TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020392/0203001.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 12.3 KB | 265 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 28

UNITED NATIONS

Challenge for The New Boss


The end of the cold war brought a boom in opportunities for
peacekeeping, but Boutros-Ghali must now reform the swollen
bureaucracy

By BONNIE ANGELO


    When Egypt's Boutros Boutros-Ghali became Secretary-General
of the United Nations on New Year's Day, he hit the ground
running. He'd better not slow down, because never in its 47-year
history has the world body had so much to do in so many areas of
the globe.

    The U.N. is poised to dispatch a peacekeeping force of
10,000 to Yugoslavia. An additional 1,000 blue helmets are on
their way to El Salvador to monitor the end of that country's
12-year civil war. A U.N. mission is organizing a referendum for
the people of the Western Sahara to determine whether they want
to be independent or part of Morocco. And an advance team is
preparing to take over the administration of an entire country,
Cambodia, until it can elect a new government in 1993.
Meanwhile, the U.N. continues to grapple with a host of crises
that know no borders: drug trafficking, global warming, the
pollution of the oceans and waterways, overpopulation and
famine.

    Thanks to the end of the cold war, the world is reaching
out more than ever to U.N. mediators, technocrats and
blue-helmeted soldiers. No longer are the U.S. and the Soviet
Union competing for influence among the 166 members of the
General Assembly or threatening each other with vetoes in the
Security Council.

    "We've bumbled into a world where everything affects
everybody," muses Sir Brian Urquhart, a 40-year veteran of the
U.N. who is now a scholar in residence at the Ford Foundation.
"We've got to stop looking at the U.N. only in terms of
day-to-day emergencies and start seeing it as the only
organization that can foster institutions for a global society."

    But the U.N. has not even begun to change in a way that
will allow it to take advantage of the revolution in world
politics. Boutros-Ghali is like a chief executive officer taking
over a corporation in danger of Chapter 11: it has vast assets
and a line of products everyone wants -- peace, health and
prosperity -- but a bottom line that hovers near bankruptcy. The
U.N. is overstaffed, underfunded and mismanaged. Its activities
are often badly conceived, wasteful and hobbled by petty
politics.

    The good news is that there is a real move toward reform.
A group of 30 concerned ambassadors, acting on their own,
worked for months to produce a blueprint for restructuring the
organization. They presented the plan to the new
Secretary-General even before he took office.

    Boutros-Ghali's predecessor, Javier Perez de Cuellar of
Peru, retired with well-earned praise for his achievements as
a peacemaker. He accepted the Nobel Prize for his peacekeeping
forces in 1988, but his stewardship of the U.N. was flawed. He
resented and resisted suggestions for change, taking them as
personal criticisms. His most serious shortcoming during his
decade in office was his unwillingness to bring the U.N.
bureaucracy under control.

    Observes Urquhart, a leading advocate of reform: "The
model home designed by the founders in 1945 has become a
sprawling, ramshackle structure; people have long since
forgotten the purpose of the rooms that have been added over the
years."

    Australian Ambassador Peter Wilenski, an internationally
recognized expert on management who is spearheading the reform
movement, says the U.N. "is run as a club rather than an
organization." Notes Edward Luck, president of the U.N.
Association of the U.S.A., a private group: "The organization
doesn't know how to set priorities -- and good management starts
there."

    Much of the problem is an elaborate and entrenched system
of patronage based on accommodating the national pride of
member states. The U.N. Charter calls only for "geographical
balance" in filling various positions, but members have come to
expect, and protect, their slots. The U.S. is as much an
offender as any. The White House personnel office seizes on U.N.
assignments at every level for political payoffs.

    Another impediment is what Luck calls "logrolling at its
worst" in the General Assembly. The Arabs, for example, insist
on maintaining a separate office for the Palestinians, and the
Africans a special committee on apartheid. The two groups have
banded together to protect both bureaucratic units, even though
neither has a role to play in the affairs of the other.

    The U.N. Economic and Social Council is too unwieldy to
deal with its vast agenda, which includes human rights,
environment, population control and economic development. Its
resolutions, says Wilenski, ``are largely unread and ignored."
The reform plan calls for reducing the number of states
represented from 54 to around 20.

    Since the end of the cold war, the Security Council, with
its mandate to deal with matters of war and peace, has
functioned reasonably well, especially during the showdown with
Saddam Hussein over his invasion of Kuwait. But the Security
Council is still a vestige of World War II. Its five permanent
members -- the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia (the
successor state to the U.S.S.R.) -- were allies against Germany
and Japan, two countries that are now economic superpowers in
their own right.

    Because of the ever increasing importance of economic
issues, pressure is building to give Germany and Japan permanent
places on the Security Council, but without the power of the
veto that the "perm five" possess. Opponents of that idea fear
that revising the Charter would lift the lid of Pandora's box:
the Third World would demand its own place on the Security
Council in the form of seats for three regional powers -- India,
Brazil and Nigeria. Otherwise, power in the council would be
weighted against the poorer nations of the world.

