UN struggles with challenges to reform package
By Mark Turner at the United Nations
September 2 2005 
The Financial Times
When John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, submitted several hundred changes to the draft outcome for September's World Summit, his critics were quick to attack.
It was the story many had wanted: the controversial ideologue arriving at the UN, throwing his weight around, threatening to bring the edifice crashing down around him.
Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, recently cut short his holiday, partly to help salvage the process.
But the reality is not so simple. While it is true that Mr Bolton's proposals, which followed a series of suggestions from Washington even before his arrival, constitute a serious challenge to the reform package, many of its most important provisions were already in trouble.
Ambassadors in charge of the negotiations, as well as Jean Ping, the UN General Assembly president, warned a month ago that reforms on human rights, peace-building, development, terrorism and management were facing growing difficulties as they moved from the general to the specific.
According to many diplomats and officials, a group of activist ambassadors from the developing world had proved particularly vocal in its opposition to many changes: including Algeria, Pakistan and Egypt, as well as Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. Russia and China also had difficulties.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Munir Akram, Pakistan's ambassador to the UN, said the process had been flawed from the beginning.
It began, he said, when Mr Annan appealed to the UN membership, after the invasion of Iraq, to accommodate itself to the global superpower.
It was almost an attitude of genuflection, Mr Akram said. At the same time, there was strong pressure from India, Germany, Japan and Brazil to use any reform to win permanent seats on the Security Council.
The UN also needed to prove itself politically correct, he said, in response to criticisms in the media and elsewhere over failures to protect people against atrocities, such as in Darfur.
What resulted, Mr Akram claims, was a black hole in thinking on the 38th floor, where Mr Annan and his advisers reside.
The perspective of many developing countries, including the Muslim world, was never sufficiently addressed, he said, and divisions over Security Council reform proved a divisive distraction.
It was no secret that some of us were not happy; we raised the flag very early in the game, he said.
But European and UN officials, who stand by the package, say many developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, do want the reforms to succeed.
The problem, they claim, is that their voices have been drowned out by a sub-group of more vocal and media-savvy ambassadors, who purport to represent the developing world to further their own ends.
The fear is that this group, which can now hide behind the reaction to the US, would rather see failure than risk any move to greater intervention in their domestic affairs.
This week however, as crisis talks began, signs emerged of a possible fightback. Dumisani Kumalo, the South African ambassador, asserted to journalists that Africa had a lot to gain from the proposals, and was set on seeing them succeed.
This summit will have to say something on human rights, development and peace-building, he said. On September 16, I want President Mbeki to go home and say 'The UN said this'. We have no alternative. We have to answer these questions.
The question is whether this is too little too late. According to one senior UN diplomat, the chances of success were still above 50 per cent, but not a lot.