Time to reform U.N. 

September 12, 2005
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Original Source:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/sep05/355232.asp
The United Nations was founded 60 years ago to achieve such lofty goals as the prevention of war and the advancement of human rights. But a powerful new report discloses that the foundations of the U.N. have become weakened by moral and administrative rot. The corruption and inefficiency need to be cleaned out. Major reforms need to be made. Otherwise, the U.N. will collapse under the weight of its own failures and descend into deserved oblivion.
The UN's failings were uncovered during an investigation of the oil-for-food program, which was established by the U.N. in December 1996 to use the revenue from the sale of Iraq's oil to buy food for its 27 million people. But the program turned out to be rife with kickbacks and other forms of corruption, according to an investigating committee led by Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
On Friday, in the last of a series of reports, the Volcker Committee delivered a scathing rebuke of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Although the committee found no proof that Annan was corrupt, it did say he failed to curb corruption and mismanagement by subordinates. His behavior, Volcker said dryly, has not been exonerated by any stretch of the imagination.
More broadly, the entire U.N. organization has become inefficient, over-politicized, corrupt and in urgent need of immediate repair, the committee noted. Annan is not the only person who deserves censure; blame must be shared by the U.N.'s member nations and especially by the Security Council.
Annan was partly a victim of a fundamental inequity in the U.N.'s administrative setup. The Volcker panel noted that the U.N. Charter gives the secretary-general the responsibility for the U.N.'s administrative functions but not the resources to meet these responsibilities. He is like a military commander who is sent into battle without the power to issue orders. That needs to change.
So do many other things. In fact, the entire U.N. requires stronger executive leadership, thoroughgoing administrative reform and more reliable controls and auditing, as the Volcker panel noted.
The time to begin such basic changes comes Wednesday, when more than 170 presidents and prime ministers gather at the U.N. to discuss administrative reforms and to update economic development goals set by a millennium summit conference.
Candor requires pessimism about the prospects for change at that meeting. Consensus becomes difficult to achieve in any large organization, and consensus on controversial matters is even more difficult. Diversity within the organization only compounds the difficulty.
But if the U.N. cannot become as honest and as competent as its founders hoped it would be, the organization will surely become irrelevant and go out of business. And it will deserve to.