[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 63 (Friday, May 19, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E891-E894]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     THE AMBASSADORS' REVIEW OF THE COUNCIL OF AMERICAN AMBASSADORS

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHRISTOPHER SHAYS

                             of connecticut

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 18, 2006

  Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Speaker, I wish to insert in the Congressional Record 
the following statement by Joseph Verner Reed, Under-Secretary-General 
of the United Nations.

                       Viewpoints: United Nations

       Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan will step down from his 
     position as Secretary-General when his second five-year term 
     ends on December 31.
       The search for a successor to Secretary-General Annan 
     promises to create differences within the U.N. Security 
     Council. Russia and China back the customary procedure of 
     rotating the post among the world's regions, while the U.S. 
     and Britain are questioning the need to do so.
       Since the United Nations was established in October 1945, 
     the post of Secretary-General has been held by Trygve Lie of 
     Norway

[[Page E892]]

     (1946-1953); Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden (1953-1961); U Thant 
     of Burma (1961-1971); Kurt Waldheim of Austria (1972-1981); 
     Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru (1982-1991); and Boutros 
     Boutros-Ghali of Egypt (1992-1996). Kofi A. Annan, who is 
     from Ghana, has served since January 1997.
       The list of candidates widely discussed in the 
     international press include: Aleksander Kwasniewski, former 
     Polish president; Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Latvian president; 
     Kemal Dervis, Turkey, currently head of the U.N. Development 
     Program; Surakiart Sathirathai, Thailand's deputy prime 
     minister; Shashi Tharoor, India, U.N. under-secretary-general 
     for Communications and Public Information and an award-
     winning journalist/novelist; Ban Ki Moon, South Korea's 
     foreign minister; Jose Ramos-Horta, foreign minister of East 
     Timor and a 1996 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate; Jayantha 
     Dhanapala, Sri Lanka, served as U.N. undersecretary-general 
     for disarmament and as ambassador to the United States; Goh 
     Chok Tong, former prime ministr of Singapore; and Prince Zeid 
     Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein, Jordanian ambassador to the U.N. The 
     list is not exhaustive and the selection of a dark-horse 
     candidate cannot be discounted.
       The BBC (February 14) reported, ``Analysts say there is 
     much support for an Asian leader among U.N. member states, in 
     line with an informal tradition that rotates the role on a 
     geographical basis. But Washington's U.N. Ambassador John R. 
     Bolton said last month that Kofi Annan's successor should be 
     selected on merit alone.''
       There have been calls for a Woman as Secretary-General. 
     Woman's groups have begun lobbying for a woman to succeed 
     Secretary-General Annan. Their campaign has taken on new 
     urgency with the recent announcement that Secretary-General 
     Annan's deputy, Louise Frechette, appointed in 1998 partly 
     because she was a woman, will leave in April to return to her 
     native Canada.
       As the campaigns move forward it is to be noted that there 
     are no established qualifications for the post, no search 
     committees, no interviews, no background checks, no campaign 
     rules and no forums for showcasing aspirants and their ideas.
       If history is a guide, it is likely that none of the 
     discussed candidates will emerge the winner and that the 
     person who does is not being publicly discussed.
       Wang Guangya, China's Ambassador (the PRC holding a 
     Permanent seat on the Security Council) at a recent reception 
     said China would support only candidates from Asia, a polite 
     way of saying the PRC would threaten to veto candidates from 
     elsewhere.
       The current Chief of Staff for the Secretary-General is 
     Mark Malloch Brown, recently Head of the UNDP (United Nations 
     Development Program). He will take the post of Deputy 
     Secretary-General in April.
       Meanwhile, the Secretary General has presented a far-
     reaching report with proposals for an overhaul ranging from 
     setting up a 2,500-strong core of mobile peacekeeping 
     professionals to multimillion-dollar invesments in training 
     and technology.
       His far-reaching report ``Investing in the United Nations: 
     For a Stronger Organization Worldwide,'' focuses on ensuring 
     efficiency and accountability in a way that reflects the fact 
     that more than 70 per cent of the $10 billion annual budget 
     now relates to peacekeeping and other field operations, up 
     from around 50 per cent of a $4.5 billion budget ten years 
     ago.
       ``Our current rules and regulations were designed for an 
     essentially static Secretariat, whose main function was to 
     service conferences and meetings of Member States, and whose 
     staff worked mainly at Headquarters,'' the Secretary-General 
     said as he presented the report in the General Assembly Hall. 
     ``Today thanks to the mandates that Member States have given 
     us, we are engaged directly in many parts of the world, 
     working on the ground to improve the lives of people who need 
     help.''
       In the 16 years since the cold war ended, the Organization 
     has taken on more than twice as many new peacekeeping 
     missions as in the previous 44 years and spending on 
     peacekeeping has quadrupled. Over half of its 30,000 civilian 
     staff now serve in the field--not only in peacekeeping, but 
     also in humanitarian relief, criminal justice, human rights 
     monitoring, supporting national elections, and in the battle 
     against drugs and crime.
       The Secretary-General's comprehensive reform blueprint was 
     called for in the Outcome Document adopted by national 
     leaders at last September's World Summit in New York. It 
     builds on a package of reforms Mr. Annan launched last year 
     to enhance ethics and accountability and address weaknesses 
     exposed by the Indepdent Inquiry on the Oil-for-Food 
     Programme as well as evidence of sexual exploitation in 
