SECRETARY-GENERAL CALLS ON INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TO ENSURE OUTCOME OF REFORM PROCESS WILL BE 'LEANER, MORE EFFECTIVE AND RELEVANT' UNITED NATIONS
Press Release
SG/SM/6202
SECRETARY-GENERAL CALLS ON INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TO ENSURE OUTCOME OF REFORM PROCESS WILL BE 'LEANER, MORE EFFECTIVE AND RELEVANT' UNITED NATIONS
19970410 Kofi Annan Says Foundation for Peace Is Socio-Economic Development, In Address to Institut Universitaires des Hautes Études InternationalesGENEVA, 9 April (UN Information Service) -- Following is the text -- original in French and English -- of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's statement to the Institut universitaire des hautes études internationales and l'Association suisse de politique étrangère in Geneva today:
Laissez-moi, tout d'abord, vous exprimer ma joie d'être aujourd'hui, ici, parmi vous. Car j'ai bien conscience, en me rendant à votre invitation, d'honorer une dette ancienne : celle que je dois à l'Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes internationales, dont je suis fier d'avoir été l'élève.
Et j'avoue avoir un peu l'impression, ce soir, de me retrouver dans la situation d'un étudiant passant un oral d'examen, devant ce public d'éminents spécialistes des relations internationales. Je demande donc, par avance, l'indulgence de mon jury.
Jaimerais aussi payer homage en particulier à, M. Rappart, fondateur de lInstitut des Hautes Etudes Internationales, ainsi quà M. Jacques Frémont, mon professeur, mentor et ami. Ce sont eux qui nous ont initiés dans létude et la pratique des relations internationales.
Et finalement, je veux aussi saisir cette occasion pour remercier toutes celles et tous ceux qui se sont associés à l'initiative de l'Institut. En particulier, l'Association des Anciens Elèves, l'Association suisse de politique étrangère et toutes les Associations, Clubs, et Cercles internationaux de Genève, regroupés par la Fondation "Un Avenir pour Genève".
Si j'ai choisi de m'entretenir, devant vous, de "l'ONU et les nouvelles réalités internationales", c'est parce que je suis convaincu que l'Organisation mondiale se doit aujourd'hui de réagir, avec efficacité et avec vigueur, aux grands bouleversements que nous avons connus ces dernières années et aux nouvelles priorités de la société internationale.
Cela est d'autant plus nécessaire que la fin de la Guerre froide et de l'affrontement Est-Ouest n'a pas donné lieu à une grande conférence
internationale, dans laquelle les Etats auraient pu dire clairement ce qu'ils attendent de l'Organisation des Nations Unies.
Après la Première Guerre mondiale, il y eut le Traité de Versailles et la Société des Nations. Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il y eut la Conférence de San Francisco et la Charte des Nations Unies. Rien de tel aujourd'hui. Ce n'est donc que par tâtonnements successifs, de manière empirique, de façon pragmatique que les Etats essaient de jeter les fondements de l'ordre international de demain. Cet exercice est rendu d'autant plus difficile que le monde est secoué aujourd'hui par un double phénomène d'"éclatement" et de "globalisation".
L'éclatement s'est d'abord produit avec la disparition de l'Union soviétique, qui a donné naissance à une quinzaine d'Etats nouveaux, mais qui a eu aussi des répercussions indirectes sur l'ensemble de l'Europe centrale et orientale.
De même, en Afrique, des guerres civiles, des conflits ethniques, des luttes tribales mettent en péril, ici ou là, les structures mêmes de l'Etat. Là encore, certains Etats sont menacés d'éclatement.
Et l'ONU a le devoir de faire face à cette situation et au cortège de souffrances qu'elle entraîne pour les populations concernées. Mais, dans le même temps, il est clair que nous sommes aussi confrontés aux défis d'une société globale. La circulation des marchandises et des capitaux, le développement durable, la diffusion de l'information, la protection de l'environnement, la maîtrise de l'avenir démographique, mais aussi la répression du crime transnational, la lutte contre le sida ou l'action contre le terrorisme, appellent des réponses à l'échelle planétaire, des réponses qui dépassent la seule compétence des Etats.
