September 3, 2005
U.N. Members Dig in Heels in Aid Dispute With U.S.
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 2 - United Nations diplomats vowed to keep negotiating next week on a pivotal document for an approaching summit meeting, but a dispute sharpened Friday over American amendments that are seen as diluting the meeting's central theme of increasing development aid.
More than 170 national leaders, including President Bush, are due at the United Nations for the gathering, from Sept. 14 to 16. The talks are to update the millennium summit meeting on development that was held in 2000. They will also consider the most sweeping institutional changes in the United Nations' 60-year history.
Talks on the document framing the proposals and changes have intensified in the week since the United States introduced more than 400 amendments and deletions. The dispute has focused on one of them, an American demand that all occurrences of the phrase millennium development goals be eliminated.
The phrase, so accepted at the United Nations that it is routinely referred to by its initials, M.D.G., describes eight objectives covering poverty, sexual discrimination, hunger, primary education, child mortality, maternal health, the environment and disease.
Will we yield on the M.D.G.? asked Munir Akram, Pakistan's ambassador. No, I don't think so. I think that M.D.G. is now a concept, a slogan if you will, that has captured the imagination of common people around the world.
In a letter to other envoys, John R. Bolton, the American ambassador, explained that the United States supported the goals enunciated by the millennium summit meeting but not the package of goals and subsidiary targets and indicators that were later circulated by the Secretariat.
He proposed substituting the words internationally agreed development goals, including those in the millennium declaration. 
But what the United States appeared to hope would be a matter of semantics has become a galvanizing element and rallying cry for most of the other 190 countries.
The issue of M.D.G. has never gotten so much coverage, said Salil Shetty, director of the United Nations millennium campaign. It's only been a conversation point until now among the political elite. I don't think we in the millennium campaign could have achieved so much as Bolton has in terms of bringing it into the public domain.
He said that even some developing nations had been worrying that the adoption of the goals would come with some kind of conditionality, some kind of mechanism tying the M.D.G. to aid, but now they've dropped their doubts and have jumped in with gusto.
The matter has arisen at a time when the performance of Mr. Bolton has been under particular scrutiny because he is new to his job and has a past of being critical, almost dismissive, about the United Nations. He took up his post on Aug. 1, the day he received a special appointment from President Bush after failing to gain Senate confirmation.
Since Mr. Bolton's arrival, American actions have appeared more assertive, and questions have arisen whether he is carrying out the traditional mission of executing State Department policy or originating his own.
Negotiating this way is either a brilliant negotiating ploy on the part of the U.S. or it's Bolton freelancing, and it's almost impossible to tell which, said John G. Ruggie, a professor of international relations at Harvard and a former under secretary general for planning.
William H. Luers, president of the United Nations Association of the United States, said, I've no doubt that the intention of the administration is to get a good document, but the fact that they came out with it so late and so strenuously has left a bad taste in the mouths of most of the delegations involved.
David Shorr, program officer of the Stanley Foundation, which supports the United Nations, said the belated American move had been at a minimum, a serious tactical error.
While U.S. officials portray this as standard operating procedure, he said, it fostered the perception that Washington is asking for the moon and not ready to compromise.