New York Times/ September 7, 2000 THE OVERVIEW Clinton Warns U.N. of a New Age of Civil Wars By DAVID E. SANGER
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 6 — President Clinton opened the summit meeting of world leaders at the United Nations today, urging the huge gathering to prepare the institution for a new age in which international forces will have to reach regularly and rapidly inside national boundaries to protect threatened people.
With his own time in the front rank of the 149 world leaders gathered here drawing to an end, Mr. Clinton also used the moment to try to settle some of the disputes that have dogged his presidency, from the Middle East to Russia to Southeast Asia.
The president met separately into the evening with Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel and then with the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, in hopes of picking up the broken pieces of the peace agreement to which they came tantalizingly close at Camp David in July. Mr. Clinton had warned earlier in the day that "like all life's chances," the moment for an accord "is fleeting and about to pass."
Tonight, the White House spokesman, Joe Lockhart, gave no indication that the meetings had resulted in any progress on the question of control of Jerusalem or other issues dividing Mr. Arafat and Mr. Barak. He said that as of now no meetings were scheduled this week among the three leaders.
Also today, Mr. Clinton sparred anew with Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, who is using the gathering here to propose a ban on military uses of space, another effort to terminate American efforts to develop a national missile defense. Mr. Clinton's aides gave Mr. Putin a summary of American intelligence gathered during the Kursk submarine disaster, which suggests that Mr. Putin's own naval forces may have misled him in the days after the accident.
Mr. Clinton was deliberately vague on the question of when the United Nations should step into civil wars or ethnic and religious disputes — an argument that has come up repeatedly during his presidency. "These conflicts present us with a stark challenge," he said. "Are they part of the scourge the U.N. was established to prevent? If so, we must respect sovereignty and territorial integrity, but still find a way to protect people as well as borders."
Just hours before he spoke, three United Nations relief workers were killed in West Timor, apparently by Indonesian militia forces. The news, underscoring the risks to United Nations workers as they insert themselves into uncontrolled disputes, put a chill on the opening ceremony. As the session began, the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, called for a minute of silence to remember the three international aid workers, as Indonesia's president, Abdurrahman Wahid, struggling with a clear erosion of his authority at home, sat in the hall.
Mr. Clinton clearly relished one of his last hurrahs as president in front of what the United Nations called the largest gathering of world leaders in history. Rarely has he had a chance to talk to both adversaries and allies at the same moment, a group as diverse as President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea and President Fidel Castro of Cuba, who listened to Mr. Clinton but never got close enough to talk to him.
Mr. Clinton stayed in the hall after his speech and, because of an unexpected change in the order of speakers, heard President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, with whom the United States still has no formal dialogue, talk about the clash of Islamic and Western cultures.
As Mr. Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright sat listening at the back of the huge hall, Mr. Khatami declared that in coming years the world could no longer be ruled by "monopolies of power and capital," a clear reference to the United States. It was one of several expressions of frustration about America's global power that was a subtext of the gathering.
Shortly after Mr. Clinton spoke of the need to intervene strongly when a nation's leaders abuse their own people, the president of China, Jiang Zemin, described a very different concept of how the world should operate. "Respect for each other's independence and sovereignty is vital to the maintenance of world peace," he said.
Striking a theme often heard from Chinese leaders who fear that intervention in Kosovo or East Timor could provide the precedent for one day intervening in Tibet or Taiwan, Mr. Jiang added: "Dialogue and cooperation in the field of human rights must be conducted on the basis of respect for state sovereignty. Without sovereignty, there will be no human rights to speak of."
Perhaps because of the growing suspicions about America's use of that power — or perhaps because of the constant conflict between the United Nations and Washington over the payment of dues to the organization — Mr. Clinton did not receive the kind of standing ovation that greeted him in 1998. During his speech, he made an oblique reference to Washington's $1.7 billion in arrears to the United Nations, saying that as the organization expands its missions, "all these things come with a price tag, and all nations, including the United States, must pay it."
He also took a clear shot at conservative Republicans who have attacked the United Nations, saying, "Those in my country or elsewhere who believe we can do without the United Nations, or impose our will upon it, misread history and misunderstand the future."
Shortly after Mr. Clinton spoke, he met in the United Nations building with the president of Vietnam, Tan Duc Luong. He reassured him that a recent trade accord between the United States and its enemy of three decades ago would remain a top priority for the United States, even though he has decided not to try to win approval of the agreement from Congress this year. The two men also discussed Mr. Clinton's desire to visit Vietnam before the end of his presidency, which would make him the first American president to set foot on Vietnamese soil since the end of the war nearly 30 years ago.
While the White House made no announcement of such plans, senior administration officials say Mr. Clinton is likely to visit Vietnam just before Thanksgiving. He is planning to attend the annual Asian economic summit meeting in Brunei, and would make a symbolic — and highly emotional — visit to Hanoi on the same trip.
Such individual meetings and initiatives always dominate the opening of the United Nations session in September. But the stated purpose of this vast meeting of leaders is much broader: to set new priorities and directions for the United Nations, which at age 55 seems creaky and unprepared for a host of new challenges.
On Friday the leaders are scheduled to sign a millennium declaration, calling for a new peacekeeping structure; a report to Mr. Annan calls for a strengthened corps of commanders in New York, ready to organize peacekeeping operations in a week or two. The declaration also sets goals for reducing poverty and illiteracy during the next 15 years, and contains carefully formulated language about guiding economic globalization so that it benefits the poor as much as the rich, and small, uncompetitive nations as much as the developed world.
But as with any document that is signed by so many, the language is so watered down that discerning its specific meaning is difficult at best. And it is particularly difficult to pin down the United Nations' role in managing economic globalization and development. More and more, that role has fallen to the institutions that were created at the end of World War II to manage the world economy — the World Bank, which focuses on poverty, and the International Monetary Fund, which seeks to prevent and manage economic crises.
Their growing role leaves the United Nations increasingly on the sidelines when it comes to the crucial questions of economic development — who gets capital and under what conditions — and even their efforts are often overshadowed by the billions in private capital that now slosh through the emerging markets on a daily basis.
In such an environment, the United Nations' role is chiefly hortatory. And exactly because the United Nations does not impose the kind of conditions on its aid that the World Bank and I.M.F. require, from fiscal prudence to Western-style accounting methods — it has become the forum to which many nations want to move the debate over the rules of globalization.
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