by Hopewell Radebe – SANF 05 no 19
In his call for the United Nations’ (UN) reform, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi remarked recently that, “It is known that the Security Council represents dictatorship and the General Assembly represents democracy and yet the latter body can do nothing without the orders of the former.”
He is one among hundreds of heads of state who have commented strongly against the UN’s imperfections. However, no leader has so far called for its demise. All have advocated for it to be improved and strengthened and they agree that “a strong UN is of vital importance to humanity”, according to UN secretary general Kofi Annan in his open letter to the Wall Street Journal last week.
The Security Council today still reflects the global power structure of 1945. Although its membership was expanded from 11 to 15 in 1965, there have been no further changes since then. The five World War II victors have held on to their privileged status – they are “permanent” and can each veto any Council decision. This arrangement makes the Council both undemocratic and often ineffective.
The few powerful members dominate UN policy and frequently veto widely accepted decisions in order to further their own interests. Despite the geographical representation of the 10 elected members, the Security Council remains imbalanced in favour of the industrialised North.
Since the mid-1990s, during the era of secretary general Boutros Ghali, reform discussions have regularly flared at the UN. The debate centred on the power of five main countries that controlled the Security Council who also contributed more resources to the UN. It also looked at how the council affected the General Assembly whose decisions were often vetoed by the former.
This made Ghali propose the concept of global taxes in a bid to end dominance of the five superpowers. The proposed taxes were also aimed at easing the UN’s finances, an idea that has not yet won support from powerful states.
In the run-up to the UN’s 50th anniversary in 1995, the General Assembly accepted the fact that the working groups which include all UN members, were ill-equipped to move swiftly towards an objective UN reform strategy. It set up five working groups to discuss aspects of UN reform but they too, were bogged down by members who were long on speech-making and short on action. While most of them produced relatively meagre results, the group working on Security Council reform succeeded in uniting members on the need for council reform. Deep and intractable divisions have been blocking all action on specific proposals.
In the process, however, the UN has managed to set up a new Office of Internal Oversight, strengthened its peacekeeping operations, and steadily revised the working methods of the Security Council. Annan has introduced reforms of his own, including re-organising the Secretariat and strengthening coordination among the UN’s many programmes, funds and agencies.
Unfortunately, the profound disagreements underlying reform proposals as power battles among states continue to frustrate many initiatives while the UN’s budget remains far too small to pay for innovation and dynamism.
The existence of a strong UN remains important to the world. Rich countries, despite their financial power, turned to the UN for coordination of humanitarian relief in the wake of the tsunami disaster.
Even the US and British led coalition forces that invaded Iraq without the UN’s blessings have turned to the UN for help when they wanted to transfer power to an interim Iraqi government.
“Indeed, when ill-informed critics try to cut the UN off at the knees, the people they hurt most are not diplomats or bureaucrats but innocent people caught in war or poverty, in desperate need of the world’s help,” says Annan.
The UN remains the only useful international body seen as independent and impartial. So, all world leaders recognise that the UN is the right body to lead because it is still perceived to belong to the world.
However, cautions Annan, if it ever came to be seen as “a mere instrument or prolongation of US foreign policy”, it would be worthless to everyone.
Hence, efforts to reform the UN are continuing until such time that the structuring of its core institutions, the general Assembly and the Security Council, fully represents all continents and are compatible with all member states. (SARDC)
