At daybreak on the East River, the United Nations building stands faceless and cold. The only movement is the turbulent tidal basin below. By 8:30, streams of men and women flow into the building's First Avenue entrance.
Most go directly to their offices among the 38 floors of the Secretariat building and among ancillary buildings nearby. Inside, above the handsome cafeteria and away from the splendid forum spaces of the General Assembly and conference buildings, the workers retire to dreary cubicles. Metal desks, translucent partitions, and the gray-green of the Spartan 1940s provide the environment. There, some begin to organize for the torrent of meetings to be held that day. Others prepare for negotiations of moment. Some of the employees dally and gossip. Most, however, plunge into their daily task of pushing paper: unceasing reams of it.
The printing and distribution of UN documents - to the hundreds of UN offices, UN missions, and depository libraries - not only consumes untold tons of wood pulp but also costs prodigious sums. Taking into account recording, transcribing, translating, printing, and distributing, each page of a UN document costs around $650, more than the annual per capita income of 62 members of the organization.
This prodigal paper production is but the effluent of thousands of meetings whole speeches, records, and reports fill the working hours of the UN employee. U.S. Ambassador Jose Sorzano, who served under Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, points out that in 1982 there were 11,672 meetings of UN bodies in New York and Geneva. Arithmetic translates that into more than 32 meetings a day, seven days a week, including holidays.
The flood of meetings produces a flood of resolutions and reports, each supposedly a statement of policy designed, somehow, to move nations into action. Leaving aside the work product of committees, commissions, and agencies, the General Assembly alone passed 353 resolutions and decisions in the first three months of its 40th session. In addition, any state may circulate in the UN system any self-serving document it wishes, and the United Nations will dutifully distribute those tracts under its logo.
The nearly 12,000 personnel of the United Nations Secretariat are paid well for monitoring this huge production. They typically receive salaries one-third higher than those of similarly situated American bureaucrats. Their pensions are often nearly double the American standard, and may receive an extremely generous and tax-free golden handshake upon retirement, often exceeding a quarter of a million dollars.
West pays 90 percent
The UN budget approaches $4 billion annually, including both assessed and voluntary programs. Of the total, the United State carries one-quarter of the load. In the more important voluntary aid programs, the West accounts for more than 90 percent of contributions, while the Soviet bloc pays less than 1 percent. Nearly three-quarters of the regular UN budget goes to personnel costs.
For many years, unrelenting expansion of the UN budget became a scandal to all but the world body itself. Exasperated, the U.S. Congress responded with a series of acts that required
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