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By Sam Youngman
Posted: 06/12/09 04:08 PM [ET]

President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations hailed new sanctions passed by the security council against North Korea, but warned that the U.S. expects the country to respond “irresponsibly.”

Ambassador Susan Rice told reporters at the White House on Friday that the U.S. did have to make some concessions, but the administration is “pleased” with the tough sanctions that go into effect Friday in response to North Korea’s recent missile tests and nuclear activity.

“This is a very robust, tough regime with teeth that will bite in North Korea,” Rice said.

North Korea warned recently that any new sanctions would be considered an act of war.

Rice declined to “speculate” on how the country might respond, but she warned that given North Korea’s actions in the past, it is likely the country will respond to the new sanctions.

“There’s reason to believe they will respond to this in an irresponsible manner,” Rice said.

But she said, it is important that North Korea “pay a price” for its actions thus far.

Among the new sanctions, which include new financial sanctions and a total embargo of exports of weapons and weapons materials, is a new provision that would allow countries to “consensually” board and inspect North Korean vessels.

However, Rice acknowledged that the sanctions do not contain the authorization to use military force if the ship refuses to allow boarding and inspection. She declined to say if the U.S. had fought for but failed to win that provision.

Source: The Hill

Apr 20, 9:29 PM EDT

By FRANK JORDANS
Associated Press Writer

GENEVA (AP) — Dozens of Western diplomats walked out of a U.N. conference and a pair of rainbow-wigged protesters threw clown noses at Iran’s president Monday when the hard-line leader called Israel the “most cruel and repressive racist regime.”

The United States decried the remarks by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as hateful - reinjecting tension into a relationship that had been warming after President Barack Obama sought to engage Iran in talks on its nuclear program and other issues.

Ahmadinejad - the first government official to take the floor at the weeklong event in Geneva - delivered a rambling, half-hour speech that was by turns conciliatory and inflammatory. At one point he appealed for global unity in the fight against racism and then said the United States and Europe helped establish Israel after World War II at the expense of Palestinians.

“They resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering,” he said.

Jewish groups had lobbied heavily for a boycott of the conference, warning it could descend into anti-Semitism or other anti-Israel rhetoric, which marred the last such conference eight years ago in South Africa.

The meeting turned chaotic almost from the start when the two wigged protesters tossed the red clown noses at Ahmadinejad as he began his speech with a Muslim prayer. A Jewish student group from France said it had been trying to convey “the masquerade that this conference represents.”

One of the protesters shouted “You are a racist!” before he and the other demonstrator were taken away by security.

Ahmadinejad interjected: “I call on all distinguished guests to forgive these ignorant people. They don’t have enough information.”

During his speech, he accused Israel of being the “most cruel and repressive racist regime” and blamed the U.S. invasion of Iraq on a Zionist conspiracy.

At the first mention of Israel, about 40 diplomats from Britain and France and other European Union countries exited the room.

Most of his remarks were not new but their timing and high profile could complicate U.S. efforts to improve ties with Iran. Alejandro Wolff, the U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N., denounced what he called “the Ahmadinejad spectacle.”

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, asked by reporters about Ahmadinejad’s remarks, replied: “Obviously, the president disagrees vehemently with what was said, as, from some of the video I saw, so did many others.”

Gibbs said it proved that the United States was right to boycott the conference. Germany, Italy and at least six other countries also refused to attend the event, which began on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“We call on the Iranian leadership to show much more measured, moderate, honest and constructive rhetoric when dealing with issues in the region, and not this type of vile, hateful, inciteful speech that we all saw,” Wolff said at the U.N. in New York.

Later, about 100 members of mainly pro-Israel and Jewish groups tried to block Ahmadinejad’s entrance to a scheduled news conference.

In a milder protest, Jewish groups outside the venue read out some of the names of the 6 million who died in the Holocaust.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with Ahmadinejad before his speech and said he had counseled the Iranian leader to avoid dividing the conference. Ban later said he was disappointed the speech was used “to accuse, divide and even incite,” directly opposing the aim of the meeting.

“It was a very troubling experience for me as a secretary-general,” he said. “It was a totally unacceptable situation.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned the speech and Ban’s meeting with Ahmadinejad.

“It is unfortunate that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon deemed it appropriate to meet with the greatest Holocaust denier of our time,” the Foreign Ministry said. “This matter is especially severe, as it took place on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day.”

Ahmadinejad has been praised by some in the Muslim world for his attacks on Israel. The hard-liner has often used international forums to criticize Israel.

Most Muslim delegations in Geneva declined to comment, but Pakistan said the protesters were wrong to interrupt Ahmadinejad.