L'ONU doit donc faire face à ce double mouvement d'éclatement et de globalisation. Cela est rendu d'autant plus difficile que l'Organisation des Nations Unies traverse une réelle crise de confiance. Chacun connaît, notamment, les rapports exigeants et complexes que les Etats-Unis entretiennent avec l'Organisation mondiale.
Je me suis engagé à faire face à cette situation. Je me suis engagé à restaurer la confiance.
Mais, pour ce faire, il est indispensable que l'Organisation des Nations Unies se réforme.
Elle doit s'adapter à cette nouvelle réalité internationale qui demande, tout à la fois, d'agir dans l'urgence au service de la paix dans le contexte de l'éclatement dont nous avons parlé plus haut et d'accompagner, dans le long
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terme, le développement de la société globale. Permettez-moi maintenant de développer chacun de ces points.
Recent years have seen an unprecedented expansion in United Nations peace operations. The Security Council launched more peace-keeping operations this decade than in the previous 45 years of its existence. There have been United Nations peace operations on all continents.
The mandates given to the blue helmets have been broader in scope than ever before. In Angola, El Salvador, Cambodia, Haiti, Liberia and Somalia, and in the former Yugoslavia, the tasks given to the soldiers of peace have been many and varied. Their missions have extended far beyond the routines of classical peace-keeping. They have involved infrastructure renewal, organizing feeding programmes, providing shelter for refugees and displaced persons, running demining programmes, and rehabilitating collapsing public services. In some cases, the mandate has involved disarming former combatants and organizing their reintegration into civil society, helping to create a state of law, or introducing democracy.
These new multifaceted operations are not only unprecedented in terms of the richness and broadness of their mandates: they also represent extraordinary commitments in both material and financial terms.
In many cases, the United Nations fulfilled its mandate impeccably. Those responsible deserve full praise and recognition. But there were also some serious setbacks. And, sadly, they had a greater impact on public opinion than the successes. So much so that, in many sectors, there is complete ignorance of what the United Nations has accomplished to bring peace around the world.
So what lessons should be drawn from the experience of recent years?
First and foremost, we have learned the value of preventive diplomacy. Decisive preventive action is always preferable to peace-keeping operations.
Situations which pose a threat to peace and security do not usually develop overnight; they are often preceded by signs which ought to be identified.
I am committed to increasing the work and capabilities of the United Nations, and to strengthening inter-agency cooperation in the field of preventive diplomacy, so as to better address these situations.
In order for diplomatic action to be successful, it requires to have at its disposal sufficient financial resources, so that investments be made to assist in redressing the causes which are at the root of conflict.
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Preventive action faces on occasions resistance from the parties involved, the very actors which would later call for a peace-keeping operation when the situation has deteriorated so much that conflict is either imminent or has already erupted.
I am convinced that the benefits that preventive action brings far outweigh limited political and financial costs.
However, should such an approach fail, and it becomes necessary to deploy troops, the lessons learned from past operations need to be applied.
The Security Council has the main responsibility for the maintenance of peace. It should exercise its powers in a precise and realistic way.
As for the Secretary-General, I see one of my roles as that of helping the Security Council to come to a responsible decision, and be fully accountable for it.
We must be clear about what the United Nations can and cannot do, and draw the consequences.
In the past, as we know, there were occasions when peace-keepers were called upon to maintain a non-existent peace. While it may not always be possible to avoid involvement in such situations, due to compelling humanitarian reasons, this ought to be done with great care and preparedness.
Peace-keeping operations must be given resources commensurate with their mandates. That means that the force must be deployed with the right strength and force structure to allow it to carry out its mandate and defend itself.
Effective command and control arrangements accepted without question by all contingents are also of the essence. These arrangements should entail the participation by the national contingents in the decision-making process and the free flow of information between them.
