Pangea promises safety of nuclear waste dump
23 Aug 1999 14:52 Australian Broacasting
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-23aug1999-54.htm
A British company promoting the underground storage of nuclear waste in Western Australia says it can basically guarantee the safety of its proposal.
Pangea Resources has chosen the state's outback as the prospective site for a nuclear waste repository for radioactive materials from uranium processing plants and disarmament projects.
Pangea's general manager of science, technology and engineering Charles McCombie says the storage technology is the best currently available.
"We can give as near to a guarantee as you can get in this world," Mr McCombie said.
"It's the best research. It's been researched for over 40 years now and all of the steps have been tried out and it's all been put together and it is being done recently.
"The first geologic disposal facility has been opened for business in the USA."
But Western Australian environmentalist Robin Chappell says the risk of the proposed project can never be eliminated.
"It's never been done. I mean, that's the simple answer.
"If we do it properly, if we develop systems to do it, it's going to be safe for the next 250,000 years.
"I defy anybody to give any guarantee over any material for that length of time," Robin Chappell said.
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Spanish Activists Protest Against Proposed Nuke Dump
EarthVision Reports 08/05/99
http://204.255.211.112/ColdFusion/News_Page1.cfm?NewsID=8036&start=151
MADRID, August 5, 1999 - A Spanish environmental group said today it will take its protests against a proposed nuclear waste storage facility from the streets to the courts. According to an article from Retuers, the group Ecologistas en Accion is planning to sue the government of Spain over its decision to approve construction of a nuclear waste storage facility northeast of Madrid. The government wants to build the facility next to a nuclear power station near Guadalajara, due to be shut down in late 2002 or early 2003. According to the article, the government believes the project is urgent and of "exceptional public interest," despite contravening local regulations.
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Iraq: Lab's Destruction a Cover Up
By Edith M. Lederer Associated Press Writer Tuesday, August
24, 1999; 4:04 a.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990824/V000099-082499-idx.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Iraq has claimed VX nerve gas and other chemical agents in a Baghdad laboratory were destroyed to cover up illegitimate activities by U.N. weapons inspectors.
In a letter to the U.N. Security Council circulated Monday, Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Saeed Hasan, repeated Iraqi allegations that samples of the VX nerve agent were used to contaminate fragments of Iraqi warheads -- not to test equipment.
The chemical agents were left behind when weapons inspectors from the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, pulled out of Iraq in December on the eve of U.S. and British airstrikes. Iraq has barred UNSCOM from returning and a team of independent chemical experts was sent to Baghdad last month to remove or destroy the materials.
The issue of VX became a flash point for the Security Council last year when the United States found traces of the deadly nerve agent on fragments of Iraqi missile warheads. A Swiss laboratory found no traces, and a French laboratory's tests were inconclusive.
Iraq has admitted producing 3.9 tons of VX agent, but denied loading it into missile warheads.
China, France and Russia -- Iraq's closest allies on the Security Council -- wanted the seven tiny samples of VX from the Baghdad laboratory held for further analysis, intimating that it may have been used to taint the missile warhead fragments sent to the United States for testing.
The United States, Britain and the majority of the 15-member council backed UNSCOM inspectors who said the small quantities of VX could only be used to calibrate equipment testing for the nerve agent.
UNSCOM said the VX posed no danger and should be destroyed. After about a week of wrangling in the Security Council, it was.
In the letter, Hasan said Iraq is convinced the chemical agents were not destroyed because they posed any danger.
He alleged that UNSCOM was illegally using chemical agents to contaminate warheads and that it wanted to destroy explosive materials kept in the laboratory and documents that provided proof of these ``illegitimate'' activities.
The ``clearest proof of this fact is the opposition of the United States of America and the United Kingdom to any suggestion in the Security Council that the VX samples should be analyzed in order to settle the matter from the technical and operational points of view,'' Hasan said.
He reiterated a demand by Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, for a comprehensive inventory of all items in UNSCOM's premises in Baghdad to be made by a neutral, professional team with the participation of diplomats representing Security Council members ``in order to determine all the facts concerning the contents of these premises.''
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Do More to Aid Nourishment of Very Young, U.N. Tells Iraq
By BARBARA CROSSETTE, August 24, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/082499iraq-un.html
UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the Iraqi government Monday that it could be doing more to help mothers and children under the program that allows Iraq to export oil to raise money for food, medicine and other essential goods.
