UN faces crunch time
2004-09-20 09:15
United Nations - World leaders will gather at the United Nations for their annual debate on Tuesday with the aftershocks of the Iraq war still very much at the top of the international agenda.
Last year's session was marked by harsh sniping at United States President George W Bush over the war, including unusually blunt criticism from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and the post-war chaos has not helped Bush's case.
Annan stoked the fires again last week by calling it "illegal" and while UN officials have since blamed the comment on prodding by an aggressive interviewer, there can be no disguising the lingering anger about the war.
Bush, who will take the stage on day one of the two-week session, has already indicated he will defend the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a sweeping global campaign to fight terrorism with the cause of freedom.
Many opportunities
"Never in the history of the United Nations have we faced so many opportunities to create a safer world by building a better world," the US president said on Saturday.
"For the sake of our common security, and for the sake of our common values, the international community must rise to this historic moment. And the United States is prepared to lead," Bush said.
Throughout the past year, Annan has repeatedly argued that while terrorism may be top priority for the world's lone superpower, many people around the globe are more concerned with poverty, sanitation and the HIV/Aids epidemic.
Annan has said the rule of law should be a central theme of this year's talks - but over the past year he has also repeatedly acknowledged that the world body has been at a "fork in the road" since the war.
The bitter divisions over what he called the "unilateral" US decision to oust Saddam Hussein have not healed, and it is unclear how the world body might cope with a mighty nation determined to set its own course of action.
Reform
Annan has made it a matter of urgency to reform the UN Security Council, and has appointed a high-level panel to come up with proposals by December that he would like to present at next year's session.
"Quite honestly, I do not believe that anyone will consider the UN reform complete without Security Council reform bringing it into line with today's realities," he said earlier this month.
Meanwhile even supporters of the United Nations have been tempted to point to its handling of another crisis besides Iraq - the catastrophe in Darfur - as proof that the world body is too ineffective.
An estimated 50 000 people have died in Sudan's Darfur region since February 2003 in what even UN officials have termed a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing, if not the genocide that Washington has called it.