UN must stand up for weak, powerless: Pakistan

UNITED NATIONS—Calling its role in promoting humanity's shared goals "indispensable", Pakistan has said that the world needs a UN which acts with moral authority and credibility.
"The world needs a United Nations which can stand up for the weak and the powerless; which is a force for objectivity, fairness, equality and justice in the management of international relations," Pakistan's UN Ambassador Munir Akram told the General Assembly on Monday.
He was speaking in a day-long debate on the report of Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Work of the Organization. In the report, the Secretary-General notes that this is his tenth and final such annual report, and it incorporates a previously separate report on progress in implementing the Millennium Declaration.
Ambassador Akram said the UN was an indispensable instrument for the promotion of humanity's shared goals; if it did not exist, "we would need to create it". Current and emerging challenges in the twenty-first century could be overcome only through multilateral cooperation.
The Organizational reforms under way were crucial to shaping a United Nations that could address those challenges. But while some implemented reforms were cause for "modest satisfaction", there were several areas where concrete action was still needed, including revitalization of the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council, and comprehensive reform of the Security Council.
The Pakistan ambassador asserted that the reform exercise had been plagued not only by the pursuit and promotion of simultaneous agendas, but also by the absence of agreement on the strategic objectives of the reforms themselves.
Some wished the Organization would mirror the unequal symmetries of the "real" world, while others, particularly developing countries, wished to use the United Nations as an instrument to change and democratize those unequal realities of a globalized yet divided world.
Some wished to use the United Nations as an instrument of collective enforcement of "good behaviour", while others wished to use it to promote collective and cooperative solutions to political, social, economic and environmental problems.
One clear example of the tension between "equity and the status quo", he said, had been the breakdown of the consensus on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. The World Summit had been unable to agree on any disarmament provisions; the Conference on disarmament remained paralysed; major powers had ignored their disarmament commitments; an arms race may soon begin in outer space; the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons regime was driven by doubt and double standards; and the three nuclear-weapon States not signatory to the treaty remained outside the relevant international agreements.
He said Pakistan believed it was time to rebuild international consensus on both disarmament and non-proliferation, and agree on effective and non-discriminatory processes to promote both. A special conference should be convened to promote that new consensus.
Noting that, a few weeks ago, the Assembly had agreed on a global counter-terrorism strategy, Ambassador Akram said that measure would remain incomplete if it did not address the root causes of terrorism, state terrorism and the use of terrorism to justify the occupation and suppression of the right of peoples to self-determination.
Those issues should be addressed, and the Assembly should create an intergovernmental mechanism to assume principle responsibility for overseeing United Nations counter-terrorism activities.
The UN, including the Security Council, were preoccupied today mostly with intra-state, or internal conflicts, rather than with the existentional threats posed by inter-State disputes, Ambassador Akram noted.
Conflicts 'such as in the Middle East in South Asia, on the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere' were being managed largely in other formats and forums rather than the UN It possesses the mechanisms and authority under Chapters VI and VII of the UN Charter, as well as through the INternational Court of Justice, to do so.
Even in case of internal conflicts, the attention of the international community is mostly aroused only after the breakdown of peace, he said. No doubt, the UN's intercessions "especially its Peacekeeping Operations" have proved indispensable in restoring peace. Pakistan hosts the oldest UN peacekeeping mission 'the UNMOGIP' which is deployed on the Line of Control in disputed Jammu and Kashmir.
On international peace and security, he said that while the United Nations had had successes in peacekeeping, the world community's combined forces were now perhaps reaching the limits of their capacity for collective intervention. The most recent United Nations Mission -- for Lebanon -- was proving difficult to organize. Another in prospect -- for Darfur -raised questions about the advisability of a United Nations-backed intervention against the wishes of the Sudanese Government.
In this context, the Pakistan ambassador said a closer look would reveal that such situations were rooted in what he called "the politics of scarcity". The secret to their prevention was rapid economic and social development and, in Africa's case at least, an end to the illegal exploitation of vast natural resources, he said in conclusion.—Agencies