US Senator Patrick Leahy on Wednesday gave his personal support to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose resignation has been demanded by a fellow senator, saying the US Congress shouldn't make the UN a political football.
The Vermont Democrat, who is also a member of the US delegation to the UN General Assembly, was the third member of Congress to come to UN headquarters to back Annan after Senator Norm Coleman urged him to step down over allegations of the corruption in the UN oil-for-food program.
Leahy said the White House assured him that its intent last week, when US Ambassador John Danforth expressed confidence in Annan and said he should remain at the helm of the UN, was to take the heat off calls for the secretary-general's resignation.
He said he talked to US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about Annan. "I know they support the secretary-general. I do, too," Leahy told reporters after a private meeting with Annan.
The Bush administration wants a thorough investigation of the oil-for-food allegations and Leahy said he believes all members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, should wait for the results of the inquiry being led by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.
The call for Annan's resignation by Coleman, a Minnesota Republican, made headlines and led to an outpouring of support for the secretary-general from nations around the world. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative Tom Lantos of California, both Democrats, came here to personally back him.
But five Republican members of the House of Representatives endorsed Coleman's call and announced support for a bill that would withhold some US dues to the UN if the organization doesn't fully cooperate with investigations of the program.
Leahy said there is a potential that UN dues could become "a wedge issue" between Democrats and Republicans "and I think it's unfortunate."
As a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he said he worked hard several years ago to get Congress to pay its back dues to the UN and doesn't want to see the same problem suddenly repeated.
"With all its imperfections the UN is a lot better than not having the UN, and the US -- with all the concerns it may have about various actions of the UN -- is a lot better off being an active member of the UN than not being," Leahy said.
"You always have people who will take shots at the UN, some of it legitimate, but I think we ought to take a deep breath," he said.
"This is not a time to make a political football out of the UN. We need them in the Sudan. We need them throughout parts of Africa. We need them" for peacekeeping in many countries and to help with elections, including in Iraq, he added.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the