     certain peace eping operations.
       In the report, the Secretary-General urges Member States to 
     seize the moment for change. ``This is an opportunity, which 
     may not occur again until another generation has passed, to 
     transform the United Nations by aligning it with, and 
     equipping it for, the substantive challenges it faces in the 
     twenty-first century,'' he writes. ``It is a chance to give 
     Member States the tools they need to provide strategic 
     direction and hold the Secretariat fully accountable for its 
     performance.''
       While the report identifies a number of areas of potential 
     cost savings and efficiencies, the primary financial message 
     is that it is time to reverse years of underinvestment in 
     people, systems and information technology to address 
     operational deficiencies and ensure that the UN can reach the 
     level of effectiveness expected by Member States.
       The Secretary-General said that although the UN had made a 
     number of major organizational changes in recent rears to 
     keep up with the increasing expectations of Member States, 
     these efforts had only addressed the symptoms, not the 
     causes, of the Organization's shortcomings. ``It is now time 
     to reach for deeper, more fundamental change,'' he said.
       Along these lines, the proposals encompass a revamped 
     version of how to recruit, contract, train, assign and 
     compensate staff, with an emphasis on bringing conditions for 
     field-based personnel up to par with those at other UN 
     agencies operating in the field. This will include proposals 
     for converting 2,500 existing short-term peacekeeping 
     positions into a new flexible and mobile core of dedicated 
     specialists who can be deployed rapidly in urgent 
     peacekeeping and special political missions.
       ``Increasingly complex mandates require staff with 
     different skills,'' the Secretary-General told the Assembly. 
     ``We need to be able to recruit and retain leaders, managers 
     and personnel capable of handling large multidisciplinary 
     operations, with increasingly high budgets. ``As things 
     stand,'' he added, ``many of our staff, especially the field 
     staff who serve with great idealism and integrity, often in 
     situations of hardship and danger are demoralized and de-
     motivated by lack of opportunities for promotion, and by the 
     frustrattons of dealing with a bureaucracy that can seem both 
     excessive and remote.''
       The report calls for consolidating reporting to address 
     logjams associated with the current system, where over 100 
     senior UN officials are directly answerable to the Secretary-
     General. It also proposes the formal delegation of 
     responsibility for management policies and overall 
     operational matters to a redefined post of Deputy Secretary-
     General to help free the Secretary-General to focus on 
     political and policy issues.
       The report also proposes significant investment to overhaul 
     the Organization's information and communications 
     infrastructure by replacing current antiquated, fragmented 
     technology systems with an integrated global platform that 
     should be led by a dedicated Chief Information Technology 
     Officer.
       Separately, the report identifies significant opportunities 
     to realize cost savings and efficiency gains, recommending 
     that the Secretariat explore options for alternative service 
     delivery, including the potential for relocating core 
     functions from Headquarters to lower cost duty stations and 
     possible outsourcing of less central functions such as 
     printing.
       One area where investment could yield substantial savings 
     is procurement, where the report outlines change that would 
     improve transparency and realize up to $400 million.
       A number of the proposals fall under the direct authority 
     of the Secretary-General, who said he intends to immediately 
     carry them out. But most of the fundamental changes, 
     particularly with regard to budget and personnel issues, 
     require approval from Member States.
       To help ensure momentum for this agenda through the end of 
     his term and to help equip his successor to follow through, 
     the Secretary-General also proposes creating a Change 
     Management Office that would seek to work closely with Member 
     States to drive the implementation of the reforms.
       In the report, Mr. Annan cautions against complacency, 
     stressing that the proposals must mark the beginning of a 
     process that will be carried over the next several years. 
     ``One of the weaknesses of the old culture is precisely the 
     view that a report or a vote in itself represents change,'' 
     he notes. ``In practice, reports and votes enable and 
     authorize change, but change itself is the long march that 
     follows.''
       Last week the international community took an important 
     step forward in the fight for global human rights by way of 
     the General Assembly voting to adopt a new Human Rights 
     Council.
       The new Human Rights Council represents a significant 
     improvement over the old, discredited Human Rights Commission 
     because it includes a number of new provisions and 
     characteristics that will significantly strengthen the UN's 
     human rights machinery and prevent human rights violators 
     from participating in the Council.
       The President of the General Assembly, Jan Eliasson, has 
     done a masterful job of diplomacy, as demonstrated by the 
     broad support that exists among governments and non-
     governmental organizations.
       His proposal was made considerably stronger through pledges 
     by a large number of countries.
       These recent pledges will help ensure that countries with 
     dubious human rights records will not be elected to the new 
     Council and that countries under Security Council sanctions 
     are prevented from participating in the Council.
       The new commitments significantly enhance the proposal and 
     set the stage for additional efforts to strengthen the new 
     body as it is formed and made operational.
       Countries committed to human rights must know that 
     leadership and diplomacy can continue to improve the Council 
     as it gets up and running and into the future.
       While this unfortunate that the United States found itself 
     virtually alone in New York and was unable to join consensus, 
     it is

