Lights, Camera, Action
By SHASHI THAROOR Times of India | September 13, 2005 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1229902.cms For a United Nations official to discuss reform of the international system is rather like an Englishman talking about the weather we do it all the time, it is a staple of daily conversation, but it seems that real change is always a little over the horizon. In fact, United Nations reform has a long pedigree. The UN was founded in 1945, and the first discussions of reform began in 1948. And these discussions have continued in fits and starts ever since. When Kofi Annan was elected secretary-general in 1997, he embarked upon a major process of reform that was widely applauded within the UN secretariat and by member states. But at the time he was wise enough to say that "reform is a process, not an event". On Wednesday, some 166 heads of state and government gather in New York for a summit that we hope will take that process a major step further. In anticipation, ambassadors in New York are working day and night to hammer out the details of the current reform proposals. But whatever they manage to agree upon, as a long-time UN official I am conscious of how much the United Nations has already changed since I joined the organisation 27 years ago. If I had suggested to my seniors at that time that the UN would one day observe and even run elections in sovereign states, conduct intrusive inspections for weapons of mass destruction, impose comprehensive sanctions on the entire import-export trade of a member state, or set up inter-national criminal tribunals and coerce governments into handing over their citizens to be tried by foreigners under international law, I am sure they would have told me that I did not understand what the United Nations was all about. And yet the UN has done every one of those things during the last two decades, and more: It has administered territory, conducted huge multidimensional peace-keeping operations with nearly 80,000 soldiers in the field, deployed human rights monitors to report on the behaviour of sovereign governments. Today's reform imperatives can be traced back to the divisions over the Iraq war. In the summer of 2003, a poll conducted by the Pew Organization in 20 countries revealed that the UN's standing had gone down in all 20. It had gone down in the US because the UN did not agree to support the US administration on the war, but it had also gone down in the 19 other countries, because the UN was unable to prevent the war. So we got hit from both sides. Some rather powerful voices began to speak of the UN's irrelevance. It was at the peak of this intense scrutiny of the UN, at a time when its potential and its deficiencies had never been more in the public eye, that secretary-general Kofi Annan seized the moment. In an historic speech to the General Assembly, he said that we had come to a fork in the road: We could either continue with business as usual, which could lead us to disaster, or we could review the entire architecture of the international system that had been built up since 1945, and build a more effective house of global governance for the 21st century. Of course, the UN often falls short of its noble aspirations, since it reflects the realities of world politics. But political freedom has been making headway, as first the peoples of Asia and Africa won freedom from colonialism, and then more and more people shook off dictatorship. When I joined the UN, it was almost unthinkable for the UN to take sides between democracy and dictatorship, or seek to intervene in the internal affairs of its members. Even human rights were by no means universally agreed, with some states seeing them as a tool of western neo-imperialism. Today, by contrast, the UN itself does more than any other single organisation to promote and strengthen democratic institutions and practices around the world. In the past year alone it has organised or assisted in elections in over 20 countries, often at decisive moments in their history in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq and Burundi. The UN is setting up a Demo-cracy Fund to increase the assistance we can provide for building democracy, and we have proposed establishing a Peace-building Commission to help countries transition from war to durable peace. As we face these new challenges of our time, let us not forget the old ones. The combination of poverty, drought, famine and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa threatens more human lives than terro-rism or the tsunami ever did. This summit must reaffirm the Millennium Development Goals and recommit the world to achieving these targets by 2015. As Mahatma Gandhi put it, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world". The UN is no exception. To change the world, we must change too. (The writer is under-secretary-general for communi-cations and public information, United Nations). ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! 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