Kassebaum vs. Moynihan on the UN
SAMUELS, GERTRUDE
THE 20 PERCENT SOLUTION Kassebaum vs. Moynihan on the UN byigertrude samuels Washington The United Nations is in the throes of a financial crisis that has "profound implications" for its future,...
...To explore the ramifications of this condition—what some are calling the "U.S...
...Okay, I say, they don't abide by the Charter, but they are committed to it...
...But for quite some time now both the financial practices and the anti-U.S...
...In her modest offices in the Senate Office Building, where her door stands open, her style is quiet, direct, crisp...
...Kassebaum: Many of us who do care about the UN have been reluctant to criticize it in any way for fear of people saying, well, you just want to get rid of the UN...
...It assumes a democratic society...
...I would like to see our government do something very different...
...Now, Nancy Kassebaum is a dear friend and a fine Senator...
...They don't connect the UN with the nonproliferation treaty...
...Very few people...
...contribution at 20 per cent...
...in a situation where it's in default, in the way the Soviet Union went into default after the Congo operation...
...It should redirect itself to being a body as it once was...
...If you don't care, then get out altogether...
...People were dying...
...But there was that conference center in Ethiopia...
...That's weakening the UN...
...What does your concept boil down to...
...Because when you let them corrupt the Charter that way, you're saying you don't care about the Charter...
...Assessments are based on a participant's gross national product...
...Is budget reform your only aim...
...Samuels: Senator, why did you vote against the Kassebaum amendment...
...Kassebaum: No...
...Kassebaum: Let the UN reduce its funding...
...All over the world meetings are going on with new proposals on how to promote world peace...
...The heaviest burden has fallen on the advanced nations, with the United States held responsible for 25 per cent...
...Name the spies...
...Moynihan: No...
...Moynihan: No...
...Could this lead to UN bankruptcy...
...So, in effect, the U.S...
...First elected to her present position in 1978, she serves on the Budget and Foreign Relations Committees...
...They're not dealing with the concrete if they just pay salaries, have conferences, have budgets that are in arrears...
...This amendment, which received support in both Houses and became law, was designed to move them to get their budget in order...
...The posts he has held include those of UN representative (1971), Ambassador to India (1973-75) and Ambassador to the UN(1975-76...
...These sound like very small but important steps...
...So the Congress voted to cut our contribution...
...Samuels: What's the feeling in Congress, Senator, about this financial crisis...
...government is paying those KGB agents, and we have never said a word about it...
...Samuels: How would you describe the worth of the UN...
...Start with the spies...
...The "small but important" steps the Senator herself cited, it is estimated, will account for a budget reduction of $30 million...
...I'd like to ask one thing: Do you think we ever consulted with our Allies before we upgraded this crisis...
...Samuels: Does the Kassebaum amendment have to be implemented, now that it's law...
...We haven't said, take your spies out of the Secretariat, and we're sick and tired of paying their salaries...
...Who pays attention to the UN...
...Samuels: Why is that...
...Samuels: Senator, what was the focus of your interest in the UN...
...Notwithstanding the current very real threat to the survival of the United Nations, the Secretary General apparently remains optimistic...
...I could see a case for cutting UN expenditures—but if we cut our proportionate share, we cut our influence...
...We've had such a deferment for all our civil servants...
...I feel very strongly that it would do a great deal to strengthen the UN...
...He also has suspended the promotion process, reduced allowances for travel, limited the issuing of documents, and deferred some cost-of-living adjustments...
...Samuels: Is it your sense that Congress would like to see the UN scrapped...
...Samuels: The UN, then, isn't taken seriously...
...During his recent visit to Atlantic College in Cardiff, Wales, he declared rather tartly in reply to a student's question: "Those who would like to see the UN collapse will have to be patient...
...Samuels: Get their budget in order...
...The new nations know nothing other than multilateral diplomacy—they were all created in the aftermath of the UN...
...I'd like to see us a law-abiding member of the Charter...
...Kassebaum: The financial crisis had not been acknowledged...
...One reason we have gotten the worst of so many encounters is that we have never learned multilateral diplomacy...
...And I don't like to see the U.S...
...If we want to reduce budgets, we ought to reduce the hell out of a dozen UN budgets...
...Kassebaum: Not necessarily...
...France, 6.4...
...Samuels: Down what path, Senator...
...The UN has been a very important place to us...
...Kassebaum: No...
...Kassebaum: I have enough trouble on the Budget Committee with our own budget...
...bashing of the UN"—The New Leader arranged the following exclusive interviews with the new law's chief sponsor, Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Republican of Kansas, and its chief opponent, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York...
