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UN has worked to overcome drop in credibility over Iraq war, senior official says

UN has worked to overcome drop in credibility over Iraq war, senior official says

Shashi Tharoor
The United Nations information offices have pulled out all stops to reverse a drop in its credibility on Iraq, a situation that developed in the United States because the UN did not support the war, but everywhere else because it failed to prevent the conflict, the world body’s chief of public information said today.

A Pew Organization poll, conducted in 20 countries in May, “found that United Nations credibility was down everywhere,” Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, told the General Assembly’s Special Political and Decolonization Committee as it began its annual consideration of questions relating to information.

Confidence-building became the foremost public information challenge facing the organization in the past year, he said. In response, the Department of Public Information (DPI) used every means at its disposal to increase global awareness and understanding of the many roles the UN had played during the Iraqi crisis, while making sure that UN activities in other critical areas were not forgotten, he said.

Among the initiatives was establishing an Inter-Agency Task Force on Iraq, for which senior information officers from across the UN system met to coordinate outreach activities, he said. The task force was now subsumed under the general weekly information meetings chaired by DPI, he added.

Meanwhile, DPI had redoubled its efforts to make sure that development questions and critical peacekeeping missions in other parts of the world got the attention they deserved, Mr. Tharoor said.

DPI’s activities included maintaining the UN web site, making television footage and radio programmes, issuing daily e-mail bulletins to the public, as well as providing library services, guided tours and educational programmes, he said.

In addition, Mr. Tharoor said the key to the Secretary-General’s reform proposals, presented to the Committee in September 2002, was his call to refocus DPI’s message, to refine its structure and to retool its operational outlets. The Department had developed a more strategic orientation and a more focused work programme. It now had a strong new mission statement, a new operating model and new organizational structure that divided DPI’s core work among three divisions – the Strategic Communications Division, which incorporated the Information Centres Services and network of UN Information Centres and Services, the News and Media Division, and the Outreach Division, which included the Dag Hammarskjöld Library.