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Letter from the United Nations: For the
beleaguered UN, a dance of reinvention |
Warren Hoge The New York
Times
Friday, February 25,
2005
| UNITED NATIONS, New York No one at the
United Nations doubts that big change is necessary for the
institution to regain its footing and restore its name. Mark Malloch
Brown, the new trouble-shooting chief of staff, speaks of the need
for "another San Francisco moment," a reference to the founding
conference of the United Nations in 1945.
But the question is
not just whether the organization will emerge reinvented from what
Secretary General Kofi Annan has called its "annus horribilis," but
what its appearance will be when it does and how that new look will
measure up to its creators' ambitions.
Under prodding, Annan
is shedding most of his inner circle, people who rose through the
ranks with him. Though in most cases their successors are still to
be named, they already bear the shorthand description "modernists"
to contrast them with the "traditionalists" they are
replacing.
Shake up a bureaucracy as entrenched as the United
Nations, and people get nervous. Many thought they heard the
sounding of a general retreat when Louise FrÃchette, the deputy
secretary general, said at a news conference last week that
"personally, I hope to God we never get another oil-for-food program
or anything approaching that kind of responsibility."
A
senior official who is among the many in his generation who is
retiring early from his post said, "We fear that you're going to get
a much more modest UN, not politically aggressive, not making strong
statements about what is legal and what is not, a much weaker
secretary general after this one is gone." When officials who are
now leaving arrived, it seemed to them a promising time for the
world organization. Then-President George H.W. Bush told a joint
session of Congress in 1991 that he foresaw "a world where the
United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill
the historic vision of its founders."
The departing official
remembered it as a time that stirred world order idealism at the
United Nations. "For the first time in its history," he said, "the
UN was permitted and almost begged to do virtually everything it
could not do in the cold war period, and the new hyperpower appeared
to allow the UN to have a politically normative role in defining
values and setting conditions for diplomatic behavior. That
permission has now been withdrawn, and the bubble has ended."
Of the embattled Annan, whose term concludes at the end of
2006, he said, "They will never again choose anyone as independent
as this man has turned out to be."
Stephen Schlesinger, the
author of "Act of Creation," a book on the founding of the United
Nations, agreed: "I expect we'll have a series of pedestrian
secretaries general like before and then 40 years from now we'll get
another Dag Hammarskjold."
Annan was once held up as the best
secretary general since Hammarskjold, who died in 1961, but that was
before his reputation and the UN's was battered by charges of
mismanagement and corruption in the oil-for-food scandal, sexual
abuse of girls and women by peacekeepers in Congo, and inaction in
the face of genocide on his home continent, Africa. Capping it off
were debilitating public disagreements with the United States, which
had originally championed his choice.
Edward Luck, a
professor of international affairs at Columbia, said the last decade
had been a sobering one for the United Nations, offering lessons of
how not to proceed in the future.
"In the early '90s the UN
got too ambitious on the operational scale," he said, "it was no
longer limited by vetoers and naysayers, so the sky seemed the
limit. In the late '90s and the beginning of this century, it got
overly zealous in building norms, setting international law and
trying to regulate state behavior. Now they have to step back in an
attempt to do both."
He also faulted the United Nations for
developing a sense of moral superiority over the pursuit of national
ambitions. "It was as if national interests are by definition base
and narrow and mean-spirited," he said.
"Somehow if you're a
global citizen, that's superior to being a patriot." said Richard
Holbrooke, the American ambassador to the United Nations under
President Bill Clinton. He said the United Nations had erred in
placing itself above its member states. "The UN cannot stand above
its member states, that's not acceptable to the big powers, and not
just the U.S. The Chinese and the Russians and countries like India
also won't accept the UN as senior to them."
In the future,
Luck said, the emphasis should be on how the United Nations can help
individual states and local powers, like Australia in East Timor or
the African Union in Sudan. Holbrooke noted that Annan was moving in
that direction in urging NATO and the European Union to increase
efforts to end the Darfur crisis.
"The learning curve from
1989 to today is that the UN has limitations on its ability to act,"
Schlesinger said. "But the realization that it's never going to live
up to the founders' ideals doesn't mean it's a defunct organization
or the miserable failure that critics say. There's a real feeling of
nervousness about whether this organization can make it through the
years ahead, but I think it's a momentary aberration."
Most
formulas for securing the future prescribe accepting the reality of
the pre-eminence of the United States, the country that created the
United Nations. The notion is already accepted in UN parlance: The
five veto-bearing members of the Security Council - Britain, China,
France, Russia and the United States - are known as the P5, but only
one of them is called the P1. No one is in any doubt who that
is.
"There are no circumstances where the UN can operate in
opposition to the United States," Holbrooke said, "and that is a
fundamental misunderstanding of the idealists."
An ambassador
from a Security Council country that embodies that idealistic view
conceded the point but added a caveat. "Yes, everyone has to come to
understand that the UN without America behind it doesn't work, but
at the same time the UN cannot be America's tool," he said. "The UN
has to represent a poor farmer in Burkina Faso as well as a senator
from Minnesota." He was referring to Senator Norm Coleman, a
Minnesota Republican who has called on Annan to resign because of
the oil-for-food scandal.
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Tomorrow: Roger Cohen on the difficulties of
Western contractors in Baghdad, who never see their own
work.
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