A Million Little Pieces 

By Nader Mousavizadeh 
September 24, 2005
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/opinion/24mousavizadeh.html?oref=login

THE United Nations summit meeting last week should be the last of its kind. It allowed world leaders, once again, to over-promise and under-deliver on behalf of an organization that few of them genuinely wish to equip for success. With the failure of its member states to agree on meaningful reform - even after Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq and the oil-for-food scandal - it is time for a new approach. 

The central, governing structures of the United Nations - the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Secretariat - have each in their own dismal way been allowed to decay to the point where they arguably do more harm than good to the very causes they were founded to serve. They should be dissolved, and their legislative responsibilities transferred to the governing bodies of the United Nations agencies that have demonstrated a capacity to deliver, decade after decade, on the world body's founding ideals - agencies like the High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Development Program and the World Food Program. From coordinating the global relief effort in the aftermath of the tsunami to providing shelter for refugees from southern Sudan and shepherding East Timor to independence, the staff of these frontline organizations have brought meaningful, measurable progress to millions around the world. 

On their own, most, if not all, of the major United Nations agencies would stand a fair chance of earning the legitimacy, support and resources necessary to succeed. The United Nations Development Program is already financed by voluntary contributions. Its board is made up of donors and recipient countries - all with a powerful common incentive to sustain an organization that can fight poverty efficiently. Taking one step further toward the model of, say, the World Health Organization (which operates independent of United Nations governing structures, though it is part of the United Nations family) need not disrupt its operations nor damage its finances. To the contrary: freed from the management rules and practices still imposed by the General Assembly, the Development Program would be even more able to attract the right people and improve the lives of the poor.

Each of the United Nations funds and programs could be reconstituted on this stand-alone model: financed by voluntary contributions; governed by a board composed of shareholders with an interest in results, and not just process; and staffed by men and women, hired on the basis of merit, who are given the resources to make a difference. Accountability, transparency - and, ultimately, success - would have a far greater chance of flowing from such a model than from the present one. 

Breaking up the United Nations would carry risks and uncertainties, of course. The important role of the secretary general as chief global diplomat would have to be reconceived - though that office would have little to lose from being freed from the pressures and influences of the entrenched interests in the Security Council and the General Assembly. The critical task of carrying out humanitarian interventions would fall to regional organizations and coalitions of the willing - precisely the formula that worked in Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone. 
Nor is a breakup a guarantee of success, given the sheer magnitude of the task facing any organization seeking to reduce poverty, end war and alleviate suffering. At this stage, however, the burden surely falls on the proponents of the status quo - those who cannot imagine a world without a Security Council, a General Assembly or Secretariat - to explain what value these structures add that outweighs the profound damage they have done to the very idea of multilateral action.

The past few years have dealt a series of terrible blows to the United Nations, its staff and its standing throughout the world. Few were more painful than the murder of the United Nations special representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, his colleagues Nadia Younes and Rick Hooper and 14 other United Nations staff in the 2003 bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad. In their lives of courage and substance, of impatience with process and dedication to meaningful change, they showed what the organization might have been. The United Nations that the heads of state left behind last week is simply not worth such sacrifice - its structures are too ossified; its practices too compromised; its potential too limited. To begin to honor those who gave their lives on that day, and to restore the merits of multilateral action, the United Nations must do away with its governing structures and let the agencies and programs operate independently. Working in dynamic partnership with the nongovernmental organizations, foundations and coalitions of the willing that increasingly are the real agents of progress in areas like global development, health, security and human rights, free-standing United Nations agencies offer the best hope of bringing the organization's founding ideals to life. 

Nader Mousavizadeh, an investment banker, was a United Nations political officer in Bosnia in 1996 and served in the office of Secretary General Kofi Annan from 1997 to 2003.