By JOHN NORTH

United Nations spokesman Will Davis fielded questions about his organization from a totally pro-U.N. audience for 45 minutes before the meeting was shut down because of time constraints last Thursday night in Asheville.

Davis, director of the United Nations Information Center in Washington, D.C., earlier addressed “The Future of the United Nations.” (For details of his speech, see story starting on Page 1.)

The session, which attracted about 60 people, was held in the Parish Hall at All Souls Cathedral in Biltmore Village. The meeting was sponsored by the Western North Carolina chapter of the United Nations Association-USA.
As the questioning continued with no break in sight, local UNA chief Jim Roush, amid some mild protests from the audience, stepped up to the lectern and said he was ending the Q&A at 9 p.m. because, otherwise, it would go on all night.

In opening the questioning, a man asked how many times have U.N. peacekeeping forces been withdrawn over the years.

“Good question,” Davis replied, noting that there have been few cases of withdrawals through the years. He cited East Timor as an example of a U.N. withdrawal. “We shut down, but had to send troops back in again” when East Timor’s stability dissolved. “The only problem with shutting down — you have to be careful about the exit strategy” and not leave too soon.

He added that “it’s not the secretary-general, it’s the Security Council with five permanent veto-wielding members” that makes the decision on whether to send in U.N. peacekeepers.

“U.N. peacekeeping missions aren’t cheap, but they’re cheaper than the U.S. unilaterally doing it,” according to Davis, who alluded to various studies showing that for every $1 spent on U.N. efforts, the same military intervention costs $7 for the U.S. to do it unilaterally.

A woman asked, “You mentioned the U.S. as the 800-pound gorilla. We are now. But what about adding up members of the European Union?” She also alluded to the growing clout of China and other up-and-coming powers.

Regarding the five permanent veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China — “they are the ones who won the war,” she said in an apparent reference to World War II. She noted that after the U.S., Japan and Germany — the two biggest losers from World War II — are the next two biggest contributors, respectively, to the U.N.

In response, Davis said, “Everybody agrees the Security Council has to be changed.” For instance, he said the U.S. supports Japan having a permanent seat, “but China likes being the only Asian country” with that distinction.
Others say Brazil, as the largest and most powerful nation in Latin America, ought to have a permanent seat on the Security Council, “but how keen would the rest of Latin America be to have someone representing it who speaks Portuguese,” when nearly everyone else speaks Spanish?

A man asked Davis his view on Iran’s making more aggressive threats toward the U.S.

“The U.N. has been actively involved” in the situation, David said. “You may not know it, but the U.N. Security Council has passed three progressively tougher sanctions on Iran for its nuclear policies.”

Davis added, “Again, the U.N. is only as good as its member-states want it to be ... If there are certain countries that don’t want sanctions to be imposed, the sanctions will fail ... So it matters how much the big players have bought into it.”

Persisting, the man interjected that “Iran has been accused of interfering” with U.S. military efforts in Iraq.

“The secretary-general has said Iraq is the world’s problem,” Davis replied. “Some say, ‘You broke it, you own it,’ but that’s not a very mature attitude.”

A woman asked “if we were flies on the wall at the United Nations and nobody from the United States was present” at a gathering of diplomats over coffee, tea and pastries, “what would we be hearing about what they think of the United States?”

“First, if we were flies on the wall we’d probably keel over from the smoke,” Davis quipped, alluding to the U.N. diplomats’ propensity to chain-smoke in an antiquated headquarters building that lacks proper ventilation systems. The U.N. headquarters is exempt from New York City building codes because of its designation as an “international” edifice. As an aside, Davis noted that the U.N. has a renovation plan — “and it’s going to be expensive.”

Returning to the question of what U.N. diplomats think of the U.S., Davis said, “As a fly, assuming you survive the smoke ... You’d hear a lot of rhetoric. You’d hear — much like Hugo Chávez — that the U.S. is the Great Satan ... You’d hear some voluble critics” of America.

Yet, “people still listen for what the U.S. is going to say. A lot of speechifying goes on, but when it comes to the end of the day, people still listen intently to every word the U.S. says.”

A man said, “it doesn’t take much corruption” to spur major concerns around the world and the U.S. about the U.N. “Is that still a big deal in the U.N. — that everybody’s corrupt?”

“To my mind, the worst reports — confirmed reports — are of U.N. peacekeepers sexually abusing the people they’re assigned to protect. To me, it’s the worst thing the U.N. has done” ever. In such cases, the accused are not tried by the U.N. and instead are dismissed from the U.N. service and sent back to their home countries with a recommendation of prosecution.

However, he added, “It really is honorable service that most of these people (U.N. peacekeepers) do, going halfway around the world” to keep the peace. “The U.N. is easy to scapegoat.”

When a man asked if the U.S. contributes troops to the U.N. peacekeeping efforts, Davis answered, “A few – maybe 100 — of the 100,000 (troops) in the field.” He added that the other major countries follow America’s lead in providing a minuscule number of troops.

As to why America provides such a small troop commitment to the U.N., Davis said with a note of understatement, “The U.S. military is a little busy elsewhere,” particularly Iraq and Afghanistan.

“And, to be frank, no administration wants to put U.S. troops under U.N. command,” Davis said. He noted that besides contributing — by far — the greatest appropriation to the U.N. budget, the U.S. “does much extra to help in other ways,” such as providing “the world’s greatest taxi service” via its military when U.N. peacekeeping forces need its help.