The UN, love and reform!

We already know Lucky Luke, the lonesome cowboy who shoots faster than his shadow, and now we have the United Nations, the Organization that reforms itself faster than anyone else.

On 12 February 2002, a memo leaves the dark corridors of New York HQ. It requests the heads of department to make proposals for a new reform. This memo arrives in Geneva on 15 February. A meeting takes place in New York on 5 March to thrash out the details of the request. A deadline is set for 15 April. That makes 41 days in all to make a 57-year-old Organization ready for the new millennium.

The Earth took only 6 days to create, the gestation of a hamster takes 16 days and my concierge took only a few seconds to break her leg, so why not reform the UN in 41 days?

Change is important, particularly in a world that is evolving so quickly. But, honestly, what kind of serious work can be done in 41 days, especially if, as the Secretary-General has urged in his letter of 25 March to the staff, we should all be consulted?

This reform should not become a never-ending story, but should simply give all people of good will an opportunity to participate. What are a few weeks, given the importance of the task at hand and the errors that we risk making? Remember the poet who said, “Haste, like love, is blind.”

Editor-in-Chief, Jean Michel Jakobowicz.