Diplomats working on a pivotal document on the management overhaul of the UN and updated approaches to terrorism, development and human rights have locked horns just days before it is to be presented to more than 170 world leaders for their endorsement.
Deep divisions persist despite crisis talks involving 32 ambassadors chosen to try to reach consensus, and there is looming embarrassment for the UN in having another failure on the heels of this week's report by the commission investigating the Iraqi oil-for-food program. The report, by a commission led by Paul Volcker, a former US Federal Reserve chairman, called for the kind of fundamental changes that the document puts forward.
Exposure
Once imagined as a visionary statement of the most far-reaching changes since the UN was created in San Francisco 60 years ago, the document instead is exposing the debilitating internal conflicts that often doom the organization to inaction.
"Trying to reach the ambitions we had for it back in January as San Francisco II has rapidly become unrealistic," Mark Malloch Brown, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's chief of staff, said in an interview on Friday.
"Now people are crimping it out of shape; they're emptying it of a lot of content," he said. "If this is just brinkmanship, we can still pull it out, but if not, my deepest fear is that we'll end up with a summit of empty words and broken promises."
That would be a great setback for Annan, who first proposed the changes, and whose future is increasingly being tied to whatever success he can have with pushing them forward.
Senator Norm Coleman, who has repeatedly called for Annan's resignation because of the oil-for-food scandal, came to the UN on Friday to reiterate it.
"The secretary-general is in no position to let that reform happen," he said. "If the guy leading the charge is stained with a record of incompetence, of mismanagement, of fraud, it's going to make it very hard for him to do the very heavy lifting required."
Rejection
Representative Tom Lantos rejected the notion, however, saying that Annan "is the first to recognize the need for the fiscal and administrative reforms at the institution that Congress has called for. Therefore, calls for him to step down are misguided and do him an injustice."
Stalling progress is a basic disagreement between nations that want to see more power vested in the office of the secretary general and the 15-member Security Council and others, from the developing world, who want to retain power in the 191-member General Assembly.
Abdallah Baali, Algeria's ambassador, said, "On management reform, you have one side basically saying that the secretary-general should be empowered and should have all flexibility as a kind of CEO and the other side saying that it is not ready to give up the prerogative of the General Assembly and would like to keep a close eye on the work of the secretary-general."
Also in dispute are measures to define terrorism as action against civilians that can never have any political justification, to enable the UN to take action in countries that don't protect their citizens from genocide.
A clash over development was defused on Tuesday when the US withdrew an earlier demand to eliminate all mention of the so-called millennium development goals and compromised on language covering the Kyoto Protocols on climate change and the goal of devoting 0.7 percent of gross national product to development aid.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
New Zealand is open to expanding its frigate fleet beyond its current two vessels, with New Zealand Minister of Defence Chris Penk saying “no options are off the table” as the government weighs buying new warships from Japan or the UK. The government yesterday said it is looking to replace its two aging Anzac-class frigates, which were both commissioned almost 30 years ago. The UK’s Type 31 and Japan’s Mogami-class warships are the options under consideration. Speaking in an interview, Penk said there is potential to increase the number of frigates the nation purchases. “We need a certain amount of capability as a
The Philippine Coast Guard yesterday said it deployed aircraft to issue radio warnings to a Chinese research ship in a disputed area of the South China Sea “swarming” with vessels from Beijing’s so-called maritime militia. The research vessel Xiang Yang Hong 33 (向陽紅33), which is capable of supporting submersible craft, was operating near a reef in the contested Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島), which Taiwan also claims, the Philippine Coast Guard said. The Chinese ship was deploying a service boat toward the Spratly’s Iroquois Reef on Wednesday when it was spotted by a coast guard plane, “confirming ongoing unauthorized [marine scientific research]
RSS