USA Decided To Punish The UN

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called upon the US Congress not to punish the whole organisation for the United States' defeat at the elections to the UN Human Rights Commission. In an interview given to the CNN television company he said that such a step would be counter-productive with regard to 189 member-states of the world community and unjust to the Secretariat. The point is that this week the US Congress intends to block the payments to the United Nations' budget and in this way "to punish the organisation" for the results of the elections. Obviously, the Congressmen are not going to take into consideration the fact that the defeat of the USA was not the work of political opponents of the USA but of its own allies in the Western countries' group in the United Nations. The ballyhoo caused by this sensational voting has been going on for a week now. As has been already reported, Austria, France and Sweden have been elected to the Commission, while the USA has received the smallest number of votes. For the first time since the creation of the Commission in 1946 the USA has been thrown by the board of this important international body. Several days later, the USA unexpectedly lost its seat in the International Council for Controlling Drugs. American reporters in the United Nations have been bombarding Kofi Annan with questions of the type: how has this happened and what should be done now? In one of the improvised conversations with the reporters the UN Secretary General had to explain truism to them. This is one of the capricious uncertainties, typical of democracy, he said. When elections are held nobody can be sure of their results, added Kofi Annan. The threat of using a financial "whip" is a beloved method of the USA in its relations with the United Nations. At the present time the United States, investor No. 1, owes approximately one and a half billion dollars to the organisation. Kofi Annan calls upon the USA to continue playing an active role in the sphere of human rights even not being a member of the Commission and to try to be elected to the Commission next year. -O- (kos/lio) 10/05/01 10:47