In a report to the Security Council on the program, Annan also asked that the council's sanctions committee stop blocking the export to Iraq of goods like water and sanitation equipment which would also contribute to better health. Most of the holds put on contracts in the committee come from representatives of the United States or, occasionally Britain, the countries that take the hardest line against Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein.
The oil-for-food program was started in 1996 to ease civilian suffering under economic sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Annan's report precedes a debate to resume next month about how to deal with Iraq now that it has effectively ended arms inspections -- which would have allowed sanctions to be lifted once questions on nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs had been answered. As the debate nears, the Iraqis, faced with mounting evidence that they have significantly stalled at least parts of a relief program, still face these questions. Even so, they continue to accuse the United States of being entirely responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iraqis under the sanctions.
As officials of the oil-for-food program explained Monday, Iraq's revenues from oil exports have risen sharply in recent months with higher world oil prices. But the government has actually been spending less on nutritionally enhanced food products that would benefit women and children in central and southern Iraq, where Hussein's government is in control and where 85 percent of the Iraqi people live.
At current oil price levels, Iraq stands to make as much as $6.3 billion in oil sales in the six-month period ending in November, Annan said in the report. Officials here said that Iraq had so far budgeted only $6.6 million in nutritional supplements for mothers and small children, down from $15 million when the program began in 1996.
In northern Iraq, program officials said, the United Nations and local Kurdish officials decide what to buy. More money is allocated there for foods like high-protein biscuits and milk fortified with nutrients to build up malnourished children.
Annan's report echoes and broadens findings of a report released two weeks ago by UNICEF, the U.N. children's fund, which surveyed the health of Iraqi children under 5.
Benon Sevan, director of the U.N. Iraq program, said Monday that the Iraqis had not heeded earlier recommendations to increase orders of special nutritional products.
"In the light of the UNICEF survey," Sevan said in an interview, "there should be serious attention given to targeted feeding programs in order to achieve immediate benefits."
The secretary-general's report, which Sevan will discuss with the Security Council on Thursday, faulted Iraq for other omissions in its civilian aid programs.
It said that working and living conditions for Iraqis and United Nations-appointed foreign experts at Mina al Bakr, where a large part of Iraqi oil exports are loaded, were unhygienic and unsafe. The port of Um Qasr, through which imports pass, is also deteriorating, slowing inspections and quality testing as goods arrive. Both are under Iraqi government control.
The quality testing is in itself a problem, the report noted. It cited four-month delays in examinations of tuberculosis and diphtheria vaccines intended for Kurdish regions, where 13 percent of oil earnings must be spent, according to the Security Council resolution setting up the program.
According to the report, the Iraqis have also been ordering less essential food for the general public -- among these cheese, milk and lentils or beans -- which has lowered the number of calories provided in monthly food rations to Iraqis in government-controlled areas. In Kurdish areas, calories are higher. Sevan said children in Kurdish areas look healthier every time he visits.
Although holds have been put on contracts for needed water and sanitation supplies, those goods that do arrive in Iraq do not always get distributed quickly, according to the report. "Large quantities of essential materials remain in storage," it read. A drought in Iraq has worsened water problems.
There have been persistent Iraqi complaints about the quality of goods imported under the oil-for-food program -- the explanation Iraq gave for sending a ship carrying baby products and cottonseed back to Dubai last week. The secretary-general said in his report that the Iraqi government, which chooses the suppliers, should "procure better quality commodities through more reliable and reputable contractors."
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Iraq Trip Nixed Amid Security Fears
Friday, August 20, 1999; 7:58 p.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990820/V000970-082099-idx.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A group of Congressional staffers has called off a trip to Iraq next week after being told by the State Department that security could be a problem.
Backed by several religious, Arab American and peace organizations, the five staffers were to meet with relief and U.N. officials. The aim was to gather information about what UNICEF has called a humanitarian emergency.
The United States, which opposes lifting sanctions imposed by the United Nations in 1991 after Iraq invaded Kuwait, has blamed President Saddam Hussein for malnutrition and deaths of Iraqi children in government-controlled areas.
In an effort to help ordinary Iraqis cope with the sanctions, the United Nations has allowed Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies since 1996.
Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes bombed Iraqi surface-to-air missile sites Tuesday after Iraqi forces targeted the planes with artillery fire during a routine patrol of the northern no-fly zone, the U.S. military said.
The State Department said Friday it had not told the Congressional staffers they could not visit Iraq, but had been informing Americans generally of a potential security risk.
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Allied Planes Bomb Northern Iraq
Monday, August 23, 1999; 1:58 p.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990823/V000597-082399-idx.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- American and British warplanes killed two people Monday in an attack on a northern Iraqi town, Iraq's armed forces said.
The U.S. military said allied planes shot at an Iraqi military radar station after being fired upon by Iraqi anti-aircraft guns.
A statement from the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, did not mention casualties, saying only that ``damage to Iraqi forces is currently being assessed.''
The Iraqi armed forces said U.S. and British planes flew 18 sorties over northern Iraq, bombing the town of Ba'sheqa. The town is located 280 miles north of Baghdad and 30 miles east of the Saddam Dam area, which allied planes bombed Aug. 16.
The U.S. military said the allied planes were fired on Monday while patrolling the ``no-fly'' zone in northern Iraq. The United States and Britain patrol the skies over northern and southern Iraq to protect Kurdish and Shiite Muslim minorities from President Saddam Hussein's forces.
Baghdad regards the patrols as a violation of its sovereignty and since December has regularly challenged the allied planes by locking missile radar on them. The United States and Britain have responded by firing, saying they target only radar and other military sites.
Iraq repeatedly accuses the United States and Britain of bombing civilians.
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Chernobyl Shelter Requests EKOR to Contain Radioactive Material
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 /PRNewswire/ -- EUROTECH, Ltd.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/08-24-1999/0001008267&EDATE=
(OTC Bulletin Board: EURO) is pleased to announce that the Chernobyl Shelter Project Director requested EUROTECH to begin site application of EKOR at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant #4. Work will begin immediately on nuclear dust suppression and isolation of fuel-containing masses in the Shelter area. This independently funded effort will prove the application technology. EKOR is a radiation-resistant, waterproof, fireproof and non-biodegradable material previously accepted by the Shelter officials and approved for use at Chernobyl.
This request is a continuation of EKOR's acceptance last year as a material for long-term encapsulation of radioactive waste. This phase will demonstrate application techniques under various Shelter conditions, while satisfying requirements for state licensing in preparation for wide application.
Mr. V.I. Kupny, Deputy Director General of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plants and Head of the Shelter Project said, "[Successful application of EKOR technology would lead to] ... further wide application of the material." In 1997, the G-7 estimated total cost of the Shelter Project at $758 million. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development funds the Shelter Project.
EUROTECH, Ltd. obtained independent funding for this EKOR application, which is executed outside the Shelter Implementation Plan. Scientists from the Euro-Asian Physical Society/Kurchatov Institute will conduct the EKOR application supported by Chernobyl (Shelter) personnel.
EKOR is a patented silicon geopolymer developed by scientists at the Kurchatov Research Institute in Moscow specifically for use at Chernobyl. EUROTECH, Ltd., who holds the exclusive worldwide rights to license EKOR outside of Russia, obtained independent funding for this final stage before full use at the site of the reactor accident. Emergency containment already completed at the site is beginning to fail. EKOR's ability to withstand radiation for centuries of exposure to radiation and the elements makes it an ideal encapsulation material to prevent radioactive material from further contamination of the environment.
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Number 4 had a catastrophic failure in 1986 causing serious radioactive releases in the Ukraine, Belarus and Western Europe. The danger of further contamination release is temporarily solved by construction of the Shelter around the broken reactor. EKOR was developed to isolate the radioactive debris inside of the Shelter and, subsequently, to allow quick and easy access to radioactive materials for later handling.
The application of EKOR in the technology demonstration is for prevention of radioactive dust release and encapsulation of the fuel-containing mass. Application of an EKOR foam layer will prevent radioactive dust from leaving the area surrounding Chernobyl because it forms a permanent barrier between the soil and the air thus trapping the contamination. The EKOR barrier will not permit water penetration and will remain in place for centuries without degrading. For nuclear fuel encapsulation, EKOR is effective for extended periods of time because it does not degrade under radiation as most materials such as glass. An EKOR coating will eliminate the threat of radioactive materials leaking to the air, soil, surface or ground water from these dangerous fuel-containing masses.
