Thugs will prevent progress at the U.N.

San Antonio Express-News:

Web Posted: 09/28/2005 01:51 AM CDT

While most of the nation was focused on hurricanes battering the Gulf Coast, another tempest of sorts descended on New York this month. The United Nations hosted a world summit, coinciding with its 60th anniversary and the start of a new session of the General Assembly.

The increasingly paranoid leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, was there. Fresh off a program to destroy urban slums that has made 700,000 of his nation's poorest citizens homeless, the 81-year-old autocrat said the United Nations should focus its efforts on housing victims of Katrina rather than victims of his disastrously oppressive rule.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chαvez attended, bravely shrugging off the mortal danger posed by viewers of "The 700 Club." In his speech to the assembly, Chαvez derided the international organization's dictatorship by the United States and its imperialist allies. Dictatorship, of course, is a subject about which he has more than a passing acquaintance.

Crown Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia came, along with Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. Al-Faisal stayed around New York long enough to tell the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York Sun reported, that his country was the victim of "an unjustified intense onslaught" that made it the "scapegoat" of Sept. 11, 2001. And Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the United Nations "to lead in the promotion of spirituality and compassion for humanity." His regime is presently engaged in a massive crackdown that has led to the arrest of thousands of "troublemakers" on the flimsiest of charges and to scores of floggings and hangings for moral infractions, including the execution of homosexuals. The clownishness, thuggishness and deception that annually accompany the opening session gala might have been dismissed if not for the extremely high stakes the United Nations itself had placed on the summit.

For months, Secretary-General Kofi Annan identified the September meeting as a pivotal event. "Never in the history of the United Nations," Annan said in June, "have bold decisions been more necessary."

He circulated draft documents addressing four critical areas: economic development; peace and security; human rights and the rule of law; and, after 60 years, comprehensive U.N. reform.

As the summit came to an end, Annan struggled to put an optimistic assessment on some modest accomplishments. On the major issues, however, member states came up short.

For four years now, for instance, the United Nations has struggled to come up with a definition — and an accompanying condemnation — of terrorism that accommodates the sensitivities of its diverse and perverse membership. The U.N. High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change came up with this simple, if uninspiring, formulation:

"Any action ... intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or noncombatants, when the purpose of such act ... is to intimidate a population or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act."

The General Assembly failed to approve it.

The United Nations can't condemn what it won't define, can't fix what many of its member states want to remain broken. And so terrorism, like nuclear proliferation and U.N. reorganization, went unresolved.

The statements of some of the world's most oppressive leaders are integrally tied to this failure. There are, according to Freedom House, 88 members of the United Nations that are full-fledged democracies. The rest — 103 — are not.

Citizens of free societies tend to look on the United Nations as the last, best hope for humanity. Leaders of despotic societies look at it as a tool for undeserved legitimacy, a vehicle to spread ideology and — as the oil-for-food scandal has demonstrated — an international trust off which they can aggrandize power and wealth. As long as the United Nations makes no fundamental distinction between free and unfree nations and legitimate and illegitimate governments, the lofty goals set for it by Annan will remain a distant vision.