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Deadbeat Washington Demands & Disses UN Reforms
Phyllis Bennis
The Progressive Response, Vol. 1, No. 12, 29 August 1997
Everyone in Washington agreed that something had to be done about the United Nations. The US owed $1.3 billion in unpaid UN dues, and the world organization needed reforming. Not everybody agreed on what should be done, so they did what politicians like to do: they started negotiating. Within a few months, they made the triumphant proclamation: they had reached a reasonable compromise that all sides could live with. The US, they declared, would pay $819 million, about 60% of the amount owed, if and when the UN met a series of US-imposed requirements, mostly having to do with eliminating programs, cutting staff, and slashing budgets.
The problem was that "all sides" meant Jesse Helms and the Congressional right wing on one side, and Sen. Joseph Biden representing the White House on the other. Washington was negotiating with itself. The UN was out of the loop.
So when UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced his own long-awaited organizational, financial and managerial revisions last week, it was hardly surprising that Helms and company were ready with rude and dismissive rejections of the proposals as insufficient to meet Washington's unilateral benchmarks.
Annan described his reform package as a "quiet revolution" for the UN. That's probably an overstatement - major improvements, the kind that would dramatically improve UN democracy and its ability to implement its diverse and demanding mandates, require far more support from member states than the pragmatic Ghanaian has won so far. But the proposed changes are serious. For example, Annan's blueprint includes a wide range of efficiency moves, designed collectively to save the UN millions of dollars. Together, the SG says, those savings should reach $55 million this year, perhaps as much as $200 million by 2002. But the more serious innovation is what happens to that money. Rather than use it to lower dues assessments across the board, Annan calls for the creation of a new development fund, targeted to the needs of the poorest countries, primarily in sub-Saharan African.
The secretary general calls for a higher profile for the UN's human rights work, to be led by Irish president Mary Robinson. (A significant challenge to Annan lies in the need to quickly fill the new post of emergency relief coordinator with an equally well-respected candidate.) His proposals also include creation of a new Deputy Secretary General position and a modest consolidation of organizational branches and managers (though the highest-ranking directors, largely Americans and Japanese, remain opposed to any diminution of their agencies' independent financial and power bases).
But revolutionary or not, Washington isn't happy. The UN's congressional critics hold a limited definition of reform, worlds away from the efforts to better serve the poorest populations of the world, that shape Annan's proposals. Jesse Helms and his colleagues define UN reform as slash-and-burn budget and staff cuts designed to cheapen the world organization and force it to toe the US line.
Helms' spokesman, Mark Thiessen, dismissed Annan's presentation as evidence that "the UN is incapable of reforming itself. It needs Congress to mandate reform. When ... the UN is left to its own devices, not much happens." Helms' point man on the UN, Sen. Rod Grams, announced that the proposed reforms did not meet Washington's conditions to pay even the 60% of its back dues. "Any further compromise will have to come from the UN," he said. "We want to start on a level playing field [based on the partial payment] and if this is the final word, I don't see the arrearages being paid."
Coming from the country whose debt to the UN dwarfs that of any other, and the one country whose refusal to pay its dues is rooted in policy rather than poverty, that takes a lot of chutzpah. But this isn't a new story. UN dues are an obligation of international law, not subject to unilateral rewriting. They are set by multilateral decision; the US never voted against its 25% dues assessment. (In fact, in 1985, the late Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme suggested limiting any country's UN contribution to no more than 10%, to avoid the undue power that results from paying a too-large proportion of the organization's dues. The US did not support the proposal.)
Instead, Washington simply stopped paying much of its dues back in 1985, long before Congress decided it didn't like former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, or that Kofi Annan's reforms weren't enough. Holding the organization financially hostage would bring the UN to heel. It did, and US power at the UN increased. But the United Nations paid the price, with its work undermined around the world.
This time, with the Cold War over and the Soviet Union gone, US power is at its height, and the UN is being asked to respond to new and far more complex crises than ever before. Kofi Annan, reminding the world that he is accountable to 185 member states and not to Washington alone, advised his congressional critics that their "demands do not intimidate. In fact, they offend."
Jesse Helms and his right-wing supporters are imposing unilateral requirements on the world organization, including a US determination of when UN programs should be ended, a guaranteed seat on the UN budget committee (which Washington was voted off last year as a result of its unpaid dues), and insisting that the UN repay Washington for all donations made to peacekeeping operations that the US supports. Those moves undermine UN democracy and make a mockery of our government's alleged commitment to international law and respect for other countries.
Kofi Annan is right. It is offensive. And we Americans should be offended too, by what our government is doing. Do we want the US to remain the world's most powerful deadbeat nation, illegally shortchanging the rest of the world?
Copyright 1997 The Progressive Response
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