Obama Siding With U.N. Against Reforms Proposed in U.S. House

By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun | August 30, 2011

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/obama-siding-with-un-against-reforms-proposed/87466/

UNITED NATIONS — Even as the Obama administration admonishes the United Nations for an “unwarranted” pay hike for staffers, it is going to bat for the United Nations against legislation proposed in Congress that would revolutionize the way America finances international institutions and give Washington better leverage over them.

Proponents of the legislation, offered today by the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican of Florida, say that no matter how hard the administration fights against it, the current political climate presents an opportunity to rethink how American taxpayers finance Turtle Bay.

“This is the only way to create real reform, especially given U.S. budgetary stringency,” the former ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, told the Sun. “This is the time to act,” he added. “The State Department may lobby hard” against Ms. Ros-Lehtinen’s proposal, “but the times they are a changin’.”

Mr. Bolton has long advocated reforming the way America pays its dues to the world body. He has called for Washington to finance only those U.N. units and programs it deems to advance America’s interests, rather than pay according to an assessment made by the General Assembly. His initiative is widely considered the basis for Ms. Ros-Lehtinen’s bill.

State Department officials say that voluntary-based U.N. dues would cut the amount of American contribution to the U.N. by half and undercut its world leadership. “In the long run, we would end up shouldering — by ourselves — much more of the costs and the burdens of defending and advancing vital U.S. interests,” said Mark Kornblau, spokesman for the American ambassador here, Susan Rice.

In speeches around the country, Ms. Rice has argued that the U.N. advances America’s interests, that paying for it puts America in a position to urge reform, and that it saves money.

A blue helmeted peacekeeper, she said in a February speech at Oregon, “costs a fraction of what it would cost to field a U.S. soldier to do the same job.” In another speech, at a gathering in June of an American U.N. advocacy group, she said America is “pushing real reforms that can enable the U.N. to do more with less.”

But the reform push is yet to change the U.N.

The American ambassador charged with management reform, Joseph Torsella, is complaining about how, as American government officials’ salaries were recently frozen, the salaries of approximately 4,800 U.N. staffers in New York were recently raised by nearly 3%.

“As a result of the global financial crisis, the United States government believes that no increases in either the base salary scale or post adjustment are warranted or appropriate at this time,” Mr. Torsella wrote yesterday in a letter to Kingston Rhodes, chairman of Turtle Bay’s International Civil Service Commission.

Yet diplomats here say that while America pays a larger share of the U.N. budget than any other country, its push to freeze salaries isn’t likely to succeed. Decisions involving U.N. expenditures are taken either by the secretariat or in various budgetary committees of the General Assembly, where the vote of a country that contributes little carries as much weight as that of the largest contributor.

“When you pay pittance there’s no reason you should be concerned about how the funds are used,” says the Heritage Foundation’s Brett Schaefer, who has written extensively on U.N. budgetary issues. Mr. Schaefer supports the principle of voluntary contribution, which, he says, will introduce a “market-based mechanism that is lacking” in the current U.N. assessment system.

The U.N. Charter does not define the basis on which countries should pay their dues. It only determines, in Article 19, that a U.N. member “which is in arrears in the payment of its financial contributions” loses its voting right at the General Assembly.

Rather than being constitutional, so to speak, the U.N. system of assessing dues results from a legislative process at the General Assembly, which presumably can be changed.

In the 1940s America paid nearly half of the organization’s budget. More recently the General Assembly decided to assess the dues each country owes the U.N. according to its share of the world economy, based on GDP. The final sum due is subject to negotiations, however. This has allowed America to cap its U.N. dues on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

In the 1990s, Senator Helms successfully frustrated the Clinton administration’s attempts to pay its U.N. dues in full. Only at the end of the decade did Helms arrive at an agreement with Joseph Biden, then a leading Democrat in the Senate, to end the impasse.