“If we actually believe in freedom of expression, then he has the right to say what he wants to say,” Ambassador Zamir Akram told The Associated Press. “There were things in there that a lot of people in the Muslim world would be in agreement with, for example the situation in Palestine, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, even if they don’t agree with the way he said it.”

While the speech was interrupted several times by cheers from the large Iranian delegation, it may not be well-received among many others in Iran, which is suffering from high inflation and unemployment partly as a result of its global isolation. Many have criticized Ahmadinejad, who is up for re-election in June, for spending too much time on anti-Israel and anti-Western rhetoric and not enough on the country’s economy.

—

Associated Press writers Bradley S. Klapper and Eliane Engeler in Geneva, and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

By MOHAMED OLAD HASSAN Associated Press
Feb. 22, 2009, 2:58PM
Houston Chronicle

MOGADISHU, Somalia — An attack on an African Union peacekeeping base in the Somali capital Sunday killed 11 people and injured 15, the AU said, but it denied insurgent claims of a suicide attack.

El Ghassim Wane, a spokesman for the AU in Addis Ababa, said the insurgents had fired mortars onto the base in Mogadishu. He gave no further details.

But Sheik Muktar Robow, a spokesman for the al-Shabab insurgent group, insisted that “Our fighters have carried out two suicide attacks on the infidels in Mogadishu, inflicting heavy losses.”

The AU peacekeeping force in Mogadishu has had a restricted mandate to guard key government installations in the two years it has been here. It has not been involved in fighting Islamic militants in the capital, battles that have killed thousands of civilians over the past two years. But hardline groups still view the peacekeepers as an occupying force.

Al-Shabab, an extremist Islamic group, has threatened to focus its attacks on AU troops now that Ethiopian troops have left Mogadishu after a two-year deployment.

Also Sunday, gunmen kidnapped a Pakistani in northern Somalia, said Muse Gelle, governor of the Bari region in Somalia’s semiautonomous Puntland region. The man was traveling to a farming project where he was working, Gelle said.

Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said he was unaware that any Pakistani national had been kidnapped in Somalia.

The man’s name and employer were not immediately known. The area of the Horn of Africa nation is notorious for kidnappings and piracy.

Pirates also seized a Greek-owned cargo ship Sunday with a 22-member crew off Somalia’s coast.

Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991.

The U.S. State Department considers al-Shabab a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaida, something the group has denied.

Somalia’s government controls virtually no territory in this unstable nation.

Former soldier, rebel and warlord Abdullahi Yusuf resigned as president in December after failing to pacify the country during his four years in office.

A moderate Islamist leader, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, was elected by parliament and observers hope he will bring many of Somalia’s Islamic factions into a more inclusive government.

Ahmed was chairman of the Islamic Courts Union that ran Mogadishu for six months in 2006 before Ethiopian soldiers drove them from power.

Associated Press writer Anita Powell contributed to this report from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Sen. John Kerry will not be visiting Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal during his trip to Syria Saturday and U.S. officials in Jerusalem are furious at the United Nations Relief and Works agency for its handling of the letter.

FOXNews.com
Saturday, February 21, 2009

U.S. officials are furious with the United Nations for its role in Hamas’ attempt to enlist U.S. Sen John Kerry to transfer a letter from the Palestinian militant group to President Obama during Kerry’s trip to the Middle East, an official source told FOX News.

The incident also has raised security concerns over how much Hamas knew about Kerry’s travel plans.

Kerry turned the letter over to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem on Friday, saying he was unaware that it was from Hamas until hearing about the letter in media reports, including on the BBC. He told FOX News on Saturday that he will not be visiting Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal during his trip to Syria on Saturday. He is scheduled to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad.

U.S. officials in Jerusalem are outraged at the United Nations Relief and Works agency for apparently handing the letter off to Kerry.

The official source who spoke to FOX News argued that if the U.N. had a letter from Hamas, it should have given U.S. officials a heads-up before the news was leaked to media organizations.

The Hamas official who wrote the letter confirmed to FOX News that he wrote Obama personally, asking him not to be biased toward Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians and to act fairly. He also said Hamas is ready to talk directly to a new American administration.

This Hamas official insists he had the backing of the group to write the letter, but it appears the official acted alone.

Kerry turned the letter over to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem on Friday and his spokesman told FOX News that the Democratic senator was not aware that the letter was from Hamas when he accepted it from an official with the U.N. relief agency.

Kerry told FOX News that he never read the letter because it was sandwich among other promotional papers the U.N. gave him. A State Department official confirmed to FOX News that it was from Hamas and is now under review.

A potential concern was whether such a letter would violate the United States’ policy toward Hamas. Obama has said his administration will not engage in diplomatic talks with Hamas unless the group renounces terrorism and affirms Israel’s right to exist.

