Global Policy Forum

By William Pfaff

Kofi Annan is proving as remarkable a secretary general as the United Nations has ever had. He demonstrates a realistic grasp of what the United Nations can't do and what it has failed to do, but also of what it might do and has never before thought of doing.

His "Millennium Summit'' seems to have been a success. The guests all came, and the affair served, as Annan intended, to relaunch a U.N. that has taken a battering since the 1960s - the last time it tried to do something on its own, intervening in the Congo under Dag Hammarskjí¶ld's leadership Annan has recovered for the organization a margin of freedom of action it has not possessed since Hammarskjí¶ld's death in 1961. The parsimony of the U.S. Congress has actually helped him, reducing the overwhelming influence the United States possessed in the past.

By going to Washington to confront Sen. Jesse Helms, an avowed enemy of the United Nations., in his lair, Annan subtly changed the relationship between Washington and the world organization. The executive branch of the U.S. government was revealed as actually a suppliant of the United Nations - begging the organization and the other member states for indulgence.

U.S Ambassador Richard Holbrooke says he is determined to get the U.S. assessment for the U.N. budget down from 25 percent to 22 percent by the end of the year, with an even larger reduction in the exceptionally high U.S. share in the peacekeeping budget, but he finds little sympathy abroad when the outstanding U.S. debt is roughly equivalent to a year of U.N. operations.

The administration has to explain that its hands are tied by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, apologizing that it wishes it could do better, and that other countries will have to understand etc. U.S. private citizens, such as Ted Turner and Bill Gates, step in, offering to compensate for their country's failure to meet its obligations.

Senator Helms cleared the air by plainly stating his own conviction - and that of a good many Americans - that the United States, because of its democratic virtues, possesses unlimited authority in dealing with less virtuous nations, and is accountable to no one in its practice of military intervention.

This might have been the conviction of many in Washington before the end of the Cold War, but until 1989 the United States was constrained in what it could do by the hostility of the Soviet Union.

Today, baldly stated, that claim to unilateral authority is simply unacceptable. No other nation can concede that its sovereignty should be limited by the unconstrained sovereignty of the United States. The claim morally isolates the United States and promotes the standing of the United Nations as the body whose international authority the other states do acknowledge.

This is one unspoken reason why the United States' European Union allies are forming a 50,000- man military intervention force and an independent, multinational police corps, trained and available for deployment in situations such as Kosovo's.

They are meant to provide alternative international intervention forces that would be available to the U.N., as well as conducting independent European missions. This initiative promises to be of considerable importance in the future and has strengthened Kofi Annan's hand.

He has recently published an independent and highly critical report on U.N. peacekeeping, his own responsibility before he became secretary general, and has made a formal acknowledgment of U.N. culpability in connection with the Rwanda genocide and the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995.

The peacekeeping report recommends recognition of peacekeeping as a core function of the U.N., fundamental change in the U.N'.s department of peacekeeping operations, new intelligence and planning facilities, and command integration with new measures for supporting operations.

It asks for "robust rules of engagement''; autonomous, properly trained, brigade-size units made available for U.N. assignments by member states; new money for headquarters preplanning; and most important, a halt to the pernicious practice by the Security Council of voting for peacekeeping missions without making money available to pay for them.

In 1997, Annan said that the United Nations should become "a bridge between civil society and governments.'' Despite the official indifference that greeted the idea, he went ahead with partnerships with the private sector. The program thus far has created 10,0000 Internet sites serving hospitals and dispensaries in developing countries, a consortium to bring information technology to those countries and a program, directed by Swedish electronics giant Ericsson to put mobile satellite phones at the disposition of humanitarian agencies in the field.

In July, he launched a "Global Compact'' between the United Nations and 50 multinational companies, unions and non-governmental organizations, to promote the humanization of globalization through cooperation among the companies, U.N. environmental and human rights agencies, and the International Labor Organization. The last, together with the NGOs and unions, oversees corporate observance of agreed principles of conduct.

These innovations are controversial. Introducing corporate cooperation and private financing into the United Nations offends many who believe that the United Nations should remain strictly an organization of governments. It displeases others because it gives the U.N. independence of governments, its own links with civil society and a degree of autonomy it did not possess before. That seems to suit Kofi Annan.

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