Senate OKs Deal on U.N. Back Dues

By a 99-0 vote, the Senate on Wednesday approved a carefully crafted deal with the United Nations to pay off almost $1 billion in unpaid dues, ending an embarrassing standoff that had threatened to brand the United States a deadbeat nation.

In exchange for the U.S. agreement to pay the back dues, the U.N. cut Washington’s share of the organization’s $1.1-billion annual administrative budget from 25% to 22% and agreed to reduce the U.S. assessment for the $3-billion peacekeeping program from 30.4% to 26% in stages by 2003.

Although the legislation still requires approval by the House and the signature of President Bush, the Senate vote essentially ended a controversy that began in 1994 when Congress voted to withhold part of Washington’s assessment to pressure the U.N. to adopt administrative reforms and reduce America’s share of the organization’s expenditures.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and the most outspoken critic of the world body on Capitol Hill, had come to personify the U.S.-U.N. dispute. When he endorsed the compromise, hammered out late last year by Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., resistance to the dues plan evaporated.

“U.N. member states have come a long way on reforms and fairer assessment scales,” Helms said before the vote, the first by the Senate in this session of Congress.

Helms’ committee approved the legislation, 16-0, just hours before the Senate’s floor action.

The measure immediately releases $582 million of a total $926 million that Congress agreed in 1999 to pay--provided the world body cut future U.S. assessments and agreed to accept the money as payment in full of the U.S. arrears. The deal in effect writes off about $500 million in disputed assessments that Washington said it didn’t owe.

The plan was denounced for more than a year by many U.N. members, including some close U.S. allies, as an attempt by the United States to bully the world organization. The U.N. states resisted, but eventually Holbrooke persuaded a majority of the organization to accept the deal as the best the United Nations could hope to get. The General Assembly approved the package in December.

The United States paid $100 million toward the arrears in December 1999 when the U.N. threatened to revoke Washington’s vote in the General Assembly. The remaining $244 million is scheduled to be paid at the end of this year.

Originally, Helms had demanded a 25% cap on the U.S. contribution to the peacekeeping budget. The General Assembly would accept only a 26% rate, to be phased in over the next three years.

Helms said the compromise was acceptable for now. But Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, warned that unless Congress passes new legislation by the end of this year to eliminate the 25% cap set in 1994, Washington will begin to fall behind again.

Speaking of Helms, Biden said, “I’m hopeful that he’ll become convinced before the year is over that these [U.N.] changes are real and we should remove the 25% cap.”

At the same time, Biden was unstinting in his praise for Helms, saying, “Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Helms could fix the U.N.”

At U.N. headquarters in New York, spokesman Fred Eckhard said the Senate action “kept faith with the United Nations.” He urged the House to follow suit quickly.

The world body’s decision to reduce the U.S. assessment--and distribute the shortfall among a number of other countries--was the first change in the organization’s dues structure in more than a quarter of a century. The dues are based on a country’s ability to pay, and U.S. officials had argued that the American share of the total world economy has declined since the rates were last fixed.

Helms said the changes will save U.S. taxpayers about $170 million annually, about $33 million from the regular U.N. budget and the rest from peacekeeping programs.