The New York Times

Thursday July 17, 1997

Toward a Leaner, Smarter UN

Secretary General Kofi Annan's plan for overhauling and energizing the United Nations is a promising blueprint. If faithfully executed, it would go partway toward, delivering on his promise to repair and streamline the U.N. It certainly deserves better than yesterday's reflexive jeers from those members of Congress whose idea of U.N. reform is assisted suicide. Beyond shaving payrolls and eliminating fiefs, Mr. Annan's plan should be judged by the quality of his choices for two pivotal new posts, Deputy Secretary General and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

With 185 sovereign bosses and a jealously watchful Security Council, the Secretary General clearly could use an efficient deputy, a management post that the General Assembly needs to approve. But Mr. Annan can move quickly on his own in naming a relief coordinator, someone capable of keeping peace between squabbling governmental and nongovernmental agencies in coping with natural disasters, ethnic civil wars and the waves of refugees that result.

With the end of the cold war, the U.N.'s focus has shifted from global arguments over ideology and overt aggression to disorder within member states, as in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It is no surprise that the U.N.'s record has been mixed, and that it has assumed tasks beyond its competence. As a veteran of the U.N. system, Mr. Annan well knows these faults and the resulting impatience in Washington, which is at once the organization's chief contributor and leading delinquent in paying mandated dues.

Laudably, Mr. Annan plans to create a strong cabinet to help him run the U.N. and to cut back the power of a score of autonomous agencies, the bickering hydra heads in the system. This is a reform that has been urged for years by American representatives. He seeks a bigger voice for a human rights office and a department of disarmament, and to put all U.N. field operations under a single resident coordinator. The protests welling up within the system attest to both the need and the difficulty of reform.

To tide the organization over recurring budgetary crises, Mr. Annan would establish a revolving fund, which seems a minimal defensive move, against Washington's withholding of dues. Indeed, the Secretary General ought to have gone further and pressed for General Assembly approval of an automatic suspension of voting rights for defaulting members, and for interest on late payments. The Senate is considering a plan that would pay $819 million in delinquent dues over three years, with strings attached. That would be substantially less than the $1.3 billion owed according to U.N. reckoning.

Mr. Annan's reform package can be improved. Over the next decade some 4,500 U.N. civil servants are expected to retire, or roughly halt the present Secretariat payroll of 9,000. Mr. Annan could help his supporters in Washington by committing himself to reducing the staffing level below 9,000, rather than merely promising to replenish the bureaucracy with younger employees. But every bit as important will be the signal he sends in his key appointments. He set a high standard by naming Mary Robinson, former President of the Irish Republic, to head the human rights office. More choices of that caliber will buttress his reforms.