UN needs overhaul says Condoleezza Rice

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday the United Nations needed to be overhauled "to survive as a vital force," in the strongest criticism yet from a senior US official amid a debate on UN reform.

Rice, who has chosen John Bolton, a longtime critic of the organization, to be her UN ambassador, said Washington needed to lead changes to fix an institution dogged by scandals over corruption in the Iraq oil-for-food program and sexual abuse by peacekeepers.

"It is no secret to anyone that the United Nations cannot survive as a vital force in international politics if it does not reform - if it doesn't reform its organizations, if it doesn't reform its secretariat, if it doesn't reform its management practices," she told a newspaper editors' conference.

Last month, Secretary General Kofi Annan proposed the most wide-ranging overhaul of the United Nations since its creation in 1945. He recommended the expansion of the UN Security Council, a radical program to combat poverty, a new human rights body and a condemnation of all forms of terrorism and a series of management and watchdog reforms.

"As important an institution as it is, one has to say that there are some things that are not so great about the United Nations right now. And everybody recognizes that. And we've got to fix it," Rice said.

President Bush has had strained relations with the United Nations. In his first term, he challenged it to avoid becoming irrelevant and ordered the invasion of Iraq without explicit UN approval before increasingly turning to the organization for support after the war.

Bolton, a hardline conservative who once said the United States should only make the United Nations work to benefit US interests, has pledged to work to improve UN accountability and complained of overlapping programs and mandates.

"He is going to be a force for what is always needed in the United Nations: American leadership to update and reform and strengthen this great institution," Rice said.

GINGRICH AND MITCHELL

In a related development, a Congressional-mandated task force on UN reform visited the UN headquarters in New York on Friday, led by Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, and George Mitchell, former Democrat Senate leader.

Both praised the meetings with Annan and his senior staff as "candid" and "informative." Their report, to be completed in June, is expected to have an impact on Congressional calls to cut US payments to the United Nations.

Gingrich, often a critic of the world body, told reporters there was "no argument" that some systems that "just don't work" and "patterns that just aren't acceptable."

"I know of no occasion that we have had a secretary-general as open and as direct as Kofi Annan has been in the last two months about the need for reform," Gingrich told reporters.

Gingrich, who stressed his mission was to produce a US and not a UN report, said, "This was a far less contentious and far more informative session than I would have guessed three months ago.

"This could be - not guaranteed - a remarkable moment to get some significant things done that will give the world a more transparent, a more accountable United Nations," he said."

- REUTERS