John Bolton - "The Long Road Ahead for UN Reform"
Source: FPA Event
Ambassador John Bolton, Permanent U.S. Representative to the United
Nations, addressed an FPA audience on "The Long Road Ahead for UN
Reform"
November 10, 2005
Transcript:
Well, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here today. What I
would like to try and do is talk a little bit about the United
Nations and then I'd be delighted to try to answer your questions on
more general subjects relating to U.S. foreign and national security
policy. Because you know better than I do what you'd like to hear,
I'm going to try and keep my opening remarks fairly brief, although
I do have a couple of points I think its important to lay out for
you on the topic of `The Long Road Ahead for UN Reform.'
You know, today is the 30th anniversary of the General Assembly's
vote declaring Zionism is a form of racism. Thirty years ago the
General Assembly made quite possibly the worst single decision that
it has ever made. And the impact of that decision brought home for
many Americans the problems that had developed within the UN system
and stressed how far the UN had moved from the ideals of its
founders. Now, one of my proudest moments in government service was
16 years ago under President Bush 41's administration when the
United States, along with many other countries, led an effort that
resulted in the repeal of the Zionism is racism resolution. But the
fact was that the adoption of the resolution in the first place was
an outrage, an outrage.
And it wasn't just the resolution that resolution that caused the
outrage, it was the underlying sentiments, the culture, if you will,
of the organization as a whole that led to it. And, the fact that
it took 16 years, 16 years, and a lot of effort, I can tell you
that, to repeal it, had an enormous impact on American public
opinion, an impact that continues today.
I just think it's important to recall, as we meet here today 30
years after the adoption of Zionism is racism, that the resolution
itself, was adopted on the anniversary date of Kristallnacht in
Germany. What a coincidence that was. The idea that history moves
in long cycles is one that has a lot of appeal, and it is important
to understand, for our friends and allies from foreign countries to
understand when they inquire as to why American opinions about the
United Nations it is so colored by things like the passage of the
Zionism is racism resolution, the impact of which, as I said the
impact of which has not disappeared even though we repealed the
resolution now some 14 years ago.
I'm accused of a lot of things, but I'm rarely accused of naïveté,
and 14 years ago when we repealed Zionism is racism I thought, well,
that's the end of that. That means Israel can now be treated as a
normal nation at the UN, not as a punching bag, a surrogate for the
United States, which in many respects it is. But today we find that
Israel is not treated as a normal country at the UN.
I like to say there are three kinds of countries at the United
Nations. There are permanent members of the Security Council, five
so far. There are elected members, non-permanent members of the
Security Council. And then there is a third category of nations, it
consists of one, a permanent non-member of the Security Council,
that being the state of Israel.
We were happy that Israel this fall finally did declare its
candidacy for the Security Council for a term beginning in the year
I think 2018, which reflects that it still takes some time for the
process to work its way through. But anniversary dates are
important in human life. They symbolize a lot of things that are
difficult to put into words. Just remember that 30 years ago the
General Assembly declared Zionism to be a form of racism.
And that brings me to the oil-for-food program. Now, the oil-for-
food program was intended to be a program to deliver humanitarian
assistance to the people of Iraq, to mitigate some of the effects of
the sanction regime that we put in after Iraq invaded Kuwait, and it
was maintained even after American-led forces through the Iraqis out
of Kuwait. And yet we've found through the extensive investigation
conducted by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker that the
oil-for-food program embodied a course of corruption and
mismanagement, the full extent of which has yet to be explored.
The Volker Commission did a substantial amount of work, and produced
a number of reports, some of which are doorstop size and weight. I
have to say I have not yet read all five of them yet, I'm still
working my way through them, and it is not pleasant reading. It is
not pleasant reading at all. And yet, within the confines of the UN
complex on 1st Avenue, it's hard to have a conversation about the
recommendations of the Volker Commission. It is hard to have
conversations about the mismanagement and corruption that were
uncovered by the Volker Commission.
And we all know more needs to be done. There are three
Congressional committees that continue to investigate the oil-for-
food program. There are at least a couple of grand juries in this
country, and there are criminal investigations in a number of other
countries. So far a former permanent French representative to the UN
has been arrested, that certainly caught my attention, and there are
other investigations that are proceeding as well. In India, we have
seen the resignation of their foreign minister, as a result of this
scandal.
And yet, one of my colleagues, another ambassador from Latin
America, had a conversation just a few weeks ago, and he said, you
know, we are losing sight of the Volker Commission. We don't have a
mechanism in place to follow through on its recommendations. He
came up with the idea that we may well follow through on and get
this item on the General Assembly agenda as a separate topic of
discussion. Because the thing about the oil-for-food scandal that
makes it important is that it did not arise out of thin air. The
mismanagement and corruption that we've seen in the program came out
of from the existing culture on 1st Avenue.
