United Nations – Amid the vitriol and accusations, leaders at this year’s General Assembly meeting sounded the same note: The U.N. Security Council doesn’t represent our interests anymore, and it must be reshaped to reflect the world of 2006, not 1945, the year it was created.
The demand was not new, but the insistence was. Reform of the Security Council had been given up for dead last year, suffocated by bitter national rivalries and a refusal to compromise. But with this year’s General Assembly session, it’s been resurrected.
Many speakers in the General Assembly suggested a new anger toward the council had fueled their call.
The Security Council took more than a month to respond to the war between Israel and Hezbollah, a delay that was largely blamed on the United States.
Iran was also dragged before the council under European and American urging, though many poor nations don’t share their concern about its suspect nuclear program.
“The Security Council has not only to be more representative but also to be more effective if it is to be able to satisfactorily perform the role mandated to it by the charter,” Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee told the Assembly debate.
Modernizing the Security Council was a key element of a reform package unveiled by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the spring of 2005. Months of jockeying, negotiations, deals and promises ultimately came to nothing, the work stymied by national rivalries and bickering.
But an increased feeling among poor nations that their wealthy neighbors dominate the Security Council has galvanized them.
Their anger has gotten so bad that many speakers warned that the council could lose its authority. The body already has enough trouble getting nations to listen to its demands, and it risks slipping toward irrelevancy without change, they said.
That could be to the detriment of President Bush, who has routed many of his biggest foreign policy initiatives through the council recently, after circumventing it in his first term.