EKOR can be used in many locations other than Chernobyl, and this application will prove that it is safe and effective for use to contain radioactive wastes and materials anywhere it is required. For a full description of EKOR, see http://www.eurotechltd.com.
EUROTECH, Ltd. is a diversified technology holding company formed to capitalize on business opportunities through the acquisition and commercialization of advanced technologies developed by prominent research institutes and individual researchers worldwide.
Certain information and statement included in this release constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Federal Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements.
For more information, please contact Heidi Hirst at 800-588-2544 or 604-948-8634, or Dawn L Van Zant at 800-665-0411 or 604-948-0763 or visit the Company's Web site at http://www.aiminvestor.com.
SOURCE EUROTECH, Ltd. Web Site: http://www.eurotechltd.com
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China Relations
August 23, 1999 PBS Newshour Extra
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/china.html
China has been in the news a lot recently. With a population that makes up one-fifth of the total world's population and a rapidly growing economy, China is destined to become a key player in the next century.
Since the Communist Revolution of 1949, China has become an interesting mix of communism and capitalism and an important trading partner for the U.S.
But the relationship between China and the U.S. is very complicated. Human rights, charges of spying and differences over international policy are just a few of the issues that keep them apart.
Here are some stories that highlight the trouble spots:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july-dec99/taiwan_8-4.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/congress/jan-june99/cox_report_index.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july-dec99/china_7-30.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/yugoslavia/chinese_embassy.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june99/zhu_index.html
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State Dept. Wants N. Korea Visit
By David Briscoe Associated Press Writer Monday, August 23,
1999; 11:00 p.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990823/V000962-082399-idx.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A U.S. special envoy has established a working relationship with North Korean officials, but the State Department hasn't yet arranged a visit by a top leader of the communist regime, a spokesman said Monday.
Former Defense Secretary William Perry issued an invitation to Washington three months ago during his trip to North Korea. As special envoy, Perry is evaluating U.S. policy towards North Korea for the Clinton administration.
The visit, which would be the first by a top North Korean government official, has not been scheduled, said State Department spokesman James Foley.
But Perry's visit accomplished one of its key aims -- ``to establish a working relationship with senior officials, who report directly to leader Kim Jong Il,'' Foley said.
``It was believed that there would be continuing value in high-level dialogue that was begun in Pyongyang,'' he said.
Foley did not identify the official who was invited, but said the invitee was the ``key interlocutor'' with Perry during his visit in May.
South Korean officials said the North Korean is Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, who is regarded as a close confidant of Kim.
Perry is to meet Aug. 27 in San Francisco with South Korea's unification minister, Lim Dong-won, who left Seoul Monday for a weeklong U.S. visit.
Later this week, Rep. Tony Hall, D-Ohio, is making his fifth trip in five years to North Korea. Hall said last week his trip is primarily humanitarian but he hopes to encourage Pyongyang officials to abandon efforts to test a ballistic missile.
An official of the North Korean Foreign Ministry said last week that his country is ready for negotiations over its reported plans for the second test-launch of a long-range missile.
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, formed their own team Monday to examine ``the North Korea problem.''
The team made up mostly of House committee leaders is to begin its review next month when Congress returns from its summer vacation.
Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y., chairman of the House International Relations Committee, is heading the Republican review. He said the group would focus on ``the threat North Korea poses to the United States and our friends and allies.''
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Sam Gejdenson of Connecticut, said it was ``simply outrageous'' that Democrats had been excluded from the team.
``Rather than seek a sensible, bipartisan solution, the Republican leadership is making an attempt to embarrass the administration. But by excluding the other side of the aisle they are only making an embarrassment of the process,'' Gejdenson added in a statement.
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China Says Hopes Korean Peninsula Nuclear-Free
Updated 12:36 PM ET August 23, 1999
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990823/12/international-china-korea
BEIJING (Reuters) - South Korean Defense Minister Cho Seong-tae, seeking help to persuade North Korea not to test fire another long range missile, held talks with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing Monday.
The six-day trip has made Cho the first South Korean defense minister to visit communist China, crossing a gulf which predated the Korean War of the 1950s. The two countries established diplomatic relations in 1992.