In addition, a U.S. official said there were security issues with the letter. The official who spoke to FOX News said there is concern that Hamas had advance notice that Kerry was visiting, which may raise issues of trust with the U.N. on future diplomatic trips.

FOX News’ Reena Ninan and Nina Donaghy contributed to this report.

Thu Feb 19, 2009 11:40pm IST

By Patrick Worsnip

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - After a decade and a half of backroom argument, the world’s nations launched talks on Thursday on expanding the powerful U.N. Security Council from 15 members to reflect present-day realities.

Diplomats said the negotiations among the 192 U.N. member states were likely to stretch at least into next year and might not come up with a definitive solution even then.

The council, authorized by the U.N. charter to impose sanctions and dispatch peacekeeping forces, has five permanent veto-holding members — the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China.

It also has 10 members with no veto power who are elected on a regional basis for two-year terms before being replaced by others. The number was set in 1965, after standing at six since the United Nations was founded after World War Two.

Developing countries have long resented the clout of the veto-holders on the council, whose composition stems from the post-war balance of power. Most nations agree the body needs to be enlarged, but there is no consensus on how.

The negotiations, chaired by Afghan Ambassador Zahir Tanin, got off to a low-key start with a closed meeting at which U.N. officials said member state envoys discussed procedural issues. Substantive negotiations will begin next month, they said.

A world summit in 2005 said reform of the Security Council would make it “more broadly representative, efficient and transparent and thus … further enhance its effectiveness and the legitimacy and implementation of its decisions.”

But regional rivalries and a concern by the big powers that their preeminence should not be diluted are likely to drag out the talks on key details of how to achieve that goal.

Numerous plans have been put forward in the past, differing over how many new seats should be added, who should have them, whether they should be permanent, semipermanent or time-limited and which, if any, new states should get the veto.

RIGHT OF VETO

But Ambassador Thomas Matussek of Germany, one of several countries bidding for a permanent seat, said he believed there was now more chance of a result because of demands for “global governance” as a result of the world financial crisis.

“The question is, do you want this world run by G13, G15, G20, or do you want it run by the only legitimate global institution we have? And that is the U.N.,” he told reporters.

One proposal that has long been discussed would give Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and two African states permanent seats but without an immediate right of veto. There would also be four new nonpermanent seats from around the world.

A rival plan would just add 10 new nonpermanent seats. That is supported by, among others, Italy and Pakistan, who want to stop permanent seats going to Germany and India respectively.

Many other variants have been suggested. The United States has said it supports permanent membership for Japan and possibly unidentified others, but Tokyo’s cause has run into opposition from China and South Korea.

France and Britain last year proposed a temporary fix that would be revisited after a few years. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said last month that could unblock an issue he said was “not only not moving forward but is moving backwards.”

A U.N. working group preparing the negotiations said last year: “We are convinced that a ‘big bang,’ an all-encompassing solution, is not possible, and that only a realistic approach that allows agreement on what is achievable in the near term … is the way to move forward.”

Committees began in 1994 to discuss setting up talks on expanding the council but bogged down in disputes on how they would work. Their launch now follows a push by the last two General Assembly presidents, Srgjan Kerim of Macedonia and the current incumbent Miguel D’Escoto of Nicaragua.

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

<---End of Quote--->

Related Article:
China calls for greater presence of developing nations in Security Council

www.chinaview.cn 2009-02-20 07:44:45

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) — China on Thursday called for a greater representation of developing countries, in particular those from Africa, in a reformed UN Security Council.

“In the reform of the Security Council, priority should be given to the greater representation of developing countries, in particular African ones,” China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Yesui told an informal plenary of the General Assembly.

With developing countries accounting for the vast majority of the UN’s 192 member states, the composition of the Security Council can no longer reflect the political reality of the United Nations, he said.

Therefore, it is imperative to resolve the issue of under-representation of developing countries in the Security Council, he noted.

Zhang said that the reform of the Security Council, which concerns the common interests of all member states, is a complex and sensitive issue that requires a long-term solution.

China hopes that all parties, through serious and patient negotiations, will eventually find a proposal that is acceptable to all, he added.

At the plenary session, the UN General Assembly opened intergovernmental negotiations on the reform of the Security Council.

According to the sketch of a “roadmap” unveiled by General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the first round of negotiations will be held in March and April to discuss the key issues related to the Council’s reform, with a second round slated for May.

Published: Dec. 23, 2008 at 5:26 PM

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Dec. 23 (UPI) — The Pakistani government has deployed a unit of troops to the volatile Darfur region of Sudan to support peacekeeping operations.

The U.N. joint peacekeeping operation in Darfur with the African Union has called on the international community for additional troop commitments to counter the escalating threat of rebel groups. Pakistan, which already has a contingent of approximately 75 troops currently deployed to Darfur, has sent a unit of 85 to support the U.N.-AU mission, the United Nations reported.