Peace operations require to be adequately supported by good intelligence and competent political analysis for better understanding of the crisis and its likely evolution.
An active public information programme is a key component of the mission. One of its tasks will be to explain to the public what the mandate is -- and explain what the United Nations can do and what it cannot be expected to deliver. The operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina provides us with many lessons in this respect. There should not have been public clamours for the United Nations to go into battle, for we had neither the orders nor the ordinance to do so.
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In situations which call for the deployment of troops, time is of the essence. The United Nations and its Member States must organize themselves to deploy troops much more rapidly than we are able to today.
Member States should train peace-keeping units able to intervene urgently in emergency situations.
And finally, we should also base our peace-keeping work on collaboration with regional organizations. Such collaboration has already taken place on this continent with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In Central America and the Caribbean, the Organization of American States (OAS) has supported our efforts in Haiti and in El Salvador. I recently returned from a visit to African countries, where the search for a peaceful solution to the crisis in the Great Lakes region is being conducted jointly by the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity (OAU). It is clear that not all regional organizations possess the capacity to undertake peace operations on their own. In such cases, the United Nations must not shirk its own responsibilities by off-loading them on to an organization which cannot handle them. Nevertheless, as a general rule, the United Nations can and should work out, with regional organizations, new joint approaches to the new challenges which we face.
Let me now turn to the challenge posed by globalization. The global economy brings many advantages. But it also entails risks that must be addressed. It can create injustices, increase inequality, and marginalize countries and even, as in the case of Africa, almost a whole continent.
As part of a process of re-thinking what is meant by balanced and sustainable development, in a globalizing economy, the United Nations has organized, in recent years, a series of global conferences on the economic and social future of the planet. From the Rio Conference of 1992 to the Istabul Conference held last year, the United Nations has sponsored a series of occasions for in-depth reflection on the environment, human rights, population policy, social development, women, and human settlements. A new global social and economic agenda is in the making. And in that way, new directions have been set for the United Nations itself.
A continuing priority must now be to ensure that these global conferences are followed up seriously and effectively. The results of this global reflection process must be seen and enjoyed by States and peoples alike.
The surest foundation for peace, stability and security is economic and social development. That is why I intend both to reform the role of the United Nations in international cooperation for development, and to do all I can to ensure that greater resources are devoted to it.
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The commitment to development is one of the guiding beacons of the work of the United Nations. Peace-keeping and peace-building may catch the headlines, but in terms of resources and in terms of the changes made in peoples' lives, the development work of the United Nations is far more significant.
With the end of the cold war, we have been able to re-examine many of our traditional assumptions about development. It has become clear that while the eradication of poverty and securing development are the responsibilities of individual States, the United Nations system has a key conceptual and promotional role to play.
The ultimate objective -- securing the development of developing countries -- remains the same. But we need to re-examine constantly the means of attaining that objective. We need to ensure that our approach to development takes full account of the economic, political and technological realities of our times -- especially the role of the private sector and of civil society.
These are among the main tasks I have assigned to the consolidated Social and Economic Department which I have recently created, merging three existing Departments within the Secretariat.
This Department will help to streamline and strengthen the work of the Organization in the social, economic and development fields, and to rationalize the division of labour within the United Nations system, including the Bretton Woods institutions. These new structures are part of a broader effort to maximize savings in administrative overhead, and to redeploy them towards development activities.
I am also planning to reorganize and integrate development activities at country level. To that end, I have asked all the funds and programmes of the United Nations to work together, on the basis of shared country programmes. At the inter-agency level, collaboration between the United Nations and its agencies, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization is being strengthened. There is a new realization that our objectives are the same. Our roles, far from being in competition, are complementary.
The United Nations is at a crossroads. We must all play our part to ensure that the outcome of the reform process will be a leaner, more effective and relevant Organization, capable of responding to the challenges of the twenty-first century.
I am particularly happy to have been able to make this statement of faith here in Geneva, a city which continues to give so much to the United Nations system as a whole.
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