China's Chi Haotian, restating a long-standing position, told him Beijing hoped the Korean peninsula would be a nuclear-free region, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
"China sincerely hopes that the situation there will ease and the peninsula will be a nuclear-free region and finally realize a lasting peace and stability," said Chi, who is also a vice-chairman of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission.
In an apparent swipe at the United States, Chi said the current trend was toward a multi-polar world and it was wrong to enhance military alignment and attempt to establish a single-pole world.
Cho, who is accompanied by about 20 South Korean officials, was due to met Chinese Premier Zhu Rong-ji Tuesday. He made no comments to reporters on his arrival in Beijing.
Last week, South Korean media said Cho would seek Chinese help in persuading North Korea not to test-fire a Taepodong-2 missile, believed capable of reaching Hawaii and Alaska.
North Korea's launch a year ago of a three-stage Taepodong-1 missile, parts of which soared over Japan, shocked the United States and its Asian allies and renewed regional interest in a U.S-proposed Theater Missile Defense (TMD) system.
Pyongyang said it had only launched a satellite.
China, which has opposed the TMD idea since it was first floated by Washington, demanded last week the United States exclude Taiwan from the anti-missile umbrella and criticised Taipei for its expressed interest in the scheme.
Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui had been quoted as saying TMD "not only meets the needs of the current situation but also is in line with the long-term interest of the country."
The United States and Japan have called on China, North Korea's only significant international ally, to use its leverage with Pyongyang to check the expected test of the Taepodong-2.
Chinese leaders have said they would convey those concerns to North Korea, but have also said they believe the United States is exaggerating Pyongyang's missile threat.
China fought on North Korea's side in the 1950-53 Korean War and has contributed tonnes of food aid to help its neighbor cope with a crippling famine, but the extent of its clout in Pyongyang remains unknown.
On August 3, China test-fired its latest long-range missile, the Dongfeng-31, an event some analysts said would make North Korea less willing to heed Beijing's call for restraint in its missile program.
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Holbrooke Faces Challenge at U.N.
New Ambassador Seeks to Restore U.S. Clout Eroded by Fights Over
Dues, Policy
By Colum Lynch Special to The Washington Post Tuesday, August
24, 1999; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-08/24/104l-082499-idx.html
UNITED NATIONSAfter a year-long vacancy in the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke will step into the job this week and begin the difficult task of restoring America's influence at the U.N., which has been chipped away committee by committee since U.S. arrears began climbing past the $1 billion mark in the mid-1990s.
While U.S. influence in the world may never have been greater, its standing in the United Nations has never been lower.
Because of its deadbeat status, the United States has been voted out of a seat on the key financial committee that vets the secretary general's biennial budget. Many of the U.N. reforms favored by Washington, such as a "sunset clause" to abolish committees that have outlived their usefulness, have faltered. And the United States is facing an enormous humiliation--the loss of its vote in the General Assembly--if it fails to pay at least $350 million of its arrears to the U.N. by Dec. 31.
In a display of rising contempt for Washington, the General Assembly has ignored American appeals to change the opening date of its next session, which this year falls on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, forcing President Clinton to postpone his planned address.
And yet, while resentment toward the lone superpower is palpable at the United Nations, many here are as hungry as ever for American leadership and financial support. They are counting on America's most celebrated contemporary diplomat to restore the U.N.'s luster in the nation's capital.
"He's a perfect transmission belt between Washington and New York," said Mark Malloch Brown, the British-born director of the United Nations Development Program and a longtime friend of Holbrooke. "He wants to not just be Washington's ambassador to the United Nations, but the United Nations' ambassador to Washington."
The Senate confirmed Holbrooke three weeks ago after more than a year's delay caused first by an investigation of possible conflicts of interest in his work as an investment banker between diplomatic posts and, later, by "holds" placed on his nomination by a few Republican senators who wanted bargaining chips in unrelated disputes with the Clinton administration.
With only a year and a half remaining until the end of President Clinton's term, Holbrooke will need to move quickly if he is to resolve festering issues that have bedeviled his predecessors: breaking a deadlock in the Security Council over U.N. policy in Iraq and getting U.N. disarmament experts back into the country, persuading Congress to pay $1 billion (or $1.6 billion by the U.N.'s count) in U.S. arrears and convincing other countries that they should accede to congressional demands to reduce the U.S. share of the cost of the United Nations and its peacekeeping missions.
