DATE: Tuesday, June 17, 1997                TAG: 9706170007

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial

                                            LENGTH:   38 lines

UNITED NATIONS HELMS GETS REFORM

T he United Nations is too important to die and too sick to survive without a cure. Now a bipartisan agreement offers hope for the patient.

Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., has long made reform of the U.N. a personal crusade. Those who can't abide Helms' politics have tended to dismiss his U.N. bashing as demagogic or ideological sound and fury. It was easy to lump Helms with the black helicopter paranoiacs who believe the U.N. is a sinister plot to contrive world government.

There was certainly some excess in Helms' critiques, but he also had valid concerns about the high cost of supporting a bog of bureaucracy. For every smoothly run and vitally important international health or environmental effort, there were several swamps of folly, nepotism and self-indulgence.

Now with the Congress in tight-fisted Republican hands, Helms in charge of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Secretary Generalship in the hands of reform-minded Kofi Annan, a commitment to change is being greeted with a commitment to pay much of the U.S. bill that is over $1 billion in arrears.

Under the terms of an agreement reached recently, the United States will pay most of its back dues over the next three years and henceforth will support 20 percent of U.N. costs, rather than the present 25 percent. Helms deserves credit for stubbornly sticking to his guns until reform was agreed to. It was said he'd wreck the institution. Instead he may be its salvation.

But Helms also deserves credit for being willing to strike a deal with the Clinton administration and with ranking minority member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., when compromise became possible. The useful parts of the U.N. are worth preserving. If they didn't exist, they'd have to be reinvented. This agreement offers a chance to get the organization on a businesslike footing, perhaps for the first time in its history. Now the U.N. must agree.

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