[[Page E893]]

     a positive sign that the United States did not abandon the 
     Council altogether.
       Result of the GA resolution on Human Rights Council: 170 in 
     favour; 44 against (U.S., Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau); 
     and 3 abstained (Venezuela, Iran, Belarus).
       Building on these principles, the U.S. should participate 
     actively in the next phase of the Council, exercising 
     leadership and summoning enlightened diplomacy to advance the 
     Council and the cause of human rights.
       The creation of this new Council--which was mandated by 
     world leaders in last September's summit at the UN--also 
     fuels the momentum in the ongoing reform process at the UN.
       The Secretary-General attended the World Economic Forum in 
     January of this year and addressed the Plenary Session:


                ``A New Mindset for the United Nations''

       ``Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear friends:
       ``Some of you may remember me coming to Davos nine years 
     ago, as a freshly minted Secretary-General.
       ``Since then I have attended all but three of your annual 
     meetings--including the memorable one in 2002 when you came 
     to show confidence in New York, after the attack on the World 
     Trade Center.
       ``So I did not hesitate one minute, Klaus, before accepting 
     your kind invitation to come here once more, at the beginning 
     of my last year in office. And I was also very happy to 
     accept the title you suggested for this session--`a new 
     mindset for the United Nations'.
       ``Why? because it expresses something I have striven to 
     achieve throughout these nine years, and something in which 
     Davos itself has played a part.
       ``In 1999, when I came here and called for a `global 
     compact' between the United Nations and the private sector, 
     many of my colleagues in the Secretariat--and many 
     representatives of member States--would hardly have been more 
     shocked if I had proposed a compact with the Devil.
       ``It is the mindset that I have been seeking to change 
     throughout my time in office--the mindset that sees 
     international relations as nothing more than relations 
     between States, and the United Nations as little more than a 
     trade union for governments.
       ``My objective has been to persuade both the member States 
     and my colleagues in the Secretariat that the United Nations 
     needs to engage not only with governments but with people. 
     Only if it does that, I believe, can it fulfill its vocation 
     and be of use to humanity in the 21st century.
       ``That's why, in the year 2000, I used the first words of 
     the UN Charter, `We the Peoples' as the title of my report 
     setting out the agenda for the Millennium Summit, at which 
     political leaders from all over the world came together to 
     assess the challenges of a new century, and adopted a 
     collective response, known as the `Millennium Declaration.'
       ``And that was why last year, in my report called `In 
     Larger Freedom', I urged governments to accept that security 
     and development are interdependent, and that neither can be 
     long sustained without respect for human rights and the rule 
     of law.
       ``That report was intended as the blueprint, not only for a 
     far-reaching reform of the United Nations itself, but also 
     for a series of decisions that would enable humanity to 
     realize the aims of the Millennium Declaration, particularly 
     in the light of new challenges that had arisen since.
       ``How far the blueprint will be translated into reality, 
     remains to be seen. But in the meantime the United Nations 
     has not stood still. Far from it! This has been a decade of 
     rapid change. Let me give you a few examples.
       ``When I took office there was a widespread perception, 
     based on the tragic events in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda, 
     that UN peacekeeping was a failed experiment, and that 
     henceforth this task would have to be handled by regional 
     organizations.
       ``Peacekeepers, especially in countries where conflict is 
     still raging--where there is literally no peace to keep--
     continue to face immense challenges. Even so, today we have 
     85,000 people serving in 16 UN peacekeeping operations, 
     spread across four continents. Most of these operations are 
     not static observers of a truce, but active participants in 
     the implementation of peace agreements, helping the people of 
     war-torn countries make the transition from war to peace.
       ``Certainly, in many parts of the world regional 
     organizations play an important role, and so they should. But 
     most often they do so in partnership with the United Nations. 
     The UN has become, in effect, the indispensable mechanism for 
     bringing international help to countries recovering from 
     conflict--and member States have now recognized this by 
     agreeing to set up a Peacebuilding Commission, within the UN, 
     to manage this highly complex process.
       ``The last decade has also seen growing use of United 
     Nations economic sanctions. These are now used to influence 
     or restrict the activity not only of recalcitrant States, but 
     also of non-State actors, such as rebel movements or 
     terrorist groups. At the same time, the Security Council has 
     developed more sophisticated and humane types of sanctions, 
     aimed at individuals rather than whole societies--travel 
     bans, for instance, and the freezing of bank accounts.
       ``The same philosophy of punishing individuals rather than 
     communities has driven the work of the UN criminal tribunals 
     for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia--one of which was the 
