Three cheers for Mr Kofi Annan taking the bold initiative! Yet the road ahead for the momentous step is strewn with numerous road blocks although predictably the Secretary General was expecting a positive reaction from the permanent five members (P-5) namely Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States who were likely to be the final arbiters of a new reformed Security Council. The ten other non-permanent members on the council who are elected every two years on the principle of rotating geographical distribution have no vetoes and remain politically impotent.

However, Mr Annan's initiative is unceremoniously scuttled by two of the permanent members -- the USA and China, in what appears to be a major setback to the Secretary General's politically ambitious plan to reform the world body for enabling it to meet the challenges of 21st century. "No reform of the UN would be complete without reform of the Security Council," Kofi Annan said recently. If that is the deciding factor, Mr Annan's overemphasis on UNSC reform may unhinge his more grandiose plans for the creation of a Peace Building Commission, the launching of a Democracy Fund and the establishment of a more effective Human Rights Council to replace the existing one.

The US Ambassador told the 191-member General Assembly that Washington would like to move forward in this regard "on the basis of broad consensus" emphasising that his country wouldn't be bound by artificial deadline. The Chinese Ambassador to the UN was equally insistent that China was not in favour of "setting an artificial time-limit for the reforms". China also rejected a proposal that "lacked consensus". "The temptation to force decision at the September summit must be resisted", the Chinese Ambassador warned.

Last month Mr Annan released a landmark 62-page report -- "In larger freedom" described as a blueprint for restructuring the world body. The report backs a proposal made by a high-level panel on UN reforms which early this year called for two alternative models. Model A provides for six new permanent seats with no veto power and three new two-year term non-permanent seats divided among Africa, Asia-Pacific as well as Europe and the Americas. Model B provides for no permanent seat but creates a new category of light four-year renewable-term seats divided among four regional groups.

Nevertheless, the reservations by the US and China were a great disappointment for four countries dubbed as 'group of 4' comprising Japan, Germany, Brazil and India who supported Model A with the hopes of finding themselves on the Council table at least by the end of the year. While Japan and Germany were staking their claims as key industrial power with major contribution either to the UN budget or for peacekeeping. Brazil and India represent two vast regions in the developing world apart from their status as burgeoning industrial power. At the moment no permanent member of the UNSC represents either Latin America or South/South East Asia where these countries are located.

Since Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt -- and more recently Kenya -- are vying for two of the six new permanent seats for some of their special attributes the Africans still remain divided as to who should be considered best qualified to represent their continent. But all of their hopes seem to have been shattered by the new dramatic development. Parrying the pro-consensus arguments the German Ambassador Gunter Pleuger told the General Assembly that no consensus was possible on this complex issue and lent support to the Secretary General according to whom the absence of consensus should not be taken as a pretext for inaction even if the consensus is desirable.

Ambassador Kenzo Oshima of Japan, another aspirant to the Security Council was blunt: "History tells us that important progresses are rarely made through consensus, but through bold decisions." He revealed that the decision to expand the UNSC membership in the non-permanent category back in 1963 was made by a vote in a divided council. It was further revealed by Ambassador Iftekhar Chowdhury of Bangladesh at a seminar sponsored by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung that the question of equitable representation of and increase in UNSC membership was first inscribed on the agenda of the 1979 General Assembly session at the request of 10 countries including Bangladesh. So, there is nothing new in the move of the Secretary-General.

But according to many the expansion in the number is not really synonymous with reforms. To them the biggest challenge before the Council "is a modus vivendi with the sole superpower" -- the United States. The view such as this is often necessary to provide the dialectical content in thinking process so that the ferment produced will take the world body to better and superior result. There is also the dominant view, according to Iftekhar Chowdhury, that the "constellation of forces is in favour of reform now more than at anytime in the recent past. It is, however, to be seen now if these forces can indeed overcome the hurdles that lie ahead or will surrender to the status quo-ists especially the permanent members, the regional rivals of each of the leading candidate countries and a large group who would see their status diminished still further with the growth of permanent members from the present five to eleven."

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.