Ambassadors in New York are now working day and night to hammer out the details of the current UN reform proposals to be debated at the summit of heads of state. But whatever they manage to agree upon, as a long-time UN official I am conscious of how much the UN has changed since I joined 27 years ago.
If I had suggested to my superiors at that time that the UN would one day observe and even run elections in sovereign states, conduct intrusive inspections for weapons of mass destruction or set up international criminal tribunals and coerce governments into handing over their citizens to be tried by foreigners under international law, they would have told me that I did not understand what the UN was all about. Yet the UN has done all of these things, and more, during the last two decades. It has administered territory, conducted huge multi-dimensional peacekeeping operations with nearly 80,000 soldiers in the field and deployed human rights monitors to report on the behaviour of sovereign governments. In short, the UN has been a highly adaptable institution.
Today’s reform imperatives can be traced to international divisions over the Iraq war. A 2003 poll in 20 countries revealed the UN’s standing had declined in all of them. The UN’s reputation suffered in the US because it did not support the Bush administration on the war – and in the 19 other countries because it was unable to prevent the war.
As we face the new challenges of our time, let us not forget the old ones. The combination of poverty, drought, famine and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa threatens more human lives than terrorism or tsunamis ever did. This summit must reaffirm the Millennium Development Goals and recommit the world to achieving these targets by 2015. There is no longer any excuse for leaving well over a billion people in abject misery.
To change the world, we must change too. The UN can be a much more effective instrument if its member states in the General Assembly and the Security Council are better organised and give clearer directives to us in the Secretariat–along with the flexibility to carry them out–and then hold us clearly accountable.
Note: SHASHI THAROOR’s books include The Great Indian Novel, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, and Show Business. He is an undersecretary general at the United Nations.