Challenges Reveal U.N.’s Shrinking Clout

When war threatened to break out between the United States and Iraq nine months ago over weapons inspections, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a dramatic flight to Baghdad and brokered a deal that preempted the conflict and made him a hero in much of the world.

But when a similar confrontation simmered this month--largely because the Iraqis had broken that agreement with Annan--the secretary-general sat conspicuously on the sidelines, refusing entreaties that he intervene again.

Aides said Annan saw little point in trying to reassemble the pact that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had shattered; the situation, they said, was fundamentally changed.

But Annan’s limited role also was emblematic of the United Nations’ diminished diplomatic clout in recent months.

The Iraq situation is only one in a multiplying set of challenges to the credibility and authority of the U.N. these days. From Congo to Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, governments are defying or ignoring the will of the world body.

And, in a little-publicized vote by the Organization of African Unity last summer that many diplomats here see as the most troubling development of all, 53 African countries agreed to defy U.N. Security Council sanctions against Libya by resuming commercial airline flights into the North African nation.

It was described by one prominent Western ambassador as an “enormous act of civil disobedience,” with nearly one-third of the U.N. members breaking their obligations under the world body’s charter.

Meanwhile, the U.N. reform program launched by Annan has stalled amid bickering and power grabbing by the 185 member states, the organization continues to struggle with a chronic shortage of funding, and the Clinton administration is seen as unable or unwilling to exercise the strong leadership most here expect--if not always welcome--from the U.S.

After a burst of optimism, new direction and drive that began with Annan’s appointment in January 1997 and lingered through his first 18 months in office, the organization seems adrift and threatened with irrelevance.

“This place is just hunkered down; it’s just not effective,” said a Western diplomat with long experience here. One senior U.S. official says the U.N. is at a crossroads and that how it responds to the current challenges may mold the organization for years to come.

There are still success stories, but they tend to be lost behind the headlines. Every year the U.N. cares for more than 22 million refugees and displaced people and delivers more than 2.9 million tons of food to the hungry around the globe. Dynamic new leaders have revived the U.N. Center for Human Rights and the World Health Organization. The myriad agencies of the organization have been forced by Annan to work in greater harmony and with more common purpose. Links formed between the U.N. and private humanitarian aid, human rights, environmental and advocacy organizations have helped change the ground rules of international diplomacy. Media mogul Ted Turner’s foundation has handed out the first $55 million of his 10-year, $1-billion gift to the organization, thus providing a template for other potential private donors.

But on the big issues of war, peace and global stability that command the immediate attention of the public and of world leaders, the organization seldom exerts decisive influence.

For example, the most recent conflict with Iraq was resolved--at least temporarily--when Hussein’s government backed down at the threat of a massive air attack by the United States and Britain. The show of gunboat diplomacy in the Persian Gulf accomplished what months of admonishments and pleadings by the Security Council could not.

The council’s impotence in influencing Baghdad is part of a pattern. In recent months the council has been divided and powerless in the face of a burgeoning war in Congo, the fraying of the U.N.-brokered peace process in Angola, suspected massacres and wholesale human rights violations by the ruling Taliban militia in Afghanistan, and the eruption of a nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan.

“It’s apparent that an increasing number of rogue states feel free to thumb their nose at the United Nations,” said Edward C. Luck, executive director of the Center for the Study of International Organization at New York University. “They’re really sticking their thumb in the Security Council’s eye, and the Security Council is blinking.”

Even an alarming rise in killings and kidnappings of U.N. humanitarian aid workers around the world--18 have been slain and 18 others held hostage so far this year--failed to move the council to concerted action. The 15 members recently spent a full day discussing the issue but reached no consensus on how to combat the problem.

In the Balkans, the U.N. deliberately has been shifted to a secondary peacekeeping role behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an arrangement that is being duplicated elsewhere around the world as regional security organizations take on interventions once reserved for the United Nations.

Few outside experts or diplomats here blame Annan for the U.N.’s recent frustrations; one referred to him as “the Teflon secretary-general” because he is so impervious to criticism. In the last analysis, they note, the secretary-general cannot go further than the membership wants him to go.

“I think there is a real sense of malaise and lack of direction at the U.N., but it doesn’t stem as much from the secretary-general’s performance as it does [from] any lack of consensus among member states on what they want the U.N. to do,” Luck said. “Vision by the secretary-general is great and action by the secretary-general is great, but it doesn’t substitute for a divided, feckless membership, which is what we have at the U.N. today, particularly on the Security Council.”

Many analysts see the disarray as inevitable given the end of the Cold War, the great glue that held international alliances together.

Brazilian Ambassador Celso L.N. Amorim calls this the “variable geometry” of the U.N., and said nowhere is it more evident than on the Security Council, the organization’s most powerful organ.

“The sense that the council has clear, common goals has faded,” said Amorim, who is completing the first of his two years on the council.

Like other ambassadors here, Amorim also worries that the council--which operates in near-total secrecy and is dominated by its veto-holding five permanent members, the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia--is increasingly estranged from most member states. “They look at the Security Council as almost extraneous, almost as if it isn’t part of the U.N.,” he said.

The defiance of most African states toward the Security Council sanctions against Libya, and the indifference with which many countries initially greeted Iraq’s misbehavior in part reflect this alienation, according to several diplomats.

A senior U.S. official suggested that the organization is still searching for its post-Cold War persona and might work out these problems in time.

The official also disputed expressions both inside and outside the U.N. that American leadership of the world body is weakening. He noted that both Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her deputy, Thomas R. Pickering, are former U.N. ambassadors and “the U.N. is never out of sight of this State Department.”

Nonetheless, the U.S. has been without an ambassador to the U.N. since September, when Bill Richardson left to become Energy secretary. His designated successor, Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the 1995 peace accord for Bosnia-Herzegovina, is considered a diplomatic heavyweight, but his formal nomination has been delayed by questions about his financial dealings. Holbrooke now is not expected to arrive before the new year.

Peter Burleigh, a career diplomat who heads the U.S. delegation, lacks the Cabinet status and political heft of Richardson or Holbrooke.

The mounting American debt to the U.N.--it stands at $1.5 billion, according to the world body--also undercuts U.S. authority here.

Canadian Ambassador Robert Fowler said, “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the U.S.’s ability to do anything with the United Nations, in the United Nations or through the United Nations is impaired if it won’t pay up.”

Annan, meanwhile, is setting new goals. His most recent theme has been to try to position the U.N. for a role in setting the global economic agenda, and he has been outspoken in recent speeches about those poor countries that have been left behind by worldwide merging of markets.