Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

Buoyed by support from world leaders last week for policies that would take the United Nations in new directions, Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered a tough message today to the opening session of the General Assembly debating season.

The General Assembly, with its delegations shaped by years of evasive and sometimes obstructionist diplomacy, is more often than not the wall where innovative ideas crash at the United Nations. Mr. Annan made that clear in his remarks.

This year, Mr. Annan wants action on reorganizing and strengthening the peacekeeping department and enlarging the Security Council to give it more diversity and a stronger voice for the developing nations. He wants the United Nations' limited money spent more effectively and a staff chosen for skills and expertise.

"Consensus is highly desirable, but it need not mean waiting for absolute unanimity on every subclause among 189 member states," he said. "The minority, often a very small minority, should not withhold its consent unreasonably. Whatever we think of the veto in the Security Council, it surely has no place in this assembly. We can no longer afford to operate always at the level of the lowest, and slowest, common denominator."

The session today included a moment of welcome and a speech of farewell. After years of anarchy, Somalia sent a president, Abdikassim Salad Hassan. Djibouti's leader, President Ismael Omar Guelleh, who organized talks that led to Mr. Hassan's election, asked him to stand, and said, "What a joy to see Somalia regain its rightful place in the community of nations!"

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, ambassador to the United Nations for four years before her present post, spoke in support of the organization and backed its plans for stronger peacekeeping. Then, saying this was probably her last official speech here, she ended with a promise "to serve the cause of international progress and individual liberty not only for as long as I am in office, but for as long as I am alive."

In his speech, Mr. Annan defended his growing links with international business and a wide range of independent organizations and agencies that governments often consider gadflies. He said neither governments nor the United Nations could meet their goals alone.

"If the 20th century taught us anything," he said, it is that large-scale, centralized government does not work. It does not work at the national level, and it is less likely to work at the global level."

Behind the scenes at the summit meeting of nearly 150 heads of government and in separate sessions of Security Council members, Mr. Annan picked up considerable backing for his efforts to change the United Nations. He wants the lumbering organization to be in step with a globalizing economy and to be quicker to react to large-scale violations of human rights, even if that means intervening in a nation's internal affairs.

Today, he received public support from the European Union in a speech by Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine of France, which holds the European presidency until the end of the year. Mr. Védrine catalogued the 60,000 troops and 5,000 police officers whom Europe hopes to have ready by 2003 to send into international crises.

At the International Peace Academy in New York, a research organization that studies the United Nations, the president, David Malone, said Mr. Annan had emerged from the summit meeting strengthened. "This provides him with some momentum to overcome apathy and parochial disputes among delegates, and inertia and misallocated resources in the secretariat," he said. "In a way, he is levitating above the whole organization, in the sense that he manages the Secretariat. But he's doing much more than that. He's successfully providing guidance to the organization that world leaders have now endorsed."

Mr. Malone, a Canadian diplomat, added: "What he's been able to do is develop a view of what the organization must do in years to come to salvage and rebuild its credibility that is politically attractive to leaders. But it requires compromises that diplomats will hate and some in the secretariat will resist."

Mr. Annan's term of office has two years to run. Diplomats are nearly unanimous in praising his steady hand over the last year, in opening the United Nations to strong criticism of peacekeeping operations for the sake of salvaging its credibility, in moving into new activities to defend human rights and in working in tandem with a global economic and technological revolution.