DRAINING THE SWAMP

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

THE UNITED NATIONS TURNED 50 this year, and in a historic gathering, more than 100 heads of state and government will celebrate the occasion next week. But as the potentates confer, socialize and speechify at U.N. headquarters and around Manhattan, some clouds will hang over the proceedings. If the U.N. is ever to solve the world's problems, it had better first solve its own, and it has plenty.

Consider: the former head of a major U.N. agency routinely charged the organization for business trips already paid for by individual governments. A high official at U.N. headquarters in New York City is promoting the career of his mistress in a well-paid U.N. job. A key adviser at one of the U.N.'s most controversial agencies is said to be an alcoholic too seldom sober to do much work. And the head of a worldwide agency is reputed to have bought his job by handing out cash--bundles provided by his national government stuffed into a suitcase--to delegates from other countries who agreed to sell their votes.

While these tales provide the most sensational illustrations of why reform of the U.N. system is urgently needed, they are not necessarily the most telling. It is true that "the U.N. is often used as a dumping ground for bureaucrats whom national governments want to get rid of," in the words of Said el-Naggar, an Egyptian who was formerly deputy director of research at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development. But less gossipy flaws have been at least as damaging to the U.N.'s effectiveness and standing: bureaucratic confusion, duplication of effort, wasteful spending and lack of coordination--either among the alphabet soup of special bodies (around 100, according to one tally) or with the so-called central U.N. in New York.

The U.N. has achieved remarkable success in feeding and sheltering refugees and in eradicating smallpox, to cite only two accomplishments. While a failure in Bosnia, peacekeeping has been effective in other parts of the world. But even the U.N.'s fiercest defenders agree that on the whole the swarm of agencies, funds, commissions and regional offices has operated with an inefficiency that can no longer be tolerated. The entire U.N. system spends about $10.5 billion a year. That's not a lot of money, considering the U.N.'s mission (it's about one-third of New York City's budget). Even so, if the U.N. doesn't shape up in a hurry, it risks having its funds cut off by budget slashers in the U.S. and other nations. Right now the U.S. owes the U.N. $1.4 billion in back dues, but many Congressmen object to paying up. Reform would take away one of their strongest arguments, and President Clinton is considering ways to link a promise of reform to payment of the debt.

Calls for reform have resounded almost as long as there has been a U.N. Little has been accomplished, except in some cases the creation of additional "coordinating layers" of bureaucracy--which should be no surprise, given the U.N.'s peculiar structure and how it grew. None of the specialized agencies is even formally part of the central U.N., the organs (Security Council, General Assembly, Secretariat) created by the 1945 charter. Most, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), were set up later as separate organizations with their own charters, assemblies and staffs. They are tied into a "U.N. system" by agreements negotiated with the central U.N. that are considered to be like treaties. The agreements grant the central U.N. no significant power to oversee the specialized agencies or their finances.

Between the central U.N. and the agencies, examples of misused funds are all too easy to find. Last year the UNICEF office in Kenya had to be greatly expanded to cope with a sudden flood of refugees from Somalia and from a local drought. The agency pumped in $37 million, of which $10 million was found by a later audit to have been unaccounted for. During the height of the U.N. intervention in Somalia, U.N. agencies were spending $1 million a day to maintain their peacekeeping operations in the country, much of it devoted to elaborate support facilities in Mogadishu: hundreds of air-conditioned apartments, a new sewerage system, even a barbecue pit. The U.N. University, an organization that helps coordinate U.N.-funded research projects worldwide, spent much of its budget between 1982 and 1992 erecting a $100 million building on some of the most expensive real estate in downtown Tokyo.

Last April brought representatives from 130 countries to Berlin for 11 days. They made exactly one decision: to spend two more years negotiating on how to meet the standards set by the 1992 Rio Earth Summit for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. In Mexico 18 different U.N. agencies are supposed to be running programs to help solve some of the country's worst problems, such as environmental pollution and drug smuggling. But Mexican officials working on the same troubles are hard put to cite anything significant that the U.N. agencies have done to help.

The bureaucratic dead weight is beginning to affect even some of the agencies once regarded as the U.N.'s best, notably WHO. While many of its people in the field still do good work, the agency's Geneva headquarters is increasingly bloated. Hiroshi Nakajima, who became director general in 1988, has sharply increased the number of senior staff members from 66 to 107. WHO says the increase probably reflects a growth in extrabudgetary programs. Most of these people earn about $75,000 a year. One subordinate says, "When you work with doctors in Zaire who get paid only $6 a week, and who haven't been paid at all for three months, it's hard to see money being spent that way."

