Shashi Tharoor: Change vital if UN is to grow further

The United Nations is a 20th-century organisation facing a 21st-century challenge. It is an institution with impressive achievements but also haunting failures, one that mirrors not just the world's hopes but its inequalities and disagreements. Most importantly, it needs to change further.

This is the pre-eminent task that will confront the next UN Secretary-General, a post for which three other candidates and I are running.

We need reform, not because the UN has failed, but because it has succeeded enough over the years to be worth investing in.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

The United Nations, in which I have worked for the past 28 years, is no exception. If we want to change the world, we must change too.

The single greatest problem facing the UN is that there is no single greatest problem - rather, a dozen different ones each day clamouring for attention.

Some, like the crisis in Lebanon, the Palestinian situation and the nuclear programmes in Iran and North Korea, are obvious and trying.

Others we call "problems without passports" - issues that cross all frontiers uninvited, like climate change, drug trafficking, human rights, terrorism, epidemic diseases, and refugee movements.

Their solutions, too, recognise no frontiers because no one country or group of countries, however rich or powerful, can tackle them alone. The key to all of them is strengthening the capacities of the UN and its members.

Here's how: make democracy a priority. There is much at the UN that must continue - for example, our work in humanitarian relief, crisis response, and social and economic development. But we must make a greater effort to promote democracy and good governance as key ingredients of development.

We now have a Democracy Fund to help us do that, financed not just by the rich West but by countries like India. To that end, the UN must also stand up for human rights everywhere, ensuring that the new Human Rights Council fulfils its responsibilities more effectively than the over-politicised Human Rights Commission it replaced.

And we must not let conflicts reignite when peacekeepers have left. We must strengthen the newly created Peacebuilding Commission to ensure that conflict gives way to development and the creation of democratic institutions so that peace is sustainable.

We have to make a difference where it counts - in the field, not just in the conference rooms in New York and Geneva. No task is more important than reinforcing the United Nations' operational capacity - to fulfil the Millennium Development Goals (promises to improve the lives of billions by 2015, which for the most part are not on course to being met), to mount effective peacekeeping operations (which take too long to deploy and are uneven in quality) and to respond urgently to humanitarian crises.

I know from my own experience with refugee work that we are doing well there, but we can become the gold standard for emergency relief.

As head of the UN, I would strengthen the international civil service, eliminating the nepotism and cronyism for which we have sometimes justifiably been blamed.

And I would work with Washington on the unfinished business of management reform, especially to ensure ethics, accountability and transparency, together with truly independent audit oversight.

The UN must be more sharply focused on areas where it has a proven and undoubted capacity to make a difference - when major humanitarian disasters strike, peace must be kept or territories administered.

But where others have the capacity, the resources and the will to keep the peace - Nato in Afghanistan, the European Union in Bosnia, though not yet the African Union in Darfur - the UN should bless their efforts. And where the task is clearly beyond us - like enforcing peace in Iraq - we should let wars be fought by warriors, not peacekeepers.

There is a great danger of the East-West divide of the Cold War being replaced by a North-South divide at the UN, as developing countries resist what they see as a rich-country agenda.

The new Secretary-General must urgently combat this. I would focus on building issues-based coalitions to deal with specific practical problems, such as management inefficiencies, procurement policies, information technology and outsourcing which have little to do with ideological politics.

Let us never forget that the UN will only succeed as a recourse for all and not the instrument of a few. It must amplify the voices of those who would otherwise not be heard, and serve as a canopy beneath which all can feel secure.

As our great second Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, put it, the UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell. So far it has, but not all the time and not everywhere. We can do better. Indeed, at this time of turbulence and transformation, we must.

* Shashi Tharoor is Undersecretary-General of the UN.