US Sends Mixed Mesage To UN
The Senate Tuesday overwhelmingly approved legislation to cut future U.S. contributions to the United Nations. The vote was part of an agreement to release nearly $1 billion in back payments owed to the world organization.
The measure, approved 98 to 1, calls for a reduction in the U.S. share of the regular U.N. budget from the present 25 percent to 20 percent, and a drop in the share of peacekeeping operations from 31 percent to 25 percent.
The reduction in payments would be unilateral despite expected U.N. objections. The international body in the past has opposed efforts to trim the U.S. share.
The delinquent payments would go both toward U.N. accounts and toward reimbursing allies for part of their costs of participating in U.N. peacekeeping operations.
Republicans have long called for shrinking the U.S. share of maintaining the U.N. But with the Clinton administration now also supporting the plan, Democrats registered only token opposition.
"The money we are paying has been heavily conditioned," said Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., the only senator to vote no on the legislation. "Important U.S. interests are undermined by our failure to pay what we owe."
The $6.4 billion two-year State Department spending bill now goes to the House, where similar legislation in the past became snarled in an unrelated dispute over abortion.
The U.N. has warned the United States that it will lose its General Assembly voting rights if at least $250 million in back dues aren't paid by December. The U.S. has been late on its payments for the past 13 years.
By U.N. calculations, that leaves the United States $1.69 billion in arrears, nearly 60 percent of the total debt owed to the 185-nation organization. U.N. officials have complained that makes it hard for the organization to pay its bills.
The United States disputes some of the arrears, but concedes owing at least $1 billion.
The plan approved Tuesday is the result of a compromise between Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Senate leaders.
Albright agreed to support the proposed cut in the U.S. share and, in exchange, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, R-N.C., agreed to back away from more ambitious demands for changes at the U.N.
Sen. Rod Grams, R-Minn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on international operations, on Monday called the U.N. "a bloated bureaucracy," and said that, without housekeeping reforms, "the U.N. will collapse under its own weight."
The compromise bill would allow payments of $819 million to the United Nations over three years and forgive $107 million in debts that the U.N. owes the United States, for a total of $916 million.
The bill also calls for spending $3 billion over the next five years to beef up security at U.S. embassies around the world - the same amount requested by the administration in the aftermath of last year's attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
Veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, President Clinton's nominee to be U.N. ambassador, has voiced support for the lower U.S. share of the United Nations budget.
Helms' committee was holding a hearing with Holbrooke on Tuesday dealing with the U.N. payments issue. His long-delayed nomination is expected to be approved by the full Senate within a few weeks.
The loss of a vote in the General Assembly would be an embarrassment, but it would not affect Washington's veto power in the Security Council, the U.N.'s most powerful decision-making body.