The 1999 Helms-Biden compromise lowered America’s contribution to the U.N. running budget to 22% from 25%. Washington’s share of the U.N. peacekeeping budget was reduced to 25% from 30%. A decade later a new compromise raised the peacekeeping share back to 27.14%t. All told, last year America contributed $516 million for the U.N. regular budget and $1.887 billion for peacekeeping.

Now Ms. Ros-Lehtinen proposes to rethink the whole thing. The new legislation “ends the era of no-strings-attached contributions, and gives us leverage to pressure the U.N. to finally make concrete reforms,” Ms. Ros-Lehtinen said in a statement today. “Making U.N. funding voluntary will give the U.S. control over how our contributions are spent at the U.N. Otherwise, U.S. taxpayer dollars will keep being spent on the bad, the ugly, and the indefensible.”

Approached by the Sun today, Secretary General Ban declined to comment on the proposed legislation’s effect on the U.N.

Laughing at the UN

Benny Avni

CLICK HERE FOR STORY @ NYPOST

Here's your multilateralism at work: Susan Rice, our UN ambassador and other members of the United NationsSecurity Council went to Africa to celebrate the coming peaceful independence of southern Sudan.

Oops. Just as the ambassadors arrived, Gen. Omar al-Bashir decided to invade Abyei -- an oil-rich, disputed city on the north-south border. The invasion may renew the war and turn into yet another Sudanese genocide.

Did Bashir -- the president who reluctantly let the south secede -- deliberately time the invasion to coincide with the visit?

"There's no cause and effect," a Western European diplomat on the Security Council told me.

Huh? The most prominent international institution didn't even enter Bashir's calculations as he planned this land grab?

Then again, maybe Bashir calculated his move specifically to thumb his nose at the Security Council.

After all, why should he fear the vaunted "international community"? So far, the only significant Security Council punishment for his genocidal deeds has been to refer his case to the ineffectiveInternational Criminal Court -- which has issued a warrant for his arrest that nobody will ever act on.

Here's a recap of how we got here, with the Security Council trapped like a deer in Bashir's headlights:

For decades, troops under the command of the northern, Islamic Sudanese government fought southern, mainly non-Arab, Christians and animists seeking independence from Khartoum. The war ended in January 2005, after the Bush administration hashed out a peace agreement.

That accord dictated a referendum in the south, which duly took place last winter. As expected, southerners voted in droves to break away from the north. Their state is scheduled to become independent in July.

The Security Council and the Obama administration declared it all a huge success for multilateralism as Bashir, under much pressure, said he'd let the south go.

But international diplomacy left one detail unresolved: Who gets Abyei? For centuries, local southern farmers have battled northern nomadic herders in that area, so the sides couldn't agree on who resides there and thus could vote on independence. So Abyei's separate referendum got delayed, and the area remains disputed.

Now add oil to the mix. As it becomes independent, South Sudan stands to control 75 percent of Sudan's petroleum production of nearly half a million barrels a day. And the Abyei area is home to several more lucrative fields.

All this was a perfect recipe for the Bashir Special. Just as his government did last decade in Darfur, it's now sending nomadic tribes into Abyei -- bent on ethnically cleansing to create facts on the ground that will assure northern control.

And what are we doing? Nothing.

Oh, we did issue tough statements: Khartoum's withdrawal from Abyei "ought to be immediate, unconditional and complete," Rice announced on Twitter yesterday.

The South Sudanese president, Salva Kiir, said the north's latest invasion shouldn't renew war. Instead, he asked international troops to prevent bloodshed in Abyei. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon obliged by proposing to reshuffle the 10,000 peacekeepers now stationed in southern Sudan.

But while UN troops perform heroically at times, they also lack the training, discipline, hardware or even legal mandate to match determined foes like Bashir. And the recruitment of troops from around the world has reached a ceiling.

Let's face it: The UN is unequipped to stop genocide in Africa or anywhere else.

