Nepal Rift Shows India's Place in the UN, Who Decides the Mission's Mandate and When to Leave

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/un2nepal072208.html

UNITED NATIONS, July 22 -- The UN Security Council canceled 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?

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.

And see, www.innercitypress.com/un2nepal072208.html