...This is hugely to our advantage in the world if we use it properly, if we don't allow ourselves to be run over in the UN by a majority that is not democratic and that frequently sides with the totalitar-ians...
...Above all, though, he insisted on April 12, the crisis derives from the nonpayment of assessments...
...But they have no regard for it...
...He's the delegate from the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), a former card-carrying Nazi, Hermann Klenner...
...I can think of one in particular: The leading candidate at this time for the Human Rights Commission in Geneva is a former Nazi...
...public opinion...
...the Soviet Union, a total of 11.8 percent...
...I've done the grocery shopping for a long time, and maybe that's why women tend to see a budget in a different light from men...
...Moynihan: It's that this is not something for the Senate to do, until the State Department says it can't negotiate weighted voting or a reduced budget...
...But I'm in favor of the United States being put up on the bulletin board saying we're "in default...
...Payno attention to it...
...Would you clarify...
...I think the Secretary-General has the ability to make something of the UN at this point...
...That's the scandal...
...Senator Moynihan, 59, a former professor of government at Harvard, has served in the Cabinet or subcabinet of four Presidents...
...It has become a very flabby organization...
...The tyranny of the Third World comes about because many of us are afraid to say, look, we do pay a large share of the budget, we should have some say in how that's spent...
...Perez de Cuellar hopes to achieve an additional $30-million savings by cutting three weeks from the next General Assembly and curtailing other meetings, as well as by suspending the construction of new conference centers and instituting several streamlining fiscal reforms...
...Nor about the Soviets intercepting telephone calls from Glen Cove, from their high-rise apartment...
...And, my God, that was quite a tender three months as we talked to him, the highest ranking Soviet...
...The Soviets blatantly offend against this...
...Samuels: Thank you, Senator...
...Kassebaum: One way to avoid weighted voting is for the UN to get its budget in order...
...Samuels: The government has demanded that the Soviets reduce their UN missions...
...Samuels: A dozen other Senators voted against the amendment with you...
...Publish their names...
...Moynihan: Very simple...
...Kassebaum: They're spending more than they're taking in, and spending in ways that are hard to justify...
...Samuels: You're not one of them...
...Kassebaum: I see he's ordered a freeze on staff recruitment, which is wise...
...Yet our government won't do anything about it...
...About seven years ago, a lieutenant colonel in the KGB was made head of UN personnel in Geneva...
...Certainly the Secretary-General, the UN's chief administrative officer with a worldwide staff of 11,600, has been goaded into effecting some savings by the Kassebaum amendment...
...There's not enough product out of them...
...He recruits from all over the world...
...arrears from previous years amount to better than $249 million, not including a separate deficit for peace-keeping operations...
...It seems to me that today the UN is rather a cacophony of sound that just goes by people...
...We've begun to learn it...
...You can't read the Charter without its references to human rights...
...and Britain, 4.9 per cent...
...Samuels: The UN's deputy controller says that weighted voting would require an amendment to the Charter, which is unlikely...
...We could cut the size of the Secretariat in half, and the Geneva Secretariat could be hugely cut...
...I think the UN is more important to the United States than is generally the view here in Washington...
...Samuels: How, specifically, would you advise the UN to do that...
...And the Administration hasn't given them any reason to think the UN is of consequence or use to the United States at all...
...The UN can look at its budget and find some significant savings that will indeed make it possible to put the U.S...
...We know who they are...
...Senator Kassebaum, a slender, graying, yet youthful 53-year-old mother of three, isknownasa "goodconservative Republican...
...That's the scandal...
...1 was our UN Ambassador when Arkady Shevchenko, then Under-Secre-tary General in charge of Security Council and Political Affairs, first indicated he wished to defect to us...
...While I was at the UN, it always had a very strong positive rating in U.S...
...The United States has to expect criticism in that forum, because being a large, well-to-do nation, we're a vulnerable target...
...Samuels: How has the UN changed...
...We make the laws, the Executive executes them...
...Well, he's since written his tale: The Soviet nationals get their UN check, then turn it in to the Soviet Embassy and get their Soviet pay...
...We don't think about theUN in Congress...
...But it will never be if it is we who decide to break the rules...
...bias at (he UN have troubled Congress, and lasl June it decided to take an unprecedented action: Under an amendment tacked on to a State Department funding authorization bill, it mandated that beginning in 1987 United States support for the budget of the UN and all of the organization's specialized agencies will be limited to 20 per cent, unless the General Assembly's one nation-one vote rule has been changed to "weighted voting" on fiscal matters—that is, keyed to each country's contribution...
...My vote against it was basically to say, "Hey, wait, you can't do that under the UN Charter, you have to negotiate...
