June 13, 2005
U.S. Panel's Report Criticizes U.N. and Proposes Overhaul
By WARREN HOGE 
UNITED NATIONS, June 12 - A Congressionally mandated panel will report this week that the United Nations suffers from poor management, dismal staff morale and lack of accountability and professional ethics but will acknowledge the broad changes proposed for the organization by Secretary General Kofi Annan and urge the United States to support them.
Among its recommendations, the panel says the United Nations should put in place corporate style oversight bodies and personnel standards to improve performance. It also calls on the United Nations to create a rapid reaction capability from its member states' armed forces to prevent genocide, mass killing and sustained major human rights violations before they occur.
Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, and George J. Mitchell, a Democratic former majority Senate leader, are co-chairmen of the bipartisan task force. It includes former diplomats, military and intelligence officials and leaders of conservative and liberal political institutes.
It was created by Congress in December to suggest measures to make the United Nations more effective and ways in which the United States can spur needed changes. The United States is the biggest donor to the United Nations, contributing 22 percent of the regular operating budget and nearly 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget. 
The Task Force on the United Nations made a copy of its 174-page report available to The New York Times on Sunday. The report is scheduled to be made public in Washington on Wednesday.
The task force, in wresting a consensus from members that include some of the institution's harshest critics, ended up producing a report that notably struck a more sympathetic tone in discussing the United Nations' failures than have its vocal detractors on Capitol Hill. Members of the panel will be discussing the conclusions at a hearing in Washington on June 22.
In judging the United Nations and its lapses, the task force said it had focused on the responsibilities of the states making up the institution rather than just the institution itself. 
On stopping genocide, the report said, too often 'the United Nations failed' should actually read 'members of the United Nations blocked or undermined action by the United Nations.' 
In a foreword to the report, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Mitchell said they were struck by the United Nations' own receptivity to needed reforms but added that the changes must be real and must be undertaken promptly.
The Gingrich-Mitchell task force is one of six investigations of the United Nations initiated in Washington and a seventh in New York. Five Congressional committees and the Justice Department are conducting inquiries into the United Nations' oil-for-food program, created to allow Iraq to sell oil to meet the needs of its civilian population. An independent panel headed by Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, is scheduled to deliver its third and final report on the subject next month.
A number of American congressmen have called on Mr. Annan to step down because of the scandals in the oil-for-food program. Last week, Representative Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois Republican who is the chairman of the House International Relations Committee, introduced legislation that would withhold half of the United States' dues to the United Nations unless it met specified requirements for change and would turn a number of automatically funded programs into programs funded only voluntarily.
While the report noted the damage caused by the scandals, it stressed that one of the consequences was that the United Nations' top leadership realized the need to make fundamental changes. Real change may now be possible without resorting to the stick of U.S. financial withholding, the report said.
In its only reference to Mr. Annan's term in office, it said that a fundamental criterion in selecting his successor when his term is completed at the end of 2006 should be management capability.
The report said that the institution's current problems stemmed from the politicization and bureaucratic unwieldiness of decision-making in the General Assembly and Security Council and absurd level of member state micromanagement as much as they do from failures in Mr. Annan's leadership.
While crediting Mr. Annan with proposing changes, the report faulted him for lack of follow-through. The secretary general has often put forward good-sounding reform proposals then failed to push hard against predictable resistance from staff and member states, it says.
Mr. Annan has proposed a sweeping set of changes and made them the centerpiece of a meeting of more than 170 heads of government scheduled to be held at United Nations headquarters this fall that he is touting as the largest gathering of world leaders in history.
The proposals include an expansion of the membership of the Security Council, the creation of a peace-building commission to restore postwar societies, an effort to define terrorism as a crime that cannot be justified as an act of freedom fighting or political resistance and the replacement of the discredited Human Rights Commission with a smaller and more powerful Human Rights Council that would effectively deny membership to notorious rights violators.
The panel took no position on Security Council expansion, but in addition to endorsing Mr. Annan's call for a new Human Rights Council, it said that its members be ideally composed from democracies.
It also urged the creation of a new position of ambassadorial rank in the United States mission with the responsibility of helping to organize a caucus of democracies within the United Nations and of promoting the extension of democratic rights throughout the member states.
In calling for rapid deployment capability, the panel stressed it was not endorsing a standing United Nations military force. Its proposal, it said, was that member states must substantially increase the availability of capable, designated forces, properly trained and equipped, for rapid deployment to peace operations on a voluntary basis.
More than 80 governments participate now in a loose standby arrangement where they acknowledge their willingness to contribute to peacekeeping operations, but the task force said most of them are in no position to move quickly enough.
It urged the creation of a United Nations office to monitor potentially genocidal developments and issue warnings to governments involved.
To improve United Nations management, the panel called for a new independent oversight board similar to a corporate audit committee to deter corruption and insure efficient use of resources.
It said that many jobs and functions at the United Nations continued in place even though they had outlived their time. Programs and activities, once mandated by the General Assembly, face little scrutiny and can live on forever without having to justify their existence, the report said. We discerned no sustained, large-scale effort by the Secretariat to identify which activities should be discontinued.
It said it backed Mr. Annan's request for a large buyout of staff, saying, For too many of the member states, the United Nations is seen as a job placement bureau.
The report also recommended a far more robust policy of protecting whistle-blowers, results-based budgeting and a new chief operating officer in the Secretariat who would be in charge of daily operations.
Citing a United Nations-commissioned poll that showed a high level of discontent, distrust and pessimism among staff concerning the integrity of the organization, it said it had found that morale is dismal.
It credited the United Nations with stepping up activity to combat the global threat of terror but warned of the consequences of obstructionism or neglect. If the members fail to work together effectively, the pressures on the United States and other responsible governments to protect themselves by acting independently of the United Nations will become enormous, it said.