Inter Press Service - September 11, 2003
Haider Rizvi

And that long-discussed change must not be thwarted by arguments that southern governments are undemocratic and would not truly represent their citizens, they add.

"There's nothing that convinces the global South to be outside the big table," Kingsley Moghalu, head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told a gathering of more than 300 NGO leaders Wednesday.

Moghalu, a former U.N. spokesman for the International Tribunal for Rwanda, believes that seating large southern nations around the Council table would enhance the credibility of the body, the senior decision-making organ of the United Nations responsible for maintaining peace and security in the world.

Early this week, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a strong case for reshaping the world body's system, including increasing the permanent and non-permanent membership of the Security Council, but he did not say if the expansion would aim to include some of the world's poor nations.

"We are an organisation of sovereign states," Annan told a news conference, "but the structure of the Council has not changed. It is about time that we took the reform seriously."

The Security Council has no permanent representation from Africa and Latin America while Asia is only represented by China. Potential candidates from the developed world include India, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa.

Some civil society advocates admit that there is an element of truth in the argument that if given permanent membership on the Council, governments of the South could fail to pursue the interests of their people. But they remain unconvinced that they should drop their demand on that account.

"Those representing should be accountable to the needs of the global South," said Mary Racelis, a Manila, Philippines-based research scientist, who also sits on the high-level panel of eminent persons on U.N.-civil society relations.

"But the NGOs, as watchdogs, would be able to pressure their governments," she added.

"I am more concerned about the imbalance between the rich and poor rather than the division inside the South," added Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of sustainable development and special advisor to Kofi Annan.

For him, representation of the South would mean: "at least the other five billion can be listened (to)".

The three-day conference, 'Human Security and Dignity: Fulfilling the Promise of the United Nations', was attended by more than 2,000 NGO representatives from around the world who work in partnership with the United Nations on human rights, health, the environment, and disarmament.

Based on the notion that collective security is founded on the well being of individuals, the meeting aimed to explore creative ideas to make the United Nations work more effectively and credibly.

Like Racelis, many activists strongly believe that it was the worldwide NGO movement that forced the international community to set Millennium Development Goals in 2000 to reduce poverty, disease and illiteracy around the world.

But U.N. officials say they are still far from raising the money required to achieve the goals -- including halving the number of the world's poor by 50 percent by 2015 -- partly because many rich nations failed to fulfil their promises.

"We need about 100 billion dollars a year to be able to achieve these goals," Annan told reporters recently while describing poverty, AIDS and illiteracy as "soft threats to human security".

"We are (at) around 57 billion."

Moghalu says: "If we don't get that money, people (with HIV/AIDS) would just die. That's a blunt truth."

Rich nations "are very good at spending money on bombs and armies, not on disease," Sachs added. "I am agonised at the fact that President Bush asked the Congress for 87 billion dollars (to finance the occupation of Iraq), which might have been used to save millions of lives from disease."

Though strongly backing the push for poor nations to have seats on the Security Council, Moghalu thinks the developing world also needs to change its own ways of doing things. "Asian and African nations need to do more for themselves instead of relying on western aid to address the issues of poverty and disease," he says.

But Sachs, who said he looks at the concept of human security from an economic viewpoint, had another perspective.

"Don't miss the point that there's a need for funding that only the rich countries can provide," he says. "Without the U.S. doing something real, millions of people are going to die."

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+Report on U.N. Reform (http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sg/index.shtml)

+Millennium Development Goals (http://www.developmentgoals.org/)

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