World summit on UN's future heads for chaos

[Ani_Ibi]

World summit on UN’s future heads for chaos

10 Sept 2005

…Mr Annan has been weakened by the criticisms voiced this week by an inquiry into the UN’s running of the Iraq oil-for-food programme and needs a successful summit to avoid renewed calls for his resignation…

Although the US has emerged as the leading opponent of the reform package, objections have also been lodged by some governments from the Non-Aligned Movement, which represents much of the developing world…

Controls on arms is likely to be dropped…There is a divide over the definition of terrorism, with pro-Palestinian states objecting that the proposed terminology be amended to exclude Palestinian fighters…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

U.N. Future: It cannot continue as is

…The U.N. is the centerpiece of a system of international organizations created at the end of the Second World War and shaped during the Cold War. These included the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and The General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT), recently transformed into the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Some of these organizations, notably the IMF, the World Bank, have long been the object of criticism. And WTO has been the magnet for anti-globalization militants. The left regards those bodies as instrument of American “imperialism,” while the right accuses them of distributing aid money among corrupt third-world dictators…

Talleyrand once described diplomacy as an instrument to…prevent governments from committing costly errors…Anyone familiar with the so-called “international system” would know about its bureaucratic inefficiency, political ineptitude, and widespread corruption…The so-called " international system" is often used to delay action to right a wrong or prevent a tragedy…

The former U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali has had the courage to admit that it was guilty of criminal negligence when it did not act to stop the genocide in Rwanda (some two million dead) or in the former Yugoslavia (half a million dead)…Each time anyone did anything to right a wrong it was outside the U.N. remit…