...Moynihan: Well, I'm not against weighted voting, and I'm certainly in favor of cutting back on their budget...
...He therefore "urgently" asked member states in arrears to mend their ways...
...I mean, Ethiopia is starving with its Marxist government, starving its own people, good God Almighty, no...
...I personally have to ask myself how much these conferences, with basically the same people sitting around those tables talking, do really help...
...Moreover, the crisis comes at a moment when the UN is under a shadow created by several of its members being linked to international terrorism, and by revelations about the Nazi past of former Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim...
...He was committed to carrying out Wilson's dream...
...What's the matter with us...
...Kassebaum: Yes...
...Far more good would come from the UN if that money was spent on education and on health care...
...I thought the UN and all our foreign aid had to be brought under the same microscope...
...Japan, 10.8...
...They don't know the whole legal structure of the Middle East depends on the UN...
...Moynihan: I don't think we understand multilateral diplomacy...
...Well, that didn't happen, we know...
...In his book-lined Washington office the tall (6'4"), ebullient, shirt-sleeved Moynihan remains a staunch advocate of the UN...
...West Germany, 8.2...
...Ought we not to have done it in concert...
...world forum that has value as such...
...Many of them don't make a financial contribution...
...You referred to the "tyranny of the Third World ma-j ority in the UN" and the irresponsibility of the budget process...
...I think that's unfortunate, and if it continues down the present path, I think it will really become irrelevant...
...Samuels: Why did you introduce the amendment...
...Look, the UN envisioned a world in which democracy was the norm...
...He did it...
...I wouldn't have factored in an inflation figure for their quite large salaries of about 10 per cent, which of course is far above what inflation is in reality...
...Only 42 of 159 member states have so far paid their full assessments this year toward an $830-million annual budget...
...Kassebaum: Coming from Kansas, I guess I could say I'm too practical...
...Samuels: The UN has designated 1986 the "International Year of Peace...
...Samuels: How will your amendment be implemented...
...Samuels: Do you feel the Secretary-General can meet the deficit...
...It could be again...
...Just convention after convention, report af-terreportthatnobodyreads...
...There are many ways we can cut expenses at the UN...
...And that was enough...
...Kassebaum: No fiscal control...
...Samuels: The Secretary-General is expected to consult with the State Department about our contribution or weighted voting...
...There are certainly those who would like to...
...Moynihan on the UN byigertrude samuels Washington The United Nations is in the throes of a financial crisis that has "profound implications" for its future, Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar cautioned recently...
...Moynihan: But that's its missions...
...It will just lead to more sensible operating procedures on theUN'spart...
...We ought to be capable of it...
...One flagrant example is the convention center in Addis Ababa—$75 million for a new convention center in a country where we're sending money to assist on the famine there...
...Moynihan: No...
...Is it that sort of thing...
...Whatgood is that...
...Samuels: When you introduced your amendment, you said the UN can no longer be "a sacred cow...
...Samuels: Precisely because of all that, Senator, why did you oppose the Kassebaum amendment...
...They speak sometimes with a hostile voice, but one has to expect that in a forum which has, so to speak, a bully pulpit...
...Samuels: One official told me the UN may not be able to pay salaries come the next General Assembly if your amendment is implemented...
...Samuels: And are hostile to the United States...
...I'd like to see it insist, in the Secretariat, that the Soviets are in gross violation of Article 100 of the Charter, which says no government may give any instructions to a national of its country who is in the Secretariat...
...Samuels: Under weighted voting, how do you think Afghanistan or Chad or Ethiopia will react, for example, if they're entitled to only a .01 per cent vote in the UN...
...Kassebaum: The number of countries that have come into the UN has changed theforum considerably...
...Why another center when there were already three...
...That was not my intent...
...That's where to fight...
...It allows people to get up on their soap box and take on a cause from their point of view, so it's a CERTRl'Dl-' Samvms reports regularly on the United Xar ions for this magazine...
...Thus, 78 countries are each required to cover only .01 per cent of the budget...
...If you know anything about the UN, you know that any European in the Secretariat will spend half of his or her time trying to avoid the KGB agent in the next office...
...We've done this with defense and our social programs...
...Samuels: Thank you, Senator...
...Moynihan: I did not want to see us declared a less important country...
...Kassebaum: I think the worth today is that of a steam valve...
...Moynihan: No feeling...
...He was first elected to the Senate in 1976, and is a member of the Budget Committee...
...Kassebaum: I felt we had to look at the functions of its budget, to prove that funds were being used effectively...
...It was our creation after all—Woodrow Wilson's great dream come true, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's...
...But I wouldn't have built a new convention center in Ethiopia...
Vol. 69 • May 1986 • No. 8
