Lavrov: Time To Take the UN Secretariat Back for Humanity, End NATO’s Control

May 20—Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has raised the long-needed, but rarely addressed necessity of re-claiming control of the United Nations Secretariat, so that the UN bureaucracy works on behalf of all humanity, instead of on behalf of the “interests” of the small clique of countries known as the “historic West,” both military and economic, more generally referred to as NATO.

He opened his May 15 press conference in New Delhi after the meeting of the BRICS Foreign Ministers with a discussion of the need for “the systemic reformatting of the global economic structure” in order to facilitate the efforts of the Global South and East countries “to conduct independent foreign policy by prioritizing national interests.” Removing the current injustices and divisions in the world inevitably, he argues, requires “adjusting” the leadership of key international institutions, including the UN and the Bretton Woods system agencies, to reflect the real correlation of forces in the world. Which interests control the IMF and World Bank is well-known, as the London-centered banking interests, along with the Swiss, Paris and Wall Street. (An example he cited: Over the last four years, the IMF loaned Ukraine more than the total amount of loans issued by the IMF to all African Union countries over the same period.)

Then came his proposal to use the election of a new UN Secretary-General this year as the chance “to put things in order at the UN,” to get a new head and structure which "evaluate the principles of the UN Charter in a non-discriminatory manner, prioritize mandatory or consensus-based decisions and rule out the use of double standards….

“A situation when the UN Secretariat has been virtually privatized by one group of countries is unacceptable. Citizens from NATO countries hold the positions of the UN Secretary-General and six Undersecretaries-General who control real administrative, budgetary and other financial leverage for governing the entire UN Family. Work in the interests of all member states has been substituted by the promotion of the minority’s approaches and the imposition of a neo-liberal discourse. It is necessary to devote special attention to this issue at a regular session of the UN General Assembly.”