report, suggesting 101 changes to give the moribund organization a new lease of life. Missing from the recommendations, however, is perhaps the only one that could give reform a real push: the need for a new leadership to preside over a serious program for change.
The omission is not surprising. The panel was composed mostly of the apparatchiki of erstwhile or actual despotic regimes (including the defunct USSR, China and Egypt), plus traditional balance-of-power theorists from the United States and Europe.
Their approach was one of an interior decorator whose remit does not include the crumbling foundations and/or leaking roofs of the building: All he is asked to do is to hide the defects of a decaying edifice. The panel did not delve into the U.N.'s record since its establishment over half a century ago. Nor did it ask the crucial question of whether or not it is still needed.
In their 95-page report, the apparatchiki have done what apparatchiki do: ignored the real problems to focus on imaginary ones. Fearful of issues of substance, they focused on cosmetic change and, being of a bureaucratic culture, recommended the expansion of what is already a huge, inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy.
What is the primordial, if not the only, raison d'etre of the United Nations? To provide a format for the collective security of its members — or, failing that, to guarantee every member's right of self defense.
But how do the apparatchiki deal with that? In a dig against the U.S.-led Coalition's intervention in Iraq, the apparatchiki reject the concept of pre-emptive action, which they have re-baptized as "anticipatory self-defense." The panel, in effect, asks U.N. members to take military action in self-defense only after they have been attacked.
In its typical language of obfuscation, the panel rejects criticism of that position in these terms: "For those impatient with such a response, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of non-intervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted."
Go figure!
The panel suggests non-action even in the face of rogue states acquiring nuclear weapons with the intention of using them, either directly or via client terror groups. Patience must be the norm even "where the threat is not imminent but still claimed to be real: for example the acquisition, with allegedly hostile intent, of nuclear-weapons making capability."
But what if collective action is made impossible with a veto, or the threat of veto, in the Security Council, especially by members that might be prompted by illicit interests, for example because they are on-board Saddam Hussein's gravy train? The panel's answer is to increase the Security Council's membership from 15 to 20. But would America, or any other country, feel safer if Egypt and Nigeria joined the council as permanent members?
The panel implicitly recognizes the need for so-called humanitarian military intervention but subjects it to so many preconditions as to render it meaningless. It says: "There is a collective international responsibility to protect, exercisable by the Security Council authorizing military intervention as the last resort in the event of genocide and other large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing or serious violations of international humanitarian law which sovereign governments have proved powerless or unwilling to prevent."
Under that definition, the interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo were illegal: Neither was based on any Security Council resolution. And yet U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan routinely cites both as examples of U.N. success.
By the same definition, the liberation of Iraq was legal because it was based on 12 Security Council resolutions plus the cease-fire documents signed by Iraq under Saddam Hussein. And yet Annan, in a childish attempt at influencing the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, last month claimed the whole thing had been "illegal."
The panel also offers a definition of terrorism, apparently to undermine those already used in U.S., British and other European law.
One thing is certain: The United Nations must either reform or die. This is an organization that failed to prevent genocide in Rwanda and is now failing to stop a similar, though smaller-scale, tragedy in Darfur. It is also the same organization whose blue-helmeted soldiers stood by and watched as the Serbs massacred 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.
And the United Nations is mired in the Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal that, having forced one assistant secretary-general, Benon Sevan, into early retirement, has now touched Annan's son Kojo. Annan endorsed the Saddamite gravy train when he visited the despot in Baghdad, exchanged Havana cigars with him, and pronounced him "a statesman with whom we could do business."
We now know what "business" he meant.
The reform must start by asking Annan to step down and allow a new secretary-general, with a new team to establish the truth about the missing $21 billion of Iraqi money. A new secretary-general would then be able to compress the 101 recommendations of the panel into a dozen at most and use them as a framework for an open, inclusive and comprehensive debate on reform.
Once the debate is concluded, the new secretary-general should appoint a panel of political, academic and cultural leaders, and not apparatchiki, to devise a serious, non-bureaucratic, reform agenda. |
