inside the glass house

Storm at UN: Silent majority preparing to stand up and talk
NEW YORK - The developing nations, comprising more than two-thirds of the 191-member UN, usually remain the "silent majority" in a world body where political power is primarily in the hands of the five permanent members of the Security Council – the US, Britain, France, China and Russia – who alone can exercise vetoes over war and peace.

But ironically the silent majority is refusing to shut up these days over a new political trend where senior UN officials, including Secretary-General Kofi Annan, are bending over backwards to appease the UN-bashing right-wing conservatives in the US.The Secretary-General is only the chief administrative officer of the world body and technically a servant of the member states. At best, he is described as more of a Secretary than a General.

But neither he nor his officials — all of them considered international civil servants — have the right to placate the big powers or curry favour with any of them either for political or other reasons.

Lately, a storm has been brewing at the UN over public statements made by Annan's chief of staff Mark Malloch Brown critical of member states which are refusing to concede their political and financial powers currently exercised either through the General Assembly or the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ).

Asked about the constraints placed by these two bodies in restructuring the management of the UN, Malloch Brown told a TV interviewer last month: "They've not given the Secretary-General the authority or the resources or the means to run a modern organisation that can be held properly accountable to its membership".

Using relatively harsh language, he also accused member states of interfering in the work of the Secretariat: "We instead have a highly-politicised interference in the day-to-day decision-making by ambassadors and their minions".

Malloch Brown also accused the two bodies of running "wild" and trampling "all over the freedom of management to manage, so that every single post, every single mini bit of the budget has to be approved by a vast governmental committee of 191 members. And we've got to push back against that".

The criticism of member states in such strong language was unprecedented — and certainly not from international civil servants. Worse still, both Annan and Malloch Brown have made several visits to Washington DC to brief US senators and congressmen about the state-of-play in the world body.

All this has provoked negative reactions from the 132-member Group of 77 (G-77), the largest single coalition of developing nations, which also includes China. In a letter to Annan, the chairman of the G-77, Ambassador Stafford Neil of Jamaica, has asked "whether it is now the practice of senior officials of the Secretariat to report directly to national parliaments on actions taken by the membership of the United Nations."

The question was tinged with sarcasm because no international civil servant is answerable to any national parliament or member state — let alone the US Senate or House of Representatives.

As Neil pointed out, the UN Secretariat, headed by Annan, is accountable to the 191-member General Assembly, and not to individual member states.
The role of the Secretariat is to implement the legislative mandates of the organisation and accordingly, public utterances by Secretariat officials critical of decisions taken by the Assembly "are not acceptable", the letter said.

Malloch Brown's visits to Capitol Hill have followed strong criticisms of the UN by some legislators who have not only threatened to reduce US funding for the world body, but also demanded Annan's resignation over charges of fraud and mismanagement of the UN's now-defunct oil-for-food programme in Iraq.

The political appeasement is, therefore, being viewed as an attempt to silence the rising criticism of the organisation by certain US legislators.
The Group of 77, on the other hand, has also objected to statements in several news media interviews where Malloch Brown took some passing shots at member states.

This, Neil says, is in violation of the UN charter, which requires the staff of the Secretariat to be politically neutral and to refrain from any action inconsistent with their status as international civil servants responsible only to the organisation.At a meeting of the G-77, Malloch Brown's statements came in for even harsher attacks. With no response from Annan to the critical letter, the G-77 is planning another meeting next week. The silent majority is on the warpath.

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