Nor is any Western country prepared to add Sudan to its military to-do list. (Uncle Sam is already quite busy with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and whatever crisis the Arab Spring springs on us next.)

So we pretend we're doing something -- that is, we talk up the supposedly miraculous powers of multilateralism. But this week's Security Council fiasco shows how ineffective that is.

And here's a question for those who claim we have a "responsibility to protect" against war atrocities and genocide: Would world powers be more responsive and effective in confronting tyranny if they didn't have institutions like the UN to hide behind?

Of course, with a White House enamored with multilateralism, we're unlikely to find out anytime soon. As Rice proudly tweeted from Africa this week, "New poll: Americans (85 percent) understand sharing burden of global challenges."

beavni@gmail.com

Support for Israel Costs Canada Seat on U.N. Security Council

America All But Disappeared in Maneuvering by Portugal, Brazil, and Cuba

By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun | October 12, 2010

UNITED NATIONS — Canada’s increasing ties with Israel and its defense of Jerusalem have cost it a seat on the United Nations Security Council, diplomats here are saying after days of maneuvering by Arab countries, Brazil, and Cuba in which the United States had nearly disappeared.

Canada’s failure to capture a seat on next year’s Security Council will break a tradition in which America’s northern neighbor has been elected to the most prestigious United Nations body in every decade since 1948. Diplomats here say Brazil was instrumental in handing defeat to Prime Minister Harper in an international contest that pitted Canada, a traditional U.N. power house, against one of the European Union’s least powerful countries – Portugal.

Canada withdrew its candidacy in today’s election for five available council slots after it realized that Portugal had sewn up enough General Assembly votes in the secret ballot to win the only contested seat. Several sources told me that members of a powerful voting bloc in the 192-member assembly – the 57 countries of the Organizations of Islamic Conference – were united in voting for Portugal over Canada, mostly because of Mr. Harper’s record of supporting Israel.

In addition to the OIC, anti-Western countries like Cuba and Venezuela have been active in opposing Canada’s candidacy. Mr. Harper’s right-of-center government, which had originally tried to stay above the fray, increased its efforts in the final weeks, mounting a world-wide campaign to capture the council seat.

But a diplomat familiar with the behind-the-scenes horse trading that marks the annual General Assembly vote tells me that top diplomats from Portuguese-speaking Brazil became particularly active in the last few weeks, convincing Muslim countries that “Canada’s vote on Israel-related issues will be no different than that of the United States, while Portugal would be more balanced.”

The U.N.-based correspondent of Canada’s National Post, Steven Edwards, reported yesterday that foreign ministry officials in Ottawa criticized the timing of a Tel Aviv visit by the country’s international trade minister, Peter Van Loan, in which he announced Sunday – on the eve of the U.N. vote – his intention to tighten Canada’s trade relations with Israel even further.

“That’s no way to win friends and influence people at the U.N.,” one diplomat here said today. While blocs that included the African and Latin American countries were largely thought to have split their vote on the contested seat, the Arab countries and the OIC were largely believed to have voted en-bloc to bar Canada entry to the council.

Mr. Harper’s government has become one of Israel’s more forthright defenders in organizations like the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council, where members like Cuba and Libya often single Israel out and garner enough votes to condemn its human rights record.

Only a few years ago, the American ambassador here would have made a public issue in defense of Canada. But in the maneuvering leading to today’s vote, American diplomats were all but absent.

Conversely, Israeli diplomats who habitually count heads before the votes at international bodies do not see Portugal as a reliable ally among the members of the European Union, which often joins the majorities or abstains after attempting to “soften” anti-Israel votes.

Portugal ended up winning 122 votes in the first round of today’s General Assembly ballot – just short of the 127 needed. Canada got only 114 votes in the first round, and eventually withdrew in the second round, after which Portugal received 150 votes. The balloting is often marked by small bribery in the form of trinkets. Vials of Canadian Maple syrup — an ambrosia unequaled on the planet for its deliciousness — were found by ambassadors as they arrived at their seats before the vote.

