UN 'reforms:' inconsequential
They’re a symbol of all that’s wrong

September 19, 2005
Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpun194433013sep19,0,4064304.story?coll=ny-editorials-headlines

Confronted with the most serious challenges in the history of the United Nations - global terrorism, crippling poverty in developing nations, corruption and gross mismanagement within the UN secretariat, the urgent need to shake up the Security Council membership - the leaders of more than 170 countries at last week's UN summit acted in the tradition of the global body: They did next to nothing.

The package of reforms they adopted was so flabby, so watered down and ultimately so inconsequential that it mirrored all that's wrong with the UN. The summit, timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the UN's founding, was intended to approve a list of fundamental reforms proposed by Secretary General Kofi Annan, a plan that ran to hundreds of pages.

The final 35-page document approved Friday was a shadow of that plan. Specifics on how to deal with terrorism and nuclear proliferation, for instance, were reduced to bland generalities. Terrorism was condemned, but not defined (some leaders objected to the murder of innocent civilians being included in its description). Nothing was proposed on how to deal with it.

The corruption and mismanagement uncovered by former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker's investigation of the multi-billion-dollar oil-for-food scandal was not even touched. Neither was the reconstitution of the all-powerful Security Council, whose membership and veto powers still reflect the geopolitical realities of 1945. The United States is partly to blame for that, but so in China, which is desperate to exclude Japan, the world's second-largest economy, from the only UN panel that has the power to impose sanctions for egregious violations or to authorize military actions.

Annan's much-vaunted Millennium Goals to slash poverty, child deaths and other miseries of underdeveloped nations languished for lack of wealthy nations' firm financial commitments. And so on.

The most positive spin that can be put on this shadow of a reform plan is that it's a starting point for fleshing out specific ways to accomplish some real changes at some later date. But that's stretching optimism to a breaking point. 
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.