Now when Chairman Volker recently testified before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, he was asked whether his investigation
turned up what the particular senator asking the question described
as a culture of corruption at the UN. And Chairman Volker paused
and said, "No, I wouldn't call it a culture of corruption, although
there is corruption at the UN," he said. "I'd call it a culture of
inaction." A culture of inaction.
Now this is not Jesse Helms speaking here. This is Paul Volker, a
man who has risen to the highest levels of public service in our
country, and who began his investigation of the oil-for-food program
not really expecting to find what he did, as he has testified in
Congress. But his conclusion at the end of this exhausted work, is
that he has been examining a culture of inaction.
And that is something that I am personally and quite gravely
concerned about, as we look here over the next several months,
attempting to put into place several of the reforms at the UN that
have been discussed in recent years. We just had a summit here in
New York, over a 150 heads of state and government attended, and I'm
sure some of you here who are New Yorkers remember it as one of the
all-time traffic jams here in the city. We also remember it at the
UN because the leaders endorsed a 35-page single-spaced statement
which we collectively called the Outcome Document, that listed a
whole series of steps that leaders agreed upon, or at least their
subordinates agreed upon, and if we took a test of the 150 leaders
of who had read all 35 single-spaced lines of inspirational prose
that we had written I'm not sure that we would find high test
scores.
But in any event, this document produced a whole series of
recommendations. I have to say on many of those that are of high
priority to the United States in the area of management reform, I
think we are in jeopardy of not seeing them enacted.
I'll give you one example in particular that has a very high profile
in the U.S. Congress and I think has a very high profile among
people who follow foreign policy generally in this country, and that
is our effort to reform the United Nations Human Rights Commission,
the organization that should be the highest decision-making body on
human rights at the UN, but which ha been characterized by having as
its Chairman Libya, and having as two of its stalwart members Cuba
and Zimbabwe.
Now, you say, how is that possible? Well, it is possible because of
the way countries get elected to organizations like the Human Rights
Commission in the UN system, through regional groups that promote
their candidates and frequently they are elected by unanimity. We
have said, and it is our objective, that we eliminate the UN Human
Rights Commission to create a new Human Rights Council that will
hopefully be immune from the deficiencies of the current Human
Rights Commission.
I don't know that we are going to achieve this objective. There is
substantial opposition to it. That was reflected in the
negotiations that led to the Outcome Document at the summit, and I'm
not sure that that opposition hasn't grown stronger in the two
months since then. We're still engaged in a major effort to
accomplish this by the end of the year, but we are seeing, I think
in the real world, the culture of inaction that Chairman Volker
talked about. And you will be able to judge whether on December the
31st, the Human Rights Commission will be abolished and this new
mechanism is put in place, whether those of us - and there are many
countries, obviously, besides the United States that want to fix the
broken UN human rights mechanism, you will be able to judge whether
we have succeeded or whether the culture of inaction has triumphed
again.
Secretary Rice, in her speech to the General Assembly two months ago
called for a revolution of reform in the UN. It's not often that a
U.S. Secretary of State calls for revolution. I think that is
indicative of her feeling and the president's feeling about how much
work needs to be done. So we will see whether the revolution of
reform or the culture of inaction prevails when the irresistible
force meets the immovable object, what the result is. And I will
just say stay tuned on that score.
So now that I've started off, I've been critical of the United
Nations and I'm sure that there are many people wondering well, when
is he going to say something nice about the United Nations, and here
it comes. The United States I think has had some success in the
past several years, predating my arrival I hasten to say, in a
number of areas that are quite important to U.S. national security
interests, working through the United Nations. I'll just give you a
couple of examples, starting with the very successful efforts over
the past year in particular to try and effectively evict Syria from
Lebanon, to return Syria to sovereignty and control over its own
territory, restore its democratic institutions and get the Syrian
grip of the country removed.
A number of the Security Council resolutions that have been adopted,
where the United States and France have worked very closely
together, culminating most recently in a report by the secretary-
general's special representative Terje Roed-Larsen, Syrian troops
have been withdrawn from the country and steps have been taken to
allow free and fair elections and institutions of representative
government to flourish in Lebanon, although there is still a very
long way to go in really achieving this separation and restoration
of Lebanese sovereignty.
