Reminding a United States House of Representatives committee that the United Nations has undergone more reform under Secretary-General Kofi Annan than under any of his predecessors, his Chief of Staff Thursday said the UN is under-funded and over-managed.
Mark Malloch Brown told the House Committee on International Relations, chaired by Rep. Henry Hyde, in Washington, DC, that Mr. Annan “welcomes the fact that you are as intent as he is to ensure that the United Nations is the most effective instrument it can be in the interests of the people it exists to serve.”
Listing cases of under-funding, however, he said the UN was operating 18 peacekeeping missions, with 67.000 uniformed personnel, on a budget of 4,5 billion US dollar that is less than 0,5 per cent of the worlds military spending “and means a unit cost for peacekeeping that is a fraction of that spent by the US and UK in comparable operations.”
– It is a bargain – but perhaps too much of one, he said.
Instead of threatening to cut contributions in response to failure, a long-term, sustainable solution would come about when the US and fellow UN Member States “agree what they want to the UN to do, then fund it properly to allow the UN to do the task well.”
Meanwhile, the UNs inter-governmental constraints on the Secretariat “often amount to micromanagement,” Mr. Malloch Brown said.
As head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) reporting to an Executive Board of Member States, Mr. Malloch Brown said, he had more autonomy and more accountability for results than had Mr. Annan, “who is mired in a web of Government committees and outdated rules that impede his freedom to manage.”
At the heart of the UN reform agenda, he added, “is the organizing idea of how a Secretary-General can be given back the power to manage, while at the same time Governments recover the strategic tools to ensure accountability for results.”
Among Mr. Annans requests has been for the authority and resources to offer a carefully calibrated one-time staff buyout, Mr. Malloch Brown said, and for Member States to review all UN mandates older than five years to see whether they are still relevant or whether their resources could be better spent elsewhere.
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