     first international court to convict people of genocide 
     (including a former prime minister) and of rape as a war 
     crime, while the other has become the first to indict and 
     try a former Head of State.
       ``This in turn has led to further innovations, including 
     the mixed tribunal in Sierra Leone and, of course, the 
     International Criminal Court. The latter is not an organ of 
     the United Nations, but the UN convened and serviced the 
     conference, which adopted its Statute in 1998.
       ``Over 100 States have now ratified the Statute--which 
     means that the Court's jurisdiction is now recognized by well 
     over half the UN's membership.
       ``Another way the UN has changed is the increasing focus on 
     human rights--which is reflected in the recent decision by 
     member States to strengthen the office of the High 
     Commissioner for Human Rights. That office is now a dynamic 
     operational entity, which deploys and supports hundreds of 
     human rights workers around the world. And I hope that within 
     the next week or two we may see agreement on a corresponding 
     change at the intergovernmental level, with the establishment 
     of a more authoritative Human Rights Council, to replace the 
     now widely discredited Commission.
       ``One more example of change: the United Nations has 
     responded to the growth of international terrorism. Even 
     before `9/11', the Security Council had imposed sanctions on 
     Al-Qaida, and set up a special committee to monitor its 
     activities. Immediately after the attack, the Council went 
     much further, with its historic resolution 1373, which 
     imposed stringent obligations on all countries, established a 
     list of terrorist organizations and individuals, and created 
     the Counter-Terrorism Committee to monitor member States' 
     compliance and help them improve their capacity to enact and 
     implement anti-terrorist legislation.
       ``In short, I believe the United Nations is proving itself 
     an increasingly flexible instrument, to which its member 
     States turn for a wider and wider array of functions.
       ``For instance, within the last five years the UN has been 
     asked: to shepherd Afghanistan's transition from the anarchic 
     wasteland of the Taliban and the warlords to the nascent 
     democracy--still struggling, but hopeful--that it is today; 
     to help establish the Interim Government of Iraq, and to help 
     organize the referendum and elections there--as it has 
     supported democratic elections in half the world's nations 
     over the last 12 years; to verify the withdrawal of Syrian 
     troops from Lebanon and carry out, for the first time ever, a 
     full criminal investigation into the assassination of a 
     former prime minister; to coordinate global relief efforts 
     after the tsunami, and again after the earthquake in Kashmir; 
     and to take the lead in raising global awareness, as well as 
     funds, to protect the world's peoples against avian flu.
       ``What all these activities have in common is that they 
     involve the United Nations not simply in relations among its 
     member States, but also in the lives of their peoples. To 
     carry out such tasks, we must engage not only with 
     governments but with all the new actors on the international 
     scene.
       ``That includes the private sector, but it also includes 
     parliamentarians; voluntary, non-profit organizations; 
     philanthropic foundations; the global media; celebrities from 
     the worlds of sport and entertainment; and in some cases 
     labour unions, mayors and local administrators. And it 
     includes less benign actors such as terrorists, warlords, and 
     traffickers in drugs, illicit weapons or--worst of all--the 
     lives and bodies of human beings.
       ``That is why I have repeatedly urged all the organs of the 
     United Nations to be more open to civil society, so that 
     their decisions can fully reflect the contribution made by 
     groups and individuals who devote themselves to studying 
     specific problems, or working in specific areas.
       ``It is also why I myself have cultivated contacts with 
     scholars, with parliamentarians, with practitioners of all 
     sorts, and with young people--seeking to learn from their 
     views and also encouraging them, whatever sector they work 
     in, to use their talents for the public good and to keep the 
     global horizon in view.
       ``It is one of the reasons why I have worked constantly to 
     make our Organization more transparent and comprehensible to 
     the public, and thereby more genuinely accountable.
       ``And, of course, it is why I launched the Global Compact, 
     to which the international business community--including some 
     of you in this audience--has responded with such enthusiasm 
     that it is now the world's leading corporate citizenship 
     initiative, involving more that 2,400 companies, in nearly 90 
     countries.
       ``This new mindset must also extend to the domain of 
     international peace and security--so that we think of 
     security not only in conventional terms, focusing on 
     prevention of war between States, but also as including the 
     protection of the world's peoples, against threats which, to 
     many of them today, seem more immediate and more real.
       ``One of those threats is the threat of genocide and other 
     crimes against humanity. I called the General Assembly's 
     attention to this in 1999, warning that such mass atrocities 
     can never be treated as a purely domestic affair. Being 
     rightly called crimes against humanity, they demand a 
     collective response from humanity, which should be organized 
     and legitimized by the United Nations.

