Monitoring Policy Making at the United Nations |
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Global Policy Forum List-Serv
GPF List-Serv
February 28-March 3, 2000Greetings from Global Policy Forum!
Another detail of the fall of Carthage is worth recounting this week. According to the Greek historian Polybius, who accompanied the Roman general on his campaign, Scipio wept as he surveyed the burning city of Carthage. Turning to his companion, Scipio said: "It is glorious, but I have a dread foreboding that some time the same doom will be pronounced upon my own country." The concept deserves to be remembered -- what is sown will be reaped.
In our own time, killing and power politics continue tragically in the Balkans. We noticed an intriguing detail in a New York Times news story on March 2 about ethnic Albanian units of the Kosovo Liberation Army organizing inside Serbia. The story mentioned that the militias were "wearing a mixture of German and American fatigues." This is the first reference we have seen in the mainstream media (though very indirect) to a widely-rumored role of the CIA and German intelligence in training and arming the KLA -- an operation said to be headquartered in Munich. Many diplomats and policy experts treat this as common-knowledge, but we have not read a single at-length news report or analytical paper on the subject. We would greatly welcome information from our readers who know of such sources. If it can be established without doubt that Washington and Berlin trained these violent, ethnic thugs and helped them oust the democratic opposition in Kosovo, then the NATO campaign and its moralizing propaganda will appear in a new and extremely compromised light.
Once international crises begin, interventions are organized. We received a mailing this week from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, offering special training with "a synergistic approach to conflict intervention" and "planning for civil-military cooperation." The program, designed for high-level military and civilian planners who work in international emergencies, is a joint project of Harvard and a company called the Conflict Management Group. A retired US army general heads the program on the Harvard side. The glossy brochure promises to help participants "act more effectively in all phases of an intervention" and it proposes to train them to "build useful relationships and wider networks during complex emergency situations." The eight-day program carries a price tag of $4,200.
Emergencies can also offer interesting opportunities to businesses with relevant wares to sell. The UN buys lots of tents, food rations, uniforms, storage units, pontoon bridges, trucks, fuel and many other goods, not to mention ship and airplane charters, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, The UN Office for Project Services is sponsoring an "International Aid & Trade" conference/exhibition at New York's Jacob Javits Convention Center on May 31 and June 1st on precisely this topic. This week a fancy program packet for the event arrived, touting the many contracts on offer. More fundamental than procurement, though, the packet boosts the UN's effort of "building partnerships" with business, through lectures, exhibitions, workshops and networking. The comprehensive registration fee -- $1,350 for a three-person team.
As UN-business relations continue to grow, our friends at the Federation of International Civil Servants' Associations (FICSA) have prepared "Model Principles" governing the selection of corporations that will work in partnership with the UN. The thirteen principles cover human rights, sustainability, integrity, transparency, rights of unions to organize and other issues. Given the elaborate standards in place governing NGO relations with the UN, it would seem only fair and sensible to develop standards in this area. We would urge delegations and the Secretariat to look into the matter. NGOs should take up this cause as well. The proposed standards appear in FICSA Quarterly (October, 1999)
FICSA's parent body, Public Services International, recently issued a Research Network Newsletter containing an interesting report on the privatization of the world's water supplies, as background to the Second World Water Forum, to be held in The Hague in mid-March. Increasingly, governments are turning over the provision of water to private companies. Meanwhile, the water sector has gone through many mergers and acquisitions. Huge firms like the French-based Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux Group are assembling world-wide water service systems and they are also moving into municipal sewage as well.
Through loan conditionalities, the World Bank pressured many governments to spin off their water-sewage systems, along with other utilities like electricity, telecommunications, railways, posts and even road transport. Promoted as a way to broaden services and to make them available more efficiently and at lower prices, these moves have often resulted in high water prices that the poor cannot afford. Since water is a fundamental necessity of life, this seems a dangerous trend indeed. At present, a very large number of people have no access to clean water. Privatization in a world of growing income inequality will make matters even worse.
