UN reform a disaster: Evans

GARETH Evans has launched a savage attack on UN inertia, condemning the troubled organisation's botched attempt at wholesale reform in its 60th year as a depressing disaster.

The former Australian foreign minister is now head of the International Crisis Group and a UN insider who recently missed out on the coveted post of High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. He was a member of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's high-level panel on UN reform. Though a strong supporter of the UN, Mr Evans warned that the failure to embrace the panel's reform blueprint, along with disagreements on security questions, development issues, the use of force, disarmament, management and the discredited Human Rights Commission constituted "a huge wasted opportunity".

"The management side of the house in the UN is depressingly blank," Mr Evans said.

"Yes, the Secretary-General has been given a series of mandates . . . but the atmosphere has not changed in New York.

"It is still the piranha pool of diplomats enjoying tearing flesh off each other, to the total exclusion of any enthusiasm for high principle or effectiveness of the organisation."

Speaking at a conference in Paris on the UN and international security challenges, Mr Evans clashed over the outcome of the UN world summit in New York last month with his friend Hans Blix, formerly the UN's chief weapons inspector.

After Mr Blix told reporters the UN was in reasonably good shape, suffered from overly high reform expectations and was not gripped by endemic corruption, Mr Evans accused him of "gathering rosebuds of consolation".

According to Mr Evans, the summit was a "deep disappointment". "It needed to be a big leap forward. It wasn't - it was a slow, small crawl and I don't think we've got any reason for any great optimism that we're going to get better than that for a very long time to come. That's a huge wasted opportunity."

More than 175 world leaders at the World Summit endorsed a watered down 35-page reform document that avoided most of the big questions facing the UN such as security council reform and the definition of terrorism.

Mr Evans's reform proposal to protect citizens from genocide and war crimes - legalising intervention to protect - was one of the few doctrines endorsed.

"If you compare it (the summit outcome) with the hopes and expectations of three months earlier in June, it is close to a disaster. And I say that not because I think expectations were over-inflated," Mr Evans said.

He added that the UN system "for all its flaws" had worked positively to reduce conflicts in the past 15 years, but the overall outlook was "depressing".

Yes, definitely an internationalist, but one who sees the UN's warts pretty clearly, it would appear. I agree with him. The UN and its apologists, especially in the European press, are a rather insular community with a tendency to reject calls for reform without really understanding their urgency. If the whole internationalist approach is in jeopardy, in their view it is purely a result of Bush and his unilataralism and not a result of systemic corruption on the part of an organization that may well be wheezing its way into total irrelevancy.

I'm becoming less concerned about the potential damage of its death throes. Let it go.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.