United Nations: Challenge for The New Boss

By Bonnie Angelo

When Egypt's Boutros Boutros-Ghali became Secretary-General of the United Nations on New Year's Day, he hit the ground running. He'd better not slow down, because never in its 47-year history has the world body had so much to do in so many areas of the globe.

The U.N. is poised to dispatch a peacekeeping force of 10,000 to Yugoslavia. An additional 1,000 blue helmets are on their way to El Salvador to monitor the end of that country's 12-year civil war. A U.N. mission is organizing a referendum for the people of the Western Sahara to determine whether they want to be independent or part of Morocco. And an advance team is preparing to take over the administration of an entire country, Cambodia, until it can elect a new government in 1993. Meanwhile, the U.N. continues to grapple with a host of crises that know no borders: drug trafficking, global warming, the pollution of the oceans and waterways, overpopulation and famine.

Thanks to the end of the cold war, the world is reaching out more than ever to U.N. mediators, technocrats and blue-helmeted soldiers. No longer are the U.S. and the Soviet Union competing for influence among the 166 members of the General Assembly or threatening each other with vetoes in the Security Council.

"We've bumbled into a world where everything affects everybody," muses Sir Brian Urquhart, a 40-year veteran of the U.N. who is now a scholar in residence at the Ford Foundation. "We've got to stop looking at the U.N. only in terms of day-to-day emergencies and start seeing it as the only organization that can foster institutions for a global society."

But the U.N. has not even begun to change in a way that will allow it to take advantage of the revolution in world politics. Boutros-Ghali is like a chief executive officer taking over a corporation in danger of Chapter 11: it has vast assets and a line of products everyone wants -- peace, health and prosperity -- but a bottom line that hovers near bankruptcy. The U.N. is overstaffed, underfunded and mismanaged. Its activities are often badly conceived, wasteful and hobbled by petty politics.

The good news is that there is a real move toward reform. A group of 30 concerned ambassadors, acting on their own, worked for months to produce a blueprint for restructuring the organization. They presented the plan to the new Secretary-General even before he took office.

Boutros-Ghali's predecessor, Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru, retired with well-earned praise for his achievements as a peacemaker. He accepted the Nobel Prize for his peacekeeping forces in 1988, but his stewardship of the U.N. was flawed. He resented and resisted suggestions for change, taking them as personal criticisms. His most serious shortcoming during his decade in office was his unwillingness to bring the U.N. bureaucracy under control.

Observes Urquhart, a leading advocate of reform: "The model home designed by the founders in 1945 has become a sprawling, ramshackle structure; people have long since forgotten the purpose of the rooms that have been added over the years."

Australian Ambassador Peter Wilenski, an internationally recognized expert on management who is spearheading the reform movement, says the U.N. "is run as a club rather than an organization." Notes Edward Luck, president of the U.N. Association of the U.S.A., a private group: "The organization doesn't know how to set priorities -- and good management starts there."

Much of the problem is an elaborate and entrenched system of patronage based on accommodating the national pride of member states. The U.N. Charter calls only for "geographical balance" in filling various positions, but members have come to expect, and protect, their slots. The U.S. is as much an offender as any. The White House personnel office seizes on U.N. assignments at every level for political payoffs.

Another impediment is what Luck calls "logrolling at its worst" in the General Assembly. The Arabs, for example, insist on maintaining a separate office for the Palestinians, and the Africans a special committee on apartheid. The two groups have banded together to protect both bureaucratic units, even though neither has a role to play in the affairs of the other.

The U.N. Economic and Social Council is too unwieldy to deal with its vast agenda, which includes human rights, environment, population control and economic development. Its resolutions, says Wilenski, "are largely unread and ignored." The reform plan calls for reducing the number of states represented from 54 to around 20.

Since the end of the cold war, the Security Council, with its mandate to deal with matters of war and peace, has functioned reasonably well, especially during the showdown with Saddam Hussein over his invasion of Kuwait. But the Security Council is still a vestige of World War II. Its five permanent members -- the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia (the successor state to the U.S.S.R.) -- were allies against Germany and Japan, two countries that are now economic superpowers in their own right.

Because of the ever increasing importance of economic issues, pressure is building to give Germany and Japan permanent places on the Security Council, but without the power of the veto that the "perm five" possess. Opponents of that idea fear that revising the Charter would lift the lid of Pandora's box: the Third World would demand its own place on the Security Council in the form of seats for three regional powers -- India, Brazil and Nigeria. Otherwise, power in the council would be weighted against the poorer nations of the world.