PSI also reports that new WTO rules promote the privatization of health care, under the rubric of "trade in services." It seems that 76 countries have already committed themselves to open markets for health insurance, 49 to open markets in medical and dental services, and 39 to marketized hospital services. The EU has committed to a particularly "open" approach, which suggests that US-based health and insurance firms may soon challenge the EU countries' public health systems and demand a fair share of the market.
The model of market choice increasingly applies to relief efforts in even the deepest humanitarian crises, where emergency food supplies must be rapidly organized to stave off starvation. Instead of agreeing to binding assessments for the funding of such crises, the wealthiest countries insist on keeping a charity system in place, so that they pay as much as they feel like, when it suits them. Rather than binding assessments, they prefer international "trust funds" and other voluntary strategies. The UN has dozens of empty trust funds, mute testimony to this cynical system. On Wednesday, the World Food Programme announced that it faces an $81 million shortfall for basic food assistance in 16 African countries. News of this kind is all too common around Turtle Bay, sometimes attributed by cliché-ridden journalists to "donor fatigue."
Even in the high-profile UN operation in East Timor, money simply has not been forthcoming from the wealthy "donors." When the Secretary General reported Tuesday to the Security Council on his Asia trip, he reported that agreed-upon funds had not arrived and that the UN had received just $22 million out of nearly $200 million needed. Also last week, the UN's Kosovo chief, Bernard Kouchner, again spoke out bitterly about the continuing financial crisis faced by his mission, which has funds for only two more weeks of operations and cannot hire urgently-needed police, as well as other basic employees for the civil administration. "This is an absurd, humiliating and self-defeating way to run anything," a colleague of Kouchner told a reporter. "Running Kosovo is hard enough without running around the world with a begging bowl," he said. Kouchner will be in New York Monday to give a report directly to the Security Council.
Readers have asked us for the sources we used for our commentary on Russia in last week's list-serv. The data on social conditions, comparing 1985 and 1995, came from IMF Occasional Paper No. 155 (March 1998). We drew other material from IMF Occasional Papers No. 111 (February 1994) and No. 175 (1998), as well as the World Bank web site and a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies called "Net Assessment of the Russian Economy," updated as of December, 1999. The collapsing Russian economy is also reflected in the UN dues scale, calculated from countries' share of world GNP. In 1992, the Russian rate was 9.40%, the third largest (after the US and Japan). In 2000, the Russian rate had fallen to 1.04%, fifteenth largest. That's a long way down in just eight years.
We want to respond to a reader who disagrees with our critical report on a food aid web site last week. We had argued that this site was ineffective. Our reader points out that another, far larger site is actually working quite well. We checked into this - at "TheHungerSite.com" - and found claims that 12 million pounds of food have been generated by 34 million "clicks," between June 1999 and March 1, 2000. So we stand corrected. We remain skeptical about this sort of enterprise, though, and we suspect that internet slight-of-hand will not solve world hunger.
Among the special postings to the GPF site this week, we call readers' attention to a new page in our section on UN finance, which provides information on the budgets of UN agencies and funds. Declining funding, both assessed and voluntary, has created a difficult and even critical situation for a number of these important programs. For the first time, all of our information on this topic, including valuable new tables and charts, are assembled in one place.
We also want to announce that our colleague Kai Muller is expanding and updating our information on the reform of the Security Council. Though we do not anticipate a breakthrough in this seven-year discussion, the many speeches, reports and press stories provide a very interesting and revealing achieve on the difficulties of renewing the Council and making it a more effective organ of global governance.
Finally, this week, we congratulate our friend, Ruth Steinkraus-Cohen, who received an International Volunteer Award at a gala event in Washington on March 1st.. She was one of 32 awardees, but for us she was the main star. All her life, she has worked to support and strengthen the United Nations, with a clear view of its highest calling and purpose. Known far and wide for her calendars that celebrate the UN's work (they are now available in all the official UN languages), Ruth has worked tirelessly to improve the UN's public support, to strengthen its funding, and to show the welcome of US citizens to delegates and UN staff. Ruth, we salute you!
