Meanwhile efforts to agree on who exactly should get new seats on the Security Council – Pakistan or India Brazil or

Meanwhile, efforts to agree on who exactly should get new seats on the Security Council – Pakistan or India; Brazil or Argentina – have been mired already for months.. Nato is taking over in the former Yugoslavia, the mandate in Rwanda is likely to expire at the year’s end and the only countries left with an important UN presence will be Cyprus and Angola.Britain and other industrial nations, meanwhile, agree that many UN agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the International Labour Organisation and even Unesco, the Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in Paris, should be closed or consolidated.Killing these bodies, which provide nice jobs for foreign civil servants, will be resisted by many, however. Many member states will demand that the deal be reversed: Give us the money, Washington, then we will reform.Peace-keeping costs, which have exploded in recent years as the UN has been deployed to trouble spots worldwide such as Bosnia and Somalia, are already falling. It is not certain whether even then he could do such a thing. This is not an exorbitant sum – less than what it costs to run the New York Police Department for 12 months – but such is the belligerence towards the UN in the US Congress that the prospect of Mr Boutros-Ghali ever seeing it remains dim.Mr Clinton in his speech laid out a bargain: Deliver the reforms – slimming down the bureaucracy, reducing the share that the US is expected to pay into UN coffers, cutting back on the number of UN agencies and scaling back peace-keeping – and I will prevail on Congress. A decision on whether to call such a session, which UN officials believe would help concentrate minds on resolving some of the issues, can be expected in the next few weeks.Unquestionably most pressing is ending the financial crisis, which means extracting the some $1.3bn (pounds 0.8bn) in unpaid dues from the United States, equivalent to more than the UN’s regular budget for one year. It is up to us to stop them”.Mr Boutros-Ghali has nailed his standard to an emergency session of the UN’s General Assembly early next year to reach some decisions He was supported by John Major.

As soon as they return home, unfortunately, they will continue their course. In a speech otherwise devoted to peace in his country, the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, concluded with this thought on all of the “nice and noble words” delivered from the podium: “One of the ancient holy scripts says: ‘Judge them according to their deeds.’ Let us listen to what they are saying, but let us ask them what they are doing. Neither the declaration nor any but a very few of the leaders’ speeches offered any signposts for the way forward.Some leaders voiced scepticism about the prospects. No one advocated closing the UN and everyone credited it with keeping humanity free of global war since 1945.But how genuine is the reaffirmation expressed by the leaders and how quickly they will be able to agree on improved financing and internal reforms, including the expansion of membership of the Security Council, remains to be seen. DAVID USBORNE

New York
With three days of speeches, gala receptions and non-stop schmoozing behind them, world leaders yesterday gave the United Nations on its fiftieth birthday, the gift of continuing life for another 50 years.With the last speakers due to take the podium last night, heads of state and government were due to adopt a seven-page declaration reaffirming the the goals of the UN’s founding charter while pledging to launch it on a course of radical reform.In their statement, the object of intense behind-closed-doors negotiation until almost the last moment, the leaders vowed to “give to the 21st century a UN equipped, financed and structured to serve effectively the peoples in whose name it was established”.As far it goes, the document will be a welcome conclusion for the Secretary- General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who at the beginning of the session dwelled on the UN’s financial crisis and lamented the “sad news” that member states no longer regard the UN as a priority. Both were clearly blissfully unaware that this Gilbertian scene had been watched on live television across Lebanon by tens of thousands of viewers..

Then he held out the decorously mouchoired presidential hand – which the somewhat stunned Muslim lady dutifully shook. Wishing to remind Mr Hrawi that, as a Muslim lady, it was not her practice to shake hands with a man, she touched her right hand lightly to her chest, a traditional female greeting in Lebanon.Not to be outdone, the 68-year-old president, who under the constitution must be a Christian Maronite, placed a white handkerchief firmly over his right hand so that it was not possible for his flesh to be touched. The public prosecutor, as they say, has been informed.What the Beirut tabloids would tell their readers if tabloids existed in Lebanon: that five lady members of Beirut’s “velvet society” – the richer, shop-owning classes – have been questioned by the police about drug-running; that Beirut’s Roumieh prison, with space for 1,000 inmates, now contains 2,100, most of whom will be released because the police hold anyone questioned about drug offences until the completion of their investigation – even though nine out of 10 are said to be innocent; that the Americans are again fingering Lebanon – without proof – as the source of the new US dollar “Supernote” forgery.Fresh from gaining an extra three years for his presidency after some extremely odd changes to Article 49 of the Lebanese constitution, Elias Hrawi was busy receiving guests at the presidential palace at Baabda when a Shia lady arrived to congratulate him on his continuation in office. There it quietly ploughed up 60 square metres of Byzantine mosaic pavement, turning to dust in 10 minutes what had lasted for almost 2,000 years. Just after the classical chaps went home last week, one construction company showed its lack of patience by sending a bulldozer down to the old Decumanus Maximus Roman road. Teams of archaeologists have unearthed a treasure trove of Roman columns, statues, glassware, roads marked by chariot wheels, the whole classical shebang from ancient Berytus, along with a mosaic inscription which advises that “jealousy is the worst of all evils, the only good about it is that it eats up the eyes and heart of the jealous”.Builders, meanwhile, are getting a little jealous of the archaeologists’ patch and want to start erecting the new Beirut. Across the city, thousands of utility poles are infested with hundreds of wires, all of them strung up by home-owners stealing power off the mains.

On one pole, I counted 168 wires this week, half of them phone links, the others leaching electricity.At least things are going a little faster in the old civil war ruins down-town. The trouble, it seems, is caused by nests – not the ornithological kind but the electrical variety. Two months after they first announced the switchover, however, I’m still on 110 volts. Then there’s my local phone line, which emits an incendiary crackle whenever the Independent’s foreign desk calls; it gets worse throughout the day and dies completely at around deadline time.

Now there’s a restaurant that definitely won’t dare give its customers food poisoning.But even at home, it’s difficult to keep food fresh when the power still comes only 12 hours a day. The Irish Electricity Supply Board is helping out in the power stations and a group of bullet-nosed Frenchmen are wiring up my local street for 220-volt electricity – much bowing and Gallic scraping was necessary to stop them running a fist-sized cable under my balcony. They include the splendid sea-front Spaggeteria, beloved of all wartime correspondents, not least because of the shrapnel- cracked mirrors it used to boast – and, “in another part of town”, the one-time watering-hole of General Ariel Sharon, overseer of Israel’s 1982- 85 military debacle in Lebanon.So it was good to eat Lebanon’s traditional Sultan Ibrahim fish yesterday in the pristine confines of Nasr’s, high above the Pigeon Rocks; not least because, after only two fish, I espied the dapper figure of Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, the all-powerful head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, sitting down with a covey of colonels at the next table. With Croesus-like generosity, Beirutis love to dine out, but new government inspections have listed a raft of fine cafes allegedly serving up food past its sell-by date. They don’t even talk about “east Beirut” or “west Beirut” any more – when I asked for new computer disks for the Independent in a Muslim-owned shop the other day I was told I could find them “in another part of town” – which meant, of course, that they could be found in a Christian-owned store.
A rather more serious clean-up has been going on in the restaurant trade. But, propped majestically above the main road into Beirut from southern Lebanon, there remain the 20ft warrior of the 1860 war against the Christian Maronites and his modern-day, Kalashnikov-wielding equivalent, hero of a hundred battles (and quite a lot of throat-cutting), both statues guarded by three sinister field guns Beirutis dutifully ignore the symbolism.