There are 10 elected seats at the Security Council, of which five new members are chosen once a year for a 2-year stint according to regional affiliation. The group of democracies known as the Western European and Others Group fielded three candidates this year for the two available seats that were vacated by Turkey and Austria. Germany won easily, which left Canada and Portugal.

Three other regional groups sent one candidate for each available council seat. Colombia replaced Mexico, India replaced Japan, and South Africa – which has amassed a remarkable anti-Western and anti-Israel voting record in its last council stint – replaced Uganda.

On January 1, the five new members will be seated at the famous horseshoe-shaped table alongside the five countries that were elected last year – Bosnia, Brazil, Gabon, Nigeria, and Lebanon – as well as the five permanent council members, Communist China, Russia, Britain, France, and America.

NYPOST: Haiti: Job for the UN

Help still needed after US leaves

By BENNY AVNI

Last Updated: 9:49 AM, January 22, 2010

Posted: 2:39 AM, January 22, 2010

The United Nations has elevated Bill Clinton to be its top coordinator for Haiti. It's an excellent move that should help the eventual transition back to UN leadership of world efforts there.

No one is doing more heroic work in Haiti now than the US military. But the 82nd Airborne and the Marines will soon be needed elsewhere, and Haiti is a rare case where the United Nationshas done a good job.

Critics of the UN secretary general have unfairly dubbed this crisis "Ban Ki-moon's Katrina" -- even though the shell-shocked UN, which suffered the largest loss of lives in its history, operated adequately.

Clinton: Great pick to be UN point man.

Of course the UN's efforts couldn't match those of the US military, dispatched to Haiti since last week and now 20,000 troops strong. America's military is best positioned to handle huge emergencies in chaotic field conditions.

The UN's set up for longer-term work -- and it will be needed, when US troops inevitably leave once the immediate emergency is over. Ideally, the tragedy could help pull Haiti out of the multigenerational, self-made crisis that has rendered it the hemisphere's poorest nation.

Happily, the UN's Haiti stabilization force is one of its better operations. With Brazilian troops as its backbone, the mission has met fire with fire since 2004, fighting violent armed gangs in Cite Soleil and other slums, and winning -- or at least achieving enough calm for some outsiders to consider investing in Haiti.

Which brings us back to Clinton, whom Secretary-General Ban last year named as his special envoy for Haiti.

Haiti's ambassador to Washington, Raymond Joseph, tried for years to lure US and international corporations to invest in his country. Though at first no Clinton fan, Joseph told me at the time that the ex-president's involvement prompted many skeptical investors to "get off the fence" and move in.

And so, relative calm in the streets, Clinton's star power and some good moves by the government of PresidentRene Preval created an atmosphere of hope. Haiti wasn't there yet -- but, for the first time in decades, it was moving in the right direction.

Haiti needs more outside help now. President Obama has already pledged $165 million in federal funds, while Americans have donated $40 millions privately, with more sure to come.

Americans should be wary, though, of funneling their money through the UN, which has just launched a $562 million "flash appeal" for donations to Haiti.

Consider what happened to the $13.6 billion, raised in 2005 to help Indonesia after a tsunami killed 2 million there. The Financial Times found that the multiple UN agencies that handled those funds spent a much higher share of the cash for administrative and bureaucratic costs than did aid groups like Oxfam. The UN was also much less transparent when asked to account for the money.

Money and outside help won't suffice, either. For example, earthquake experts can help Haitians devise new construction codes, so fewer buildings collapse next time -- but only Haitians can obey and enforce those codes.

America should help Haiti as much and as long as we can, but (as Obama & Co. are fond of saying) we can't solve all the world's problems alone. Where there's no direct threat, as in Haiti, we should move aside and let other good neighbors (along with our private citizens, our former presidents and the UN) shoulder most of the work.

beavni@gmail.com