In particular just last week the Security Council, following through
on the steps in took in Resolution 1595 establishing a commission to
assist the government of Lebanon in investigating the assassination
of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a terrible terrorist
act that killed over 20 people in Beirut, Lebanon earlier this
year. The investigative commission at the Security Council set up,
and has been headed by an experienced German investigator Detlev
Mehlis who has extensive experience in investigating terrorist
acts. He was the investigator of the bombing of the Le Belle Disco
that we remember, and he has done a very professional and careful
job in trying to ascertain the facts surrounding the Hariri
assassination, despite the fact he came to the case late, despite
the fact there has been obvious obstruction, almost since the day of
the assassination.
One fact that I just find unbelievable is of course this terrorist
bombing made a big crater in the street where the bomb went off.
The government of Lebanon, obviously under the direction of Syria,
filled in the crater just a few days after the assassination,
meaning god only knows how much evidence is buried under tons of
asphalt. Even despite that, Mehlis and his commission were able to
do an outstanding job and the evidence which he followed very
vigorously took him to the conclusion that there was converging
evidence of involvement at senior levels of the Syrian government,
in cooperation with their puppet government in Lebanon.
Now, he was not able to finish his investigation, because the Syrian
government wouldn't cooperate. When he got Syrian witnesses
together they always had government minders with them. It was like
they were talking from the same set of talking points. You couldn't
get them out of the country. The government of Syria refused to
provide documents. At one point, Mehlis told the Security Council
he said to the government of Syria, "I want all of your documents on
the former Prime Minister Hariri," and the government of Syria said
we have no documents on former Prime Minister Hariri. Now, think
about that one for a minute.
In any event, the Security Council, after receiving Mehlis' report
last week, unanimously adopted Resolution 1636, which calls for the
full, unconditional and immediate cooperation by the government of
Syria with the Mehlis investigation, and if the government of Syria
chooses not to cooperate, the Security Council is prepared to take
further steps.
This is an example of how the Security Council can be an effective
instrument of American foreign policy, as it was in the first
Persian Gulf War, as another example, when we received authorization
to use force against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait the first
authorization to use force since the Korean conflict in 1950. And
on the subject of Iraq, just this week we had the unanimous
extension by the Security Council of the mandate contained in
Resolution 1546 for the multinational force in Iraq, a major step
forward for the coalition forces there. It was a matter of
considerable importance to a number of our coalition partners that
there be continued UN support for the presence of their important
military contributions in Iraq. We were able to see the resolution
adopted well before the upcoming elections in Iraq, which was
important to avoid there being any uncertainty in the minds of the
courageous Iraqi voters where the international community stood.
And through a lot of efforts in capitals and in Washington and New
York, we had 11 foreign ministers come to adopt that resolution
unanimously.
Also last week we had the General Assembly's adoption of the
Holocaust Remembrance Resolution, the fist Israeli resolution to be
adopted by consensus, another important step forward.
But of course, there is always a bit on the other side. This week,
we had the 14th annual General Assembly adoption of a resolution
condemning the American embargo of Cuba. Now, you may wonder where
our embargo is, or that we had an embargo on Cuba. I'm not aware we
have an embargo of Cuba either. We have domestic laws that prohibit
trade with that country, which I would think it is our sovereign
right to do, but that resolution passed 182 to 4, the other states
standing with us, Israel, Palau and the Martial Islands. And I want
you to know we worked hard on Palau and the Martial islands and
greatly appreciate their support.
There is considerable, and one could ask why it is the General
Assembly has time to adopt this resolution, it is really no more
than an exercise in Cuban propaganda, but not turn its attention to
things like management reform.
There are a range of things that we need to do in addition to this.
I don't want to get into it here because I want to provide an
opportunity for questions, but we need substantial reform in the way
the Security Council operated. We need more and better consultation
among the five permanent members. One of the disappointments I
would have to say, thinking back to the first Bush administration,
one of the major differences between the way the Council operates
now and it operated then, is that the level of cooperation among the
five permanent members that I remember has broken down considerably,
not simply because of the dispute over the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein, but dating back before that. That is something that we
need to correct.
There are a range of things. There are a few small things that I
have done myself. There were on several occasions when an issue
came before the Council where I didn't say anything. I didn't say
anything because we had nothing new to say, and I thought that
silence was better than saying what we had said five or six sessions
in a row before that. This caused great consternation among some of
our colleagues, so I hasten to say that our silence didn't mean
anything other than that we didn't have anything new to say, and I
encouraged other that didn't have anything new to say to remain
silent too.
I don't mean to sound too much like a revolutionary. Others of my
ideas don't sweep that broadly, but there is a revolution of reform
that is required at the United Nations. The president is committed
to it, the secretary of state is committed to it. I'm honored to be
their representative here. I enjoy what I'm doing very much. I
look forward to continuing to do it, and I look forward to answering
your questions.
Remarks by John Bolton. (36K) [download]
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