[[Page E894]]

       ``More recently, the High-Level Panel that I appointed in 
     2003 has identified a broad range of threats, including: 
     poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation; 
     conflict within States, as well as between them; the spread 
     of nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons; 
     terrorism; and transnational organized crime.
       ``My `Larger Freedom' report built on this re-definition of 
     global security, drawing it together with the detailed 
     recommendations of the Millennium Project for achieving the 
     Millennium Development Goals by 2015--which in itself would 
     rescue many millions of people from the threats of poverty 
     and disease.
       ``But my report also included a third dimension: human 
     rights and the rule of law. Without these, any society, 
     however well-armed, will remain insecure; and its 
     development, however dynamic, will remain precarious.
       ``Member States took the report as their starting-point in 
     negotiating the outcome of last September's world summit. I 
     won't say that that document fulfills all my hopes. But it 
     does contain many important decisions--from the creation of a 
     Peacebuilding Commission and Human Rights Council, through 
     the commitments to advance the Millennium Development Goals, 
     to the acceptance, by all States individually and 
     collectively, of the responsibility to protect populations 
     from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes 
     against humanity.
       ``Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
       ``The United Nations cannot stand still, because the 
     threats to humanity do not stand still. Every day the world 
     presents new challenges, which the founders of the UN 60 
     years ago could never have anticipated. Whether it is a 
     looming crisis over Iran and its compliance with the Nuclear 
     Non-Proliferation Treaty, continuing atrocities in Darfur, or 
     the threat of an avian flu pandemic, people all over the 
     world look to the United Nations to play a role in making 
     peace, protecting civilians, improving livelihoods, promoting 
     human rights and upholding international law. I have worked 
     long and hard to transform the United Nations so that when 
     called upon, as we are every day, we will deliver what is 
     asked of us--effectively, efficiently and equitably. That 
     is the true objective of the changes I have sought to 
     bring about, and it will be the true measure of my success 
     or failure.
       ``And my successor--since I understand several members of 
     this panel may be interested in the position--need not worry. 
     Changing the mindset of the United Nations, so that it can 
     both reflect and influence the temper of the times, is a 
     never-ending challenge. There will be plenty more work to do 
     in the years and decades to come.''
       I have worked for three Secretary Generals and been at post 
     for some 20 years. I am honored to have worked for the House 
     of Peace. As we approach the new era of a new Secretary-
     General I say it is time for renewal.

                          ____________________