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U.N. Study Could Spark Debate on Japan's Overseas Role
By Tim Shorrock
Last fall, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed 16 former statesmen and government officials to a High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. He asked them to explore future threats to global peace and security and recommend new ways the United Nations could respond to those challenges. The completion of the report "will be the beginning of a real discussion" of the future of the United Nations, said Kitaoka Shinichi, a former academic who was appointed in 2002 as Japan's deputy permanent representative to the world body. Reform, he added, "is not totally impossible". Kitaoka gave his views about the United Nations in a speech to the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA in Washington in June. The high-level panel's recommendations could include an expansion of the U.N. Security Council, which includes five permanent members and a rotating body of 10 non-permanent members. Japan has long coveted a permanent seat on the council alongside the United States, Britain, Russia, China and France. A permanent seat would benefit Japan because "it takes more energy" to push Japanese interests outside of the Security Council, said Kitaoka. But "Japan has never put a full effort into this," he added. Discussions about including Japan have never become serious because of contentious disagreements over other countries that might join and complaints from developing countries that rich nations would continue to dominate the organisation. The United States has supported a permanent Japanese seat on the council since 1972. Japan became a U.N. member in December 1956. Kitaoka said "very few" countries oppose Japan's entry to the Security Council, adding that the only public opposition has come from North Korea. Britain and France, he said, want both France and Germany to join, and it's "our expectation" that China would not oppose such a measure. Changes in the U.N. charter require a two-thirds majority vote in the 191-member U.N. General Assembly and the unanimous consent of the Security Council. Some critics of Japanese foreign policy say Japan's interests are so closely aligned with U.S. foreign policy that a Japanese seat on the Security Council would be an automatic vote for the United States. Asked to comment on this issue, Kitaoka replied, "when it comes to core interests of the country, it's very hard for Japan to differ with the United States.We have to be very careful about it." Pressed about a recent Security Council resolution criticising Israel for demolishing homes of anti-occupation activists in Gaza, Kitaoka said Japan would have abstained, just as the U.S. delegation did. Japan's military alliance with the United States will become an issue as Japan gets more involved in U.N. operations overseas, said Rust Deming, a former U.S. diplomat in Japan and a visiting fellow at the National Defence University in Washington. Deming noted the opposition Democratic Party recently proposed that any Japanese involvement in overseas military action must be within the United Nations rather than in alliance with U.S. forces. "This a real point of debate and division," Deming said. Within Asia, however, Japan's expanding military role is less of an issue than it was during the 1990s, when the U.S.-Japan military alliance was revised to allow Japanese forces more freedom of movement in areas around Japan. At the time, those revisions "weren't particularly welcome," particularly in China, said Deming, who was deputy chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo during the Clinton administration. But during a recent visit to Shanghai, said Deming, "Japan didn't come up at all in that context." He concluded that it's "a very, very differentenvironment than it was six or seven years ago." A key issue of concern to Japan is the rapid rise in the U.N. budget for peacekeeping operations. Japan already contributes about 20 percent of those costs, far more than any country. Last month, U.N. officials announced that next year's budget will rise to 4.6 billion dollars, a 60 percent increase from the year before. That has alarmed the Japanese government, which says it will be forced to cut its offshore development aid to meet the increased peacekeeping operations costs. Japan's U.N. ambassador, Toshiro Ozawa, outlined those concerned in a Jun. 3 speech to the General Assembly. "We must point out that the Government of Japan is not blessed with a budgetary mechanism that can easily absorb a more than 60 percent increase of a major budget item," he said. Ozawa added that Japanese criticism of the U.N. peacekeeping budgets "is reinforced by the fact that Japan, not being a Permanent Member of the Security Council, has often no say in the decisions of the Security Council concerning the long-term policies of individual PKOs (peacekeeping operations), despite Japan's obligation to shoulder about one fifth of the related costs." In a visit to Tokyo in February, Secretary General Kofi Annan recognised some of Japan's concerns. "Virtually all members" of the United Nations "agree that the (Security) Council must be reformed and must be enlarged," he said in a speech to the Japanese Diet or parliament. "But the difficulty of reaching agreement does not excuse the failure to do so." Another source of Japanese discontent, he said, is "your feeling of being simultaneously overassessed for the regular budget and under-represented in the rank of the Secretariat." Kofi Annan's panel is being chaired by Anand Panyarachun of Thailand. Its other members are Robert Badinter (France), Jo?o Clemente Baena Soares (Brazil), Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norway), David Hannay (United Kingdom), Mary Chinery-Hesse (Ghana), Gareth Evans (Australia), Enrique Iglesias (Uruguay), Amre Moussa (Egypt), Satish Nambiar (India), Sadako Ogata (Japan), Yevgeny Primakov (Russian Federation), Qian Qichen (China), Nafis Sadik (Pakistan), Salim Ahmed Salim (Tanzania) and Brent Scowcroft (United States).(Inter Press Service) |
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