Pakistani defense officials are also sending an additional 176 members of the Pakistani Engineering Co. expected to arrive in Darfur before Monday. The Pakistani troops will support the construction of refugee and internally displaced person camps among other infrastructure.

The United Nations estimates that “300,000 people have been killed and another 2.7 million have been displaced from their homes in Darfur since rebels began fighting government forces and allied militiamen in 2003,” the release said.

© 2008 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

By MARTIN SIEFF
Published: Oct. 24, 2008 at 11:22 AM

WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 (UPI) — Happy United Nations Day! It was 63 years ago Friday that the U.N. Charter went into effect. To paraphrase noted bard Paul McCartney, “Will we still need it, will we still feed it, when it’s 64?”

The answer is “Yes.” The failures of the United Nations are many and awful, but it has had some overlooked and crucial successes as well.

The United Nations certainly has failed in its primary function — to stop and prevent war. But you would have to wait for the Messianic era proclaimed in many of the world’s great religions to achieve that.

At least 100 million people have been killed in conflicts since the United Nations was created. It has proved toothless and futile in preventing the genocide in Darfur or the violence in Congo that has cost 10 million lives over the past decade. It never raised a finger to rein in tyrants from Mao Zedong in China to Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

When the United Nations has been authorized to act, to try to prevent war or end mass slaughters, its own administrative incompetence has repeatedly signed the death warrants of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

In Bosnia, the United Nations failed utterly to prevent the massacre in Srebrenica. In Rwanda, the organization’s incompetence failed to deter a genocide that cost a million lives.

In both cases, some form of concerted humanitarian intervention by the great powers would have been far more effective and humane. Trusting in the United Nations, as U.S. President Bill Clinton did, proved a true warrant for genocide.

U.N. apologists usually argue that since the organization functions at the bidding of its member nations, it is their fault rather than the world body itself when it cannot perform international security functions.

But this argument does not hold water. Had the United Nations not existed, or been sidelined from the word “go,” the innocent victims of Srebrenica and Rwanda would have had a far better chance of being saved by concerted great power action. Trusting in the United Nations to protect them proved their doom. U.N. officials were culpable precisely because they craved the prestige of running security operations that they could not begin to deliver.

U.N. apologists also claim the world body does a great deal of good with its health, food and relief agencies. However, this argument too is spurious. The best of those bodies, such as the Geneva-based World Health Organization, would be maintained and funded even if the United Nations vanished. Many of them are far more adept in publicizing their efforts and fundraising among the rich and beautiful of the global elite than they are in actually helping people anyway.

In terms of promoting global development, critics from the right and the left have cogently argued for decades that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have done much more harm than good. In the current global financial meltdown, the United Nations has been an irrelevance.

However, in one crucial area it has performed brilliantly — though none of the credit goes to the Secretariat or any part of the organization’s huge bureaucracy.

For the veto system of the great powers exercised in the U.N. Security Council actually works. In the closing months of World War II, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed the idea and won the grudging agreement of Soviet Premier Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for it.

Since then, the Security Council veto has played a major role in preventing any outbreak of global war between the world’s leading industrial powers for the past 63 years. This is a record already three times better than that of the moribund League of Nations, which lasted less than two decades before World War II broke out in 1939.

As long as the policymakers in Russia, the United States, China, Britain and France remain confident that they can block any international action or unilateral action by each other, or by other major powers, through the wielding of their vetoes as the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, outright conflict between them can be avoided.

However, starting with the U.S. and NATO bombing of Yugoslavia to end Serb violence against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999, a precedent was established whereby major powers, most of all and initially the United States, but now Russia too, have felt increasingly free to act unilaterally with their armed forces without the cover of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

In August the Russians took advantage of that precedent to invade the former Soviet republic of Georgia in the Caucasus and occupy one-third of it, despite Georgia’s close ties to the United States and its aspirations to becoming a NATO ally.

The United Nations certainly hasn’t prevented wars or mass killings around the world, and the wording of its Charter limits it from impinging on national sovereignty to prevent national governments slaughtering millions of their own citizens within their borders.

Since it was created, wars have been running at about the same rate they did in the second half of the 19th century, with the same disproportionate emphasis on colonial or postcolonial conflicts.

The U.N. track record is still vastly better than the first half of the 20th century that saw both world wars and the unprecedented genocides and mass slaughters inflicted by Adolf Hitler across Nazi-occupied Europe, Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao in China.

The ideal of the United Nations sounds noble, and the U.N. General Assembly came up with the idea of U.N. Day to blow its own trumpet. But its many failures need to be exposed and examined if the organization is to do a better job in the future.

© 2008 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.