Also, "there is a great timidity and passivity within all U.N. agencies before any politically tinted situations," charges Pierre Pradier, a former WHO official. On a mission to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Pradier says, he found Israeli and Palestinian doctors eager to meet to discuss health issues there. But when he proposed that WHO arrange such meetings, Geneva was aghast that the agency might seem to be interfering in Arab-Israeli political disputes. WHO asserts that all this happened before 1990, and it has since taken an active role in helping solve health problems in the Israeli-occupied areas.

When one U.N. body has failed to fulfill a crucial mission, the tendency has been to form another outfit. Thus there are four U.N. agencies concerned with food production and seven with industrial development in the Third World. Emergency situations sharply highlight the resulting problems of duplication and overlap. Consider a not-very-hypothetical situation: a sudden flood of refugees. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) might build camps to house them. But WHO would want something to say about their health problems. One or more of the food agencies might consider feeding them to be its job. And since some of the refugees would surely be children, UNICEF might also get into the act. The U.N. member states in 1992 created a Department of Humanitarian Affairs to bring some coordination into this chaos. But they did not give it enough money or authority; the department has turned into just another layer of bureaucracy.

Some other attempts at reform hold more promise. Karl Paschke, who occupies the new post of Under Secretary-General for Internal Oversight Services, is energetically investigating and reporting on how well various agencies do their jobs--a revolutionary idea for the U.N. Says Paschke: "After seven months on the job, I think the U.N. is a good example of waste and inefficiency." Unfortunately, Paschke's authority is limited to those few agencies directly responsible to the Secretariat.

Joseph Connor, former chief of the U.S. accounting firm Price Waterhouse, last May became the first businessman ever to be put in charge of U.N. administration and management. He has begun rigorous management-training and performance-evaluation systems for Secretariat employees, which could be the first steps toward creating a professional international civil service in place of what now amounts to a gargantuan political-patronage system.

Will such efforts develop beyond bare beginnings? Much may depend on Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; and his record in promoting reform is, to put it charitably, mixed. One example: while the U.N. generates a mountain of policy statements and proclamations about women's rights, its own record as an equal-opportunity employer is poor. By this year women were supposed to hold 25% of executive jobs, but the actual figure will be only about 16.6%. The reason, says Ciceil Gross, former president of the Group on Equal Rights for Women at the U.N., is that "there is no will to change things. Boutros-Ghali's stand on women is excellent, but mouthing the right thing when you can make it happen isn't enough."

In any case, the reforms started so far are a pale reflection of what needs to be done. Some basic principles are obvious. U.N. budgets have to be cut, and the central U.N. has to get some kind of authority over the spending of the agencies. The duplicate functions have to be harmonized, agencies themselves consolidated and some perhaps killed. The U.S. State Department last summer put together a 10-page "non-paper" that contains many specific proposals the American delegation is likely to urge on the General Assembly's Working Group on U.N. Reform. U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher has put portions of this on record. Samples: consolidate the emergency operations of UNHCR, UNICEF, the World Food Program and the Department of Humanitarian Affairs. Consolidate the technical work of seven U.N. bodies--but also end support for one of them, the U.N. Industrial Development Organization. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright suggests a temporary moratorium on U.N. conferences.

A thorough revamping will be a hard sell. Member nations have vested interests in all the agencies involved, as donor-designers of their programs or beneficiaries or both. Moreover, like all U.N. operations, reform moves are running afoul of the North-South split. Says Ahmad Kamal, Pakistani ambassador to the U.N.: "The objective of the developed world is to create a kind of stockade it can live behind. The developed world says to the developing world, 'You're not using well the money we're giving you.' But it's a subterfuge to preserve the stockade. The developing countries want more money from the developed countries, and they see reform as a cover-up for an even further decline." Which is in part true--though Albright argues that poor countries would benefit more from reduced aid that was well-targeted than from larger sums frittered away.

The U.N. is not a corporation and probably can never be run as efficiently as one. In part, at least, it is a legislature; and legislatures, local, national or global, run by logrolling--you vote for my bill; I'll vote for yours. That is not the most efficient practice. Even within those parameters, however, change is possible and necessary. The U.N. may never be a model of streamlined organization, but it does not have to be as inefficient as it is. In fact, if it is to survive, it cannot be.

--Reported by William Dowell and Marguerite Michaels/New York, Andrew Purvis/Nairobi and Ellen Wallace/Geneva, with other bureaus

With reporting by WILLIAM DOWELL AND MARGUERITE MICHAELS/NEW YORK, ANDREW PURVIS/NAIROBI AND ELLEN WALLACE/GENEVA, WITH OTHER BUREAUS