Articles By ShashiTharoor

Lots of cencerns besides Iraq
At the United Nations
By Shashi Tharoor
Friday, February 14, 2003

NEW YORK: In mid-January, as the rumors of war over Iraq swirled around the United Nations, the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, addressed a press conference at his headquarters. It was his first in more than a year, and the briefing room was overflowing with journalists.

Annan was asked why the United Nations had become obsessed with Iraq. He turned the question back to his interrogator. "Is it we who are obsessed with Iraq or you?" he said. "Don't you think the media [bear] any responsibility for the extent to which Iraq has eclipsed everything else on our agenda?"

If confirmation were needed of the point, it came the next day in The New York Times' account of the press conference. Annan had deliberately ranged over a wide array of topics, from climate change to civil conflict, from Cyprus to Ivory Coast. He had invoked UN concerns about poverty, AIDS and African development. The Times' story, spread across the bottom of an international news page, referred to only one subject: Iraq.

For those of us whose job it is to make people everywhere aware of the enormous challenges facing today's world, it couldn't get much worse.

Much of what the United Nations seeks to do requires rousing the consciences of people who live in relative affluence and peace about the plight of the poor and the strife-torn.

Large sections of the world's people require desperately needed help from the United Nations to surmount problems that they cannot overcome on their own. The media's identification of the United Nations with only one issue, Iraq, comes at a bad time. Civil war rages in Ivory Coast and sputters in Congo. Long-running conflicts may be close to permanent solution in Cyprus and Sierra Leone, but they need international attention.

The arduous task of nation-building proceeds fitfully in Afghanistan, the Balkans and East Timor.

Twenty million refugees and displaced persons around the world depend on the United Nations for shelter and succor. Decades of development in Africa are being wiped out by the scourge of AIDS. The Millennium Development Goals - agreed upon with much fanfare in the largest gathering of heads of government in human history at the UN's Millennium Summit in September 2000 - lag behind the pace needed to fulfill them. The resources required to eliminate poverty, bring girls into school and promote health and clean drinking water have not been made available at the necessary levels. None of these goals can be met without the support of ordinary people around the world - the informed publics who sustain the political will of their governments. Yet people hear little about these issues because they are drowned out in the drumbeat over Iraq. The media bear a vital share of the responsibility for this.

The world is told that the relevance of the United Nations depends on its conduct on one issue alone, Iraq. No doubt what happens in the Security Council on Iraq is of key importance to the United Nations' role in maintaining international peace and security. But when the Iraq crisis has passed, the world will still be facing innumerable problems, including the spread of weapons of mass destruction, degradation of the global environment, contagious disease and chronic starvation, issues of human rights and human wrongs, mass illiteracy and massive displacement of people.

These are problems that no one country, however powerful, can solve on its own. They need solutions that, like the problems themselves, also cross frontiers.

The United Nations exists to find such solutions through the common endeavor of its member states. We should not, by reducing the value of the UN to one issue, risk depriving ourselves of the only effective instrument the world has to confront the challenges that will remain when Iraq has passed from the headlines.

The writer, a novelist, is the UN undersecretary-general for communications and public information.