Yves Fortier, who just retired as Canada's ambassador to the U.N., says the organization suffers from "overlapping mandates" among its different agencies. A single water project in Africa, for example, might have six agencies vying for control. "We've witnessed some appalling turf wars," says Fortier. To avert future battles, he urges Boutros-Ghali to "commandeer the system and make sure that the barons are not always getting in each other's way and trying to outdo sister agencies." Last month the General Assembly took a first step to control duplication and infighting among humanitarian aid programs by calling for the appointment of a high-level coordinator with the power to overrule agency heads.

The key to reform, however, is not adding posts but getting rid of them. The U.N. needs a sunset law to eliminate units that have outlived their usefulness.

The Trusteeship Council, a holdover from the post-World War I League of Nations, was set up to supervise the administration of trust territories. Its function has shriveled to almost nothing, yet it continues to employ 13 professionals. The moribund Military Staff Committee, with delegates from 39 nations, meets regularly for splendid lunches, but has never played a meaningful role, not even during last year's gulf war. A cluster of document offices spews out an avalanche of papers that are "printed in six languages," as one delegate notes, "and read in none."

Over the years the U.N. has spawned an array of specialized agencies that have become autonomous fiefdoms. Based mostly in Geneva, Paris and Rome, they raise their own funds and answer to their own governing boards rather than to U.N. headquarters overlooking the East River in New York City. "You cannot control them," says Edward Luck. "The Secretary-General cannot lay down priorities or coordinate their activities."

Some, like the U.N. Children's Fund and the International Atomic Energy Agency, are generally well regarded. Others -- most prominently UNESCO (the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) -- have been an embarrassment to the institution. Increasingly, UNESCO degenerated into little more than an organ of Marxist propaganda and a plaything for its corrupt, high-living director, Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal. The U.S., Britain and Singapore withdrew in protest in 1985, with all their financial support. M'Bow was finally forced out two years later, and since then UNESCO has somewhat cleaned up its act, no longer spending 80% of its funds in Paris, no longer packed with M'Bow's relatives.

Other agencies pose different problems. The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization has been run by the same autocratic director, Edouard Saouma of Lebanon, for 16 years. "He dispenses favors and collects political debts from member states," says Luck. "I question whether anyone should run any agency for that long."

The most egregious example of organizational bloat is the one closest to home for Boutros-Ghali: the U.N. Secretariat. A rough counterpart of the President's Cabinet and White House staff, the top echelon of the Secretariat originally consisted of eight assistant secretaries. Now it has 20 assistant secretaries, a new superlayer of 27 under secretaries and a director-general -- plus 21 more top-level officials who are not on the regular budget, for a total of 69.

Reformers urge clearing out the deadwood and bringing in officials chosen on merit who can provide the Secretary-General with background reports, analyses of complex situations, options for decisions and ideas for future missions. The Secretariat's role would be similar to the one that the U.S. National Security Council staff plays in advising the President.

Shrinking the U.N.'s size and overhauling its organization chart would add muscle, speed and flexibility to the way it goes about its work. From his first day Boutros-Ghali has urged "preventive diplomacy" -- sending envoys to try to defuse political crises before they escalate into armed conflict. Moving quickly to identify and deal with explosive situations can avert bloodshed in the countries involved and for the U.N. From the time of the first peacekeeping mission, 794 blue helmets have been killed in the service of world peace.

None of these burgeoning opportunities for the U.N. come cheap. This year's regular budget for the New York headquarters and core operations is $1.2 billion. The post-cold war boom in peacekeeping has led to eight major new operations since 1988, with costs projected to reach $1 billion this year. The Cambodia venture alone is expected to drain $1 billion-plus over the next two years, but that will be a bargain if it buys peace in that devastated land.

Funding is a perennial problem for the U.N. as a whole and for its richest member in particular. For years the U.S., which bears one-fourth of the financial burden, was embroiled in disputes not only with the U.N. but also between its own Executive and Legislative branches over how much it owed and how far behind it was in paying its assessments; at one point, in 1989, the U.N. claimed that the U.S. debt totaled $365 million. The U.S. is now paying off its arrears, although not as fast as the U.N. would like.

Boutros-Ghali has spent a lifetime in international affairs as a professor, politician and diplomat. When he was named Secretary-General last November, however, it was not so much because of his experience in the world arena as because the Africans insisted it was their turn for leadership of the U.N. As an Egyptian, Boutros-Ghali was on their list of six acceptable candidates, even though he is a highly Europeanized Christian Arab. The Security Council, bowing to the Africans' demand, chose him.

Still, Boutros-Ghali may turn out to be just the right man for the job. In his first speech to the General Assembly, he pledged to "examine every proposal for streamlining our operations, eliminating what is wasteful or obsolete." But he must act within six months, say the reformers, before he is co-opted by the bureaucracy and loses the fresh, critical view of a newcomer.

At 69, he says he will not seek a second five-year term. Since he does not have to worry about re-election, he can break crockery, step on toes and generally give the organization the shake-up it so badly needs. Now all he has to do is do it.