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Nepal Rift Shows India's Place in the UN, Who
Decides the Mandate and When to Leave
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of
Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis
UNITED NATIONS,
July 22 -- The UN Security Council
cancelled its meeting on Nepal on Tuesday morning.
There's a dispute, it has emerged, about
whether the mandate of the UN mission there will remain the same as
before -- as
proposed by, among others, the UK and UN envoy Ian Martin, sources say
-- or
whether it will be more limited, as the now-Maoist government of Nepal,
and
India, favor.
This
dispute surfaced last week, when India's Ambassador Sen criticized
Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon for ask Nepal to clarify what it wants from the UN. Click here for
Inner City Press' story. Further inquiry finds that India has
sought
various posts from Ban's UN -- as simply one example, the top post at
UNIFEM --
and has been denied. In the UNIFEM case, the post went to Spain because
of its
larger financial contributions. But in other cases, India has been told
that
since Vijay Nambiar is already Ban's chief of staff, they are already
represented. There is also reference to the chief of staff post within
the UN
Mission in Iraq.
Close
observers of the UN note that Germany, for example, even while pining
for a
permanent post of the Security Council, is given interim access, as
part of the
EU 3 on Iran, and on Georgia as head of the Group of Friends. So what
powers is
India, with its over one billion people, given? Is it too much to ask
that they
get their way -- or Nepal's way, as they put it -- on the pending
resolution?
Ian Martin, his Tuesday press conference pushed on to Wednesday
One view
has it that Nepal is one of the UN's success stories, but that for some
reason
the UN is fouling it up at the end. If the host country which invited
the UN in
wants to scale down the mandate, why not go along? Ian Martin is said
to want
offer UN expertise on constitutions and related matters. But if the
host
country says scale back, scale back. Perhaps it is time, some say, for
Ian
Martin's next job. Since Ms. Pillay still has not been named, and since
Martin
was previously with Amnesty International, some joke that would be the
solution. Or that the Thailand - Cambodia tension needs, at least for
now, a
skilled and patient mediator. You just have to know when to leave...
Footnote: Inner
City Press asked Lynn Pascoe, Under
Secretary General for Political Affairs, if the UN Secretariat will get
involved on Cambodia - Thailand and their UNESCO World Heritage temple
dispute. If there is space for us, he said. Two letters
are pending before the Security Council -- a migraine
about the temple, as one way (this one) put it. There is a regional
aversion to ceding
jurisdiction to the Council. And, in its way, the resistance to
granting
Nepal's scale-down request is one of the reasons.
Watch this site. And
this --
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