"Holbrooke is playing with a weak hand because the United States doesn't pay its dues, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the United States is the essential country," said a European diplomat. "Without the United States, the United Nations is not credible."
Over the coming months, the General Assembly will be asked to approve from $500 million to $600 million to fund the U.N. mission in Kosovo. One of Holbrooke's duties will be to deflect attempts by other countries to hamstring the mission. In recent weeks China, Cuba and Uganda have blocked $70 million for Kosovo, arguing that there were other, equally needy missions in Africa.
"I have written every [U.N. delegate] telling them, 'Send cash, we can't operate without it, we have no resources,' " said Joseph Connor, the U.N.'s undersecretary general for management. "This is not a situation where we can delay payments. In Kosovo, we're paying for policemen. If we don't pay them, they go home."
Holbrooke, who will be sworn in as ambassador in a low-key ceremony at the U.N. tomorrow, told Congress during his confirmation hearings that his top priorities will be managing emergencies such as Kosovo, fighting to get the U.S. back on the budget advisory panel and, above all, getting the U.N.'s financial house in order. "Budgetary discipline will be my watchword," Holbrooke told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "U.N. reform will be my highest sustained priority."
Some U.N. delegates openly question whether Holbrooke's reputation for knuckle-busting diplomacy--earned while negotiating an end to the Bosnian war in 1995 with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic--will serve him well in the chummy atmosphere of the United Nations.
"Today's adversary is tomorrow's friend. If you wish to maintain and enhance your influence you have to find a way to do it without rubbing people the wrong way," said Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia's former foreign minister and now its ambassador to the U.N. "You need to project power without letting anyone know you're doing it."
Other observers say that given the simmering hostility at the U.N. toward the United States, Holbrooke will have to resist the temptation to take center stage, relying at times on friendly nations to press the American agenda.
"The United States has no credibility in pushing any kind of measures; it can't be the prime mover," said Jeffrey Laurenti, an analyst at the United Nations Association. "If they have something they want done, they have to find someone else to take the initiative."
Connor, the U.N.'s top financial officer, predicts that Holbrooke will face two immediate tests.
In the fall, Secretary General Kofi Annan will submit the U.N.'s 2000-2001 budget, which contains an increase of about $100 million, to $2.6 billion, to keep pace with inflation. The budget, already endorsed by the General Assembly's budget committee, flies in the face of U.S. legislation that blocks the Clinton administration from approving any increase in U.N. spending. American efforts to trim the new budget have so far failed.
"If the United States believes zero nominal growth must be achieved, then they have to have someone here who can negotiate that," Connor said.
He added that Holbrooke will have an equally difficult time persuading his counterparts to accept a laundry list of American conditions--which include shrinking the U.S. share of the U.N. budget to 20 percent from the current 25 percent and forgiving nearly half a billion dollars in disputed dues--in exchange for U.S. payment of its arrears.
According to Connor, the United Nations already has undertaken difficult reforms, such as cutting 1,000 jobs by attrition, in return for which the United States was expected to pay its dues. "There is resentment that the quid pro quo hasn't happened," he said.
Both of Holbrooke's predecessors, Bill Richardson and Madeleine K. Albright, tried and failed to win payment of American arrears, which Congress last year tied to restrictions on U.S. funding for family planning organizations overseas, prompting a presidential veto.
Diplomats here are also mindful of what they perceive as Washington's disdain for the United Nations. They frequently note that the Security Council was not consulted before NATO's air war against Yugoslavia. They also say the U.N. was treated like an unwanted child by Holbrooke's negotiating team during the Dayton peace talks.
"I remember during the days of Dayton, the U.N. was a word that could not be uttered," recalled Carl Bildt, senior U.N. envoy to the Balkans. "The things that we were forced to do in terms of avoiding any association with the United Nations were really quite extraordinary."
In his testimony before Congress, however, Holbrooke sought to allay some of those concerns. He said he firmly believes that the United Nations is central to American national security interests. And when Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) knocked the United Nations as a "well-intended, ofttimes slow and sometimes incompetent" organization, Holbrooke gently scolded him and his colleagues.
"In Bosnia, we weakened the [U.N.] High Representative's authority, and that was another one of our mistakes," said Holbrooke. "The goal here isn't to destroy the U.N. It's to reform it."