Annan's Legacy
Turtle Bay 
BY BENNY AVNI
August 8, 2005
No one seriously expects reform plans to cure immediately the U.N. ills brought into sharp focus by oil for food. Claiming the reformist mantle, nevertheless, is Secretary-General Annan's strategy for defusing the scandal - and preserving his own legacy.
The Volcker committee publishes its latest report today, but Mr. Annan's aides are more concerned about its oil-for-food report due next month, which will broadly review the program's management. Their concern is that Mr. Volcker will provide his own reform blueprint, dwarfing Mr. Annan's strategy released last March under the title In Larger Freedom, and that Mr. Annan's name will become synonymous with oil for food.
At Turtle Bay, meanwhile, the ambitious aims expressed by Mr. Annan have not moved far forward. A group of four regional powerhouses - Germany, Japan, India, and Brazil - quickly seized on one aspect of Mr. Annan's reform package and drew up a plan to enlarge the U.N. Security Council to 25 from 15, including six new permanent members, with no veto rights. The idea last week suffered a major setback from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the African Union declined to endorse it.
As if that were not a heavy enough blow, Ambassador Wang Guangya of China told reporters last week that he and the new American ambassador, John Bolton, decided together to oppose the G-4. The Sino-American diplomatic cooperation is puzzling: Among the four permanent-seat aspirants, America supports only Japan, while China recently flooded its cities with demonstrators opposing Japan's inclusion. But America and China both believe that when it comes to reforming the Security Council, the objective is to maintain its authority and its effectiveness, Mr. Wang said.
Considering that the organ was unable to stop genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and, most recently, Sudan, and could not agree on how to oust Saddam Hussein, the notion that adding more bickering members would boost the council's credibility is ludicrous. The best reform plan would be to cut membership to seven: two permanent seats for the most powerful (currently America and China), and one rotating seat for each continent. But Mr. Annan wants to make the United Nations - where most of the 191 members are no paragons of democracy - more democratic, which to him means adding council seats rather than cutting them.
This reform goal will most likely go belly up next month, when heads of states come to Turtle Bay for their annual gabfest. This year, Mr. Annan declared the conference would be crucial for the success of In Larger Freedom. Another goal - reforming the bureaucracy - is also all but doomed. Management reform proposals so far were not well organized, Deputy American Ambassador Anne Patterson said.
Success for other proposals is far from assured. Mr. Annan's idea of replacing the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Commission with a smaller council is opposed by human-rights abusers, who can easily gather a majority at the General Assembly. A convention based on a common definition of terror is resisted by the Arab group and its supporters, who believe that Israeli occupation is the cause for terrorism, or, as the Arab League's secretary-general, Amre Moussa, told me recently, It's like a coin: If one side is the occupation, the other side is resistance.
Many at Turtle Bay blame America, saying either that Washington's constant push for reform breeds resistance by other members, or that the Bush administration merely pretends to want reform, while in reality it wants to weaken the world body, as evidenced by its choice of Mr. Bolton for ambassador.
A former Senate majority leader, George Mitchell, who along with a former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, recently outlined a congressional-mandated U.N. overhaul plan, told me last week he believes that the administration is committed to reform. Mr. Bolton, he said, will convey the views of the president and the administration in an effective manner.
Despite all the noise coming out of Turtle Bay, nevertheless, it is difficult to envision major changes there anytime soon. In typical U.N. fashion, In Larger Freedom is filled with noble ideas that will never materialize. Mr. Annan's legacy will be informed by the details of the Volcker reports, which at best will say that he has been less than a stellar manager - not a ringing endorsement for a visionary reformer wannabe.