UNITED NATIONS -- U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, acknowledging he had been absent from the United Nations for weeks, criticized the world body Monday for its lack of coordination and focus on process at the expense of results.
At his first news conference for U.N. press since coming to New York in September, Holbrooke also said peacekeeping, particularly in Africa, would be his priority for next year.Since arriving at the world body after his nomination was blocked in the U.S. Senate for a year, Holbrooke has spent much of his time in Washington lobbying for payment of U.S. arrears to the United Nations. He also traveled to the Balkans, East Timor and 10 nations in Africa.
Africa, he said, will be at the top of the Security Council's agenda when he assumes its presidency in January, with open debates on the fighting in Burundi, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone as well as the AIDS scourge. "The future of the U.N. will be heavily determined by its getting it right in Central Africa in the coming cycle," he said.
In his travels, he said he had noticed "inadequate coordination" between specialized agencies and the U.N. secretariat.
He referred to the U.N. refugee agency, saying it appeared to pay more attention refugees outside a country -- such as in Angola or East Timor -- than displaced people within a country who may be far more in need.
Holbrooke also criticized the relationship between the secretariat, run by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and 15-member Security Council.
He cited the scheduling of a news conference on a searing U.N. report about the 1995 massacres in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica at the same time as a press briefing he had scheduled with the three members of the Bosnian inter-ethnic presidency after they addressed the council on Nov. 15.
Although the United Nations frequently schedules several events at once, Holbrooke expressed astonishment that Annan's office was unaware of the conflict.
Holbrooke also said the bureaucracy was still too unresponsive and that there was a "general sense" that process rather than substance "was what this place is all about."
"We have to get focused on outcomes and that is again where management and substance merge," he said.
U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard noted that the United Nations is organized in such a way that Annan has little control over specialized agencies in the field.
But he said the United Nations had become far more operational in the past decade. "I would step back from it a bit and see a bureaucracy that has been changing."
Acknowledging that he had been absent from daily chores at the United Nations, Holbrooke said he had to spend his initial months getting U.S. dues paid and not let a key appropriations bill "drop off the radar screen at the last moment as it has in the past" during Washington's budget negotiations.
Now he has the thankless task of getting 187 other U.N. members to lower U.S. dues from 25 percent to 22 percent of the U.N. budget, a condition Congress imposed before the bulk of the $926 million appropriated would be paid.
The U.S. arrears come to $1.5 billion, according to U.N. official figures.