UN:THE UNITED NATIONS this month presented its top donors with a request for nearly $1.1 billion (€712 million) in additional funds over the next two years, boosting current UN expenses by 25 per cent and marking the organisation's highest-ever administrative budget, according to internal UN memos.
Much of the increased spending flows from demands from the US, among others, for a more ambitious UN role around the world, such as the billions of dollars for UN peacekeeping operations in Sudan and elsewhere, and hundreds of millions for UN efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its officials helped to organise elections and draft a new constitution.
UN administrative costs have more than doubled, to about $2.5 billion a year in the last seven years, while peacekeeping expenses have increased threefold, with nearly 110,000 peacekeepers in 20 overseas missions at a 2008 cost of about $7 billion.
"This is a breakdown of a 20-year-long effort to rein in UN spending," said John Bolton, who served as US ambassador to the UN early in US president George Bush's second term. "What happened in the late part of the Clinton administration, but most spectacularly in the Bush administration, is that the principle of zero nominal growth broke down completely."
That principle required the UN to maintain its administrative budget at the same level each year, meeting the costs of inflation through spending cuts.
The additional funds in the latest request would be used to renovate the landmark UN headquarters in New York, fund war-crimes investigators in Lebanon and pay $100 million to build a reinforced, attack-resistant UN headquarters building in Baghdad. But they would also pay nearly $7 million for a 2009 anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, which Washington believes would serve as a forum to criticise Israel.
The United States pays for 22 per cent of the UN administrative budget and about 27 per cent of peacekeeping costs, and it has vowed to press member states and the UN secretariat to seek cost savings. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to the United Nations, insists the organisation will have to find savings or" live without its new programmes". But administration officials now concede that they have limited leverage, because most of the money in the latest UN supplemental request would fund missions and initiatives that Washington either approved or helped create.
The UN comptroller, Warren Sach of Britain, defends the increases, saying most of the costs were because of reform initiatives approved by Mr Bush and other world leaders and decisions by the UN Security Council, where the United States wields veto power. Mr Sach said that more than 10 per cent of the supplemental proposal reflected inflation and the costs of running large operations in Europe with a weak US dollar.
Takahiro Shinyo, Japan's deputy UN ambassador, said his government would press the UN budget committee to slash the latest request, and if necessary, delay approval of some programmes until the next budget cycle in 2010. "We are not acquiescing; we are not automatically agreeing," he said. "We will be questioning and proposing ideas for reductions."
Some observers predicted that while the final budget may include cost savings, the vast majority will probably sail through.
"As a rule of thumb, they usually get about two-thirds of what they want," said Edward Luck, a historian of the UN and adviser to the UN secretary general. "Major donors are concerned, but at end of the day, they value what the organisation does, and they have a lot of their own priorities they are pushing for in the budget."