    Yves Fortier, who just retired as Canada's ambassador to
the U.N., says the organization suffers from "overlapping
mandates" among its different agencies. A single water project
in Africa, for example, might have six agencies vying for
control. "We've witnessed some appalling turf wars," says
Fortier. To avert future battles, he urges Boutros-Ghali to
"commandeer the system and make sure that the barons are not
always getting in each other's way and trying to outdo sister
agencies." Last month the General Assembly took a first step to
control duplication and infighting among humanitarian aid
programs by calling for the appointment of a high-level
coordinator with the power to overrule agency heads.

    The key to reform, however, is not adding posts but
getting rid of them. The U.N. needs a sunset law to eliminate
units that have outlived their usefulness.

    The Trusteeship Council, a holdover from the post-World
War I League of Nations, was set up to supervise the
administration of trust territories. Its function has shriveled
to almost nothing, yet it continues to employ 13 professionals.
The moribund Military Staff Committee, with delegates from 39
nations, meets regularly for splendid lunches, but has never
played a meaningful role, not even during last year's gulf war.
A cluster of document offices spews out an avalanche of papers
that are "printed in six languages," as one delegate notes, "and
read in none."

    Over the years the U.N. has spawned an array of
specialized agencies that have become autonomous fiefdoms. Based
mostly in Geneva, Paris and Rome, they raise their own funds and
answer to their own governing boards rather than to U.N.
headquarters overlooking the East River in New York City. "You
cannot control them," says Edward Luck. "The Secretary-General
cannot lay down priorities or coordinate their activities."

    Some, like the U.N. Children's Fund and the International
Atomic Energy Agency, are generally well regarded. Others --
most prominently UNESCO (the U.N. Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization) -- have been an embarrassment to the
institution. Increasingly, UNESCO degenerated into little more
than an organ of Marxist propaganda and a plaything for its
corrupt, high-living director, Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal.
The U.S., Britain and Singapore withdrew in protest in 1985,
with all their financial support. M'Bow was finally forced out
two years later, and since then UNESCO has somewhat cleaned up
its act, no longer spending 80% of its funds in Paris, no longer
packed with M'Bow's relatives.

    Other agencies pose different problems. The Rome-based
Food and Agriculture Organization has been run by the same
autocratic director, Edouard Saouma of Lebanon, for 16 years.
"He dispenses favors and collects political debts from member
states," says Luck. "I question whether anyone should run any
agency for that long."

    The most egregious example of organizational bloat is the
one closest to home for Boutros-Ghali: the U.N. Secretariat. A
rough counterpart of the President's Cabinet and White House
staff, the top echelon of the Secretariat originally consisted
of eight assistant secretaries. Now it has 20 assistant
secretaries, a new superlayer of 27 under secretaries and a
director-general -- plus 21 more top-level officials who are not
on the regular budget, for a total of 69.

    Reformers urge clearing out the deadwood and bringing in
officials chosen on merit who can provide the Secretary-General
with background reports, analyses of complex situations, options
for decisions and ideas for future missions. The Secretariat's
role would be similar to the one that the U.S. National Security
Council staff plays in advising the President.

    Shrinking the U.N.'s size and overhauling its organization
chart would add muscle, speed and flexibility to the way it goes
about its work. From his first day Boutros-Ghali has urged
"preventive diplomacy" -- sending envoys to try to defuse
political crises before they escalate into armed conflict.
Moving quickly to identify and deal with explosive situations
can avert bloodshed in the countries involved and for the U.N.
From the time of the first peacekeeping mission, 794 blue
helmets have been killed in the service of world peace.

    None of these burgeoning opportunities for the U.N. come
cheap. This year's regular budget for the New York headquarters
and core operations is $1.2 billion. The post-cold war boom in
peacekeeping has led to eight major new operations since 1988,
with costs projected to reach $1 billion this year. The Cambodia
venture alone is expected to drain $1 billion-plus over the next
two years, but that will be a bargain if it buys peace in that
devastated land.

    Funding is a perennial problem for the U.N. as a whole and
for its richest member in particular. For years the U.S., which
bears one-fourth of the financial burden, was embroiled in
disputes not only with the U.N. but also between its own
Executive and Legislative branches over how much it owed and how
far behind it was in paying its assessments; at one point, in
1989, the U.N. claimed that the U.S. debt totaled $365 million.
The U.S. is now paying off its arrears, although not as fast as
the U.N. would like.

    Boutros-Ghali has spent a lifetime in international
affairs as a professor, politician and diplomat. When he was
named Secretary-General last November, however, it was not so
much because of his experience in the world arena as because the
Africans insisted it was their turn for leadership of the U.N.
As an Egyptian, Boutros-Ghali was on their list of six
acceptable candidates, even though he is a highly Europeanized
Christian Arab. The Security Council, bowing to the Africans'
demand, chose him.

    Still, Boutros-Ghali may turn out to be just the right man
for the job. In his first speech to the General Assembly, he
pledged to "examine every proposal for streamlining our
operations, eliminating what is wasteful or obsolete." But he
must act within six months, say the reformers, before he is
co-opted by the bureaucracy and loses the fresh, critical view
of a newcomer.

    At 69, he says he will not seek a second five-year term.
Since he does not have to worry about re-election, he can break
crockery, step on toes and generally give the organization the
shake-up it so badly needs. Now all he has to do is do it.