THE UNITED NATIONS IS NO BETTER THAN ITS MEMBERS

by Flora Lewis

International Herald Tribune, Friday, August 27, 1993

BINI CALAF, Minorca, Spain - When the United Nations was set up in San Francisco in 1945, the founders' paramount concern was to avoid repeating the fatal flaws of the League of Nations, launched with noble ideals after World War I and with not a whit of power to carry them out.

Hence the separation of function between the Security Council and the General Assembly, majority voting instead of the league's rule of unanimity, and the veto in the council recognizing the reality of power. All states are not created equal. Still, for a long time, UN effectiveness was largely frustrated by the Cold War.

Recently, Secretary-General Butros Butros Ghali rightly pointed out that new possibilities, and new responsabilities, exist at last (IHT, Aug.21). But he complains that the states are balking at letting him run the show after they vote him the tasks of "coordinating" negotiations, aid, peace-keeping and the timing of approved military action.

"Multilateralism", the speciality of UN system, is undermined, he says, by "the upsurge of two kinds of ugly nationalism: ultranationalism and micronationalism." Certainly there is plainty to complain about - but no sign at all that more deference to the secretary-general's views would improve anything.

He is shifting blame, just as governments that do not want to risk effective action shift blame by pronouncing, "Let the UN do it".

Everybody can see that current operations, particulary in Bosnia and Somalia, are a mess. True, as Mr. Butros Ghali says, they are much more ambitious than what the United Nations attempted before.

In Somalia, the UN seeks to recreate a state that has crumbled out of existence, replaced by bandit gangs. That necessity was perfectly foreseeable. But there was neither planning nor explanation, which at least took place in Cambodia.

So Senator Robert Byrd has a point in noting (IHT, Aug.21) that neither Congress nor American public opinion authorized the use of U.S. troops for this purpose when President George Bush's Operation Restore Hope was launched.

I think the West Virginia senator is wrong in arguing that humanitarian aid is fine but that the United States should not be helping prevent a relapse into conditions that made aid urgent, and that would perpetuate the need, just because the United Nations so resolved. I think he is right in putting it up to the Clinton administration to build support for a mission that its predecessor pretended would not be Washington's concern.

Mr. Byrd's insistence on clear and prior American decision in undertaking UN actions seems to be what Mr. Butros Ghali is aiming when he decries "ultranationalism". He calls it nostalgia "for the years when one or a few big powers called all the shots", and desire to see the United Nations "return to the relatively marginal role it played in years past".

None of all this gets to the point, just as none of the twittering about Bosnia drowns out the gunfire, massacre and human agony. Endless meetings, communiqués, big headlines examine exactly how many Serbian soldiers remain on Mount Igman above Sarajevo, whether or not Sarajevo remains under siege if artillery fire is held for a few days but people and goods still cannot move freely in and out. This is trivia, cover for indecision, shifting blame.

It now seems that all the weeks of noise about possible NATO air strikes if the siege were not lifted was just another way of using words to mask no deeds. Whose fault, that of the United Nations or of the NATO governments? They mumble and shuffle, drop the subject, and move on to ever more surrealistic proposals in the name off both recognizing and controverting "battlefield realism".

Given the undeniable failure to impose any political settlement, what on earth is this nonsense about the United Nations "administering" Sarajevo for two years, along with an assortment of tenuous corridors and byways which can only assure that it remains a trap?

What does Mr. Butros Ghali think will be left to "coordinate"? At least big powers do exercice the will to get in or to get out of harm's way. His complaint should be not that they do not rely enough on the United Nations, but that they rely on it primarily for dithering. That may salve conscience, but it solves nothing.

As for "micronationalism", of course it is a menace to any hope for an orderly world, and every "ethnic or tribal faction" cannot expect what the secretary-general calls "the privileges of a sovereign nation-state" by violent secession from the state of which it forms a part.

But the remedy is not his aim of preserving "the nation-state as the very foundation of international life". It is accepting the duty to establish, and impose by force if necessary, rules for political settlement and minority protection that do not reward violence as the means to national goals, indeed, that punish its use.

The UN can only do what its members want. If they want this kind of world, they can get it. If they don't, they won't. The secretary-general's role is to remind them of that.