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NATIONS -- Secretary General Kofi A. Annan held
a hastily arranged meeting in Washington Wednesday
with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell after voicing
his personal shock and dismay at the unseating
of the US in the UN Human Rights Commission, which
Eleanor Roosevelt helped to create and of which
she was the first chairperson.
UN
Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson's shared
Annan's feelings on the issue, but the Secretary
General also wanted to point out that elections to
the 53-member panel followed democratic procedures,
his spokesman said after a meeting of UN system chiefs,
where the question was discussed.
Annan's worried reaction was voiced at this
closed-door meeting, prior to his departure
for Washington for previously scheduled talks
with Health Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. To
that engagement was added a last-minute separate
session with Powell -- highlighting the sense
of urgency generated by the controversial ballot.
The talk with Thompson was on international
efforts to help poor nations battle the AIDS
pandemic -- a priority for Annan -- and was,
therefore, totally unrelated to the vote in
the Economic and Social Council last week that
resulted in America's ouster from the Human
Rights Commission.
Powell and Annan agreed to use the opportunity
provided by the Secretary General's afternoon
visit to the nation's capital to discuss a
number of contentious matters, officials said.
Relations between the UN and the US, already
uneasy for several reasons, were severely jolted
by the results of the rights commission elections.
France and Austria romped to victory and Sweden
scraped through, but the US managed to obtain
only 29 votes, despite reported private pledges
that promised reelection by a handy majority.
The vacancies in contention were those reserved
for Western states. UN spokesman Fred Eckhard
made Annan's views on the vote public, along
with Robinson's, for the first time since a
relatively bland statement in the immediate
aftermath of the vote. But since then, members
of the House of Representatives have upped
the ante, by linking the snub to the payment
of US arrears and proposing to hold hearings
shortly on the episode.
Eckhard
quoted Annan, at the executives' meeting,
as having
paid tribute to the US for contributing
significantly to the work of the Commission
since it began and voicing hope that Washington
would "remain engaged even as a nonmember." Also,
that the US will return to membership next
year.
Annan
has "some worry at reports that
some members of Congress want to punish the
Organization for what is essentially a democratic
process," Eckhard reported. Moreover,
only a limited number of UN members voted on
the Human Rights Commission matter since the
economic council has only 54 member states.
Punishing the 189-nation UN would be counterproductive
and punishing the bureaucracy would be unfair,
Annan believes, said Eckhard.
Was
the Congressional response a "huge
setback"?, he was asked. The spokesman
replied by repeating what he had just said
about Annan's views and noting that the UN
had no information on a proposal to withhold
funds, other than what had appeared in media
accounts. "We hope they don't shoot the
messenger," he said of the Congress.
"We
think it would be counterproductive to target
the
whole membership or target the
bureaucracy for what has happened."
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