Divisions Threaten U.N. Overhaul
Budget Fight to Put Focus On Disputed U.S. Proposal To Improve Management

By Frederick Kempe
November 29, 2005
Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113322641583108633.html
Growing opposition within the United Nations is threatening to derail U.S. efforts following the oil-for-food scandal to remake the institution as a more effectively managed and less corrupt body. The conflict will come to a head in coming days in a fight over the U.N. budget.
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns said the Bush administration won't sign off on the $3.6 billion U.N. budget for 2006-2007, due for approval by month's end, if Washington doesn't see greater progress in implementing management and operational changes endorsed by a September U.N. summit.
They include more scrutiny of U.N. spending, increased ethics oversight, greater executive authority for the secretary-general and the replacement of the Human Rights Commission with a new group that would exclude rights abusers. Most importantly for budget purposes, the summit's Outcome Document asked the secretary-general to review and report on 3,000 mandates that drive U.N. activity, some of them more than a half-century old.
Since the September congress, we haven't seen the kind of progress we've wanted for what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the gathering should be a lasting revolution of reform, said Mr. Burns. He said that failure to convert national leaders' general pacts into agreed policies before passing a budget could renew U.S. congressional efforts to withhold U.N. funding and prevent implementation of many changes until after 2007. One draft bill in Congress would withhold half the U.S. funding without sufficient U.N. fixes.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton has suggested to colleagues that the General Assembly could pass a temporary budget to finance U.N. operations through the first quarter of 2006. Although in favor of the changes, Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that failure to adopt the budget by year-end would create a serious financial crisis for the organization as many countries would delay contributions, prompting a liquidity crisis. The European Union thus far has sided with developing countries in opposing any holdup of the budget.
Senior U.N. officials say a U.S.-developing world conflict over the budget could overshadow the consensus that the U.N. must fix itself, while the U.S. believes the overhauls will founder if pressure for change eases. The disagreement will likely come to a head in the week before Christmas, when the U.S. will see whether commitments to change are sufficient for it to remove obstacles to the budget.
Efforts to improve U.N. management are as old as the institution itself, which was created at the initiative of the U.S. in 1945. They have more often than not failed in a body of 191 members, each with a veto on critical budget issues. Overhaul efforts now have a greater chance of success due to U.S. efforts to engage the U.N. during President Bush's second term and due to greater recognition generally that change is needed after revelations of corruption in the oil-for-food scandal. Secretary-General Annan also has championed change partly as a chance to rescue his legacy.
Most U.N. members had come to recognize that demands had overstretched the organization's management system, which was created to run conferences and not administer a multibillion-dollar budget with numerous agencies and tens of thousands of employees. For example, the U.N. has more troops deployed around the world than any other body except the U.S. military, with 80,000 peacekeepers in 18 operations at a cost of $5 billion annually.
The U.N. is unequipped to tackle the new challenges that have been thrown at it, said Mark Malloch Brown, Mr. Annan's chief of staff. It was never engineered or designed for the purpose of running dispersed, global operations around the world.
Gravitating against change is the fact that the U.S. has been pushing the agenda. Rancor grew after the U.S. decision to go to war over Iraq without Security Council approval. Opponents of management change -- lead by such ostensible U.S. friends as Pakistan, Egypt and India -- view it as a Trojan horse that would reduce the General Assembly's power while strengthening the hand of the secretary-general, who they charge is overly influenced by the U.S.