PRESS BRIEFING BY CARNEGIE COMMISSION ON PREVENTING DEADLY CONFLICT

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY CARNEGIE COMMISSION ON PREVENTING DEADLY CONFLICT

The United Nations could be an essential focal point for marshalling the resources of the international community to prevent mass violence, Cyrus Vance, Co-chair of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and a former United States Secretary of State, said at a Headquarters press briefing sponsored by the Department of Public Information (DPI) this morning.

Introducing the Commission's report to journalists, Mr. Vance said the Commission supported the establishment of a United Nations rapid reaction capability, the core of which should be made up of 5,000 to 10,000 troops from members of the Security Council. The Commission believed that the United Nations should establish an international criminal court and looked forward to movement in that direction.

Present at the briefing were some of the Commission's 16 members -- the other Co-Chair, David A. Hamburg, who is also President Emeritus of the Carnegie Corporation of New York; Flora MacDonald, former Foreign Minister of Canada; Sir Brian Urquhart, former United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Questions; Olara A. Otunnu, President of the International Peace Academy and the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict; and Jane E. Holl, Executive Director of the Commission.

The Commission was created by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1994 to advance thinking on conflict prevention.

Mr. Vance said the Commission recommended that United Nations Member States should work to strengthen and support the Office of the Secretary- General in sending envoys and special representatives on missions of quiet diplomacy and in bringing prevention issues to the Security Council's attention. The Secretary-General could also draw together Member States as "friends of the Secretary-General" to support preventive diplomacy. The Security Council should reflect today's world, he said, adding that its reform was essential.

Mr. Vance said the Commission members benefited greatly from the input of diplomats and scholars and could not have carried out its tasks without the active support of Vartan Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The Commission published its main report last December and would, in the coming two years, publish more than a dozen books and two dozen reports on related subjects.

Mr. Vance announced the theme of the forum this afternoon was "The Centrality of the United Nations to Prevention and the Centrality of Prevention to the United Nations".

Mr. Hamburg, Co-chair of the Commission, said, in addition to the Commission members, there was a 36-member advisory council of eminent scholars from all over the world. The Commission had taken a long-term view. What was historically new and very frightening, he said, was the destructive power of modern weaponry and its worldwide spread. Also new was the technology that permitted the very rapid, vivid and very widely broadcast justification for violence and incitement to violence.

The world was undergoing a very vast increase in killing power, Mr. Hamburg said. That development was one of the concerns leading to the establishment of the Commission. The strongest motivation, however, for the project was the survival of mankind. The Commission had formulated a novel approach to conflict resolution. It believed that ethnic, religious and international wars could be prevented if their causes were confronted early. Democracy and market reform would be promoted and civil institutions created to protect human rights.

He said the Commission's recommendations were addressed to a number of different institutions, including the United Nations, governments, regional bodies and civil society -- including the business and scientific communities -- educational and religious institutions, the media and non-governmental organizations. The Commission felt that all those institutions needed to be strengthened to contribute to preventing deadly conflict.

"We have come to the conclusion that the problem with very deadly conflict is too hard intellectually, technically and politically to be handled" by any one institution or government, no matter how strong, Mr. Hamburg said. Another distinctive feature of the report was that the Commission adopted a public health model with emphasis on primary prevention. It had linked security, well-being and justice in a formulation about long-term conditions conducive to peace. More attention was given in the report to conflicts within and between States.

Responding to questions, Mr. Hamburg said the Commission's report was perhaps one of the most comprehensive on the subject of conflict prevention. There was a tendency to focus on wars after they had occurred and conduct salvage operations at a late stage. The Commissioners had sought to challenge themselves to ask what could have been done earlier, and what the international community could do to develop conditions in which such catastrophes were unlikely to recur.

Asked what proposals the Commission preferred in dealing with conflict prevention and the spread of conventional weapons, Ms. Holl, Executive Director of the Commission, said the Commission made contacts with experts around the world to try to draw on the practical aspects of making positive steps that would have preventive effects. Increasingly, there were thoughts about not only the importance of conflict prevention, but its possibilities. With respect to conventional weapons, she said the Commission had approached the subject by pointing out the contribution that the free flow of arms around the world made

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to incipient violence and to rapidly unfolding violence. It had looked at arms sales and the use of arms, and had pointed out the value of the United Nations arms registry.

Ms. MacDonald, former Foreign Minister of Canada, also said that with regard to conventional weapons, perhaps one of the things that had been overlooked in the past -- and which the Commission emphasized in its report -- was the role that grass-roots organizations could play in helping to mobilize public opinion to ensure reduction in arms sales. Nothing was more illustrative of that than the way in which 120 nations gathered last December in Ottawa to sign the Convention on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Landmines, she said. That whole effort, she added, was triggered by the work of non-governmental organizations which were now working in other fields relating to conventional weapons. She said their expertise were needed for a comprehensive attack on the problem.

Noting that tensions had mounted in recent months in Kosovo, a correspondent asked what the United Nations could do to prevent conflicts within States which could have regional consequences. Mr. Vance said efforts should continue to be made to ensure the return of those who fled their homes in the region because of ethnic cleansing. "That is absolutely necessary", he said.

Mr. Hamburg said the Carnegie Corporation a year ago convened a meeting of faction leaders from Kosovo in New York. The reason was to try to identify moderate, pragmatic problem-solving leaders.

Responding to another question, Mr. Hamburg said the Commission had submitted a special report to the United Nations Secretary-General on ways of strengthening the capacity of the Office of the Secretary-General to use his good offices at the early stage of a crisis. It had recommended that the Secretary- General move into conflict situations with preventive diplomacy.

Asked whether the efforts to encourage preventive diplomacy was an attempt to keep the classic peacekeeping model in place, former Under-Secretary-General Sir Brian Urquhart said he did not think so, adding "both were different sides of the same coin". Peacekeeping at the moment appeared to be on the back-burner, he said, adding that "fortunately, the kind of extremely violent situations which called into being the flood of peacekeeping operations of the early 1990s" did not appear to exist. He hoped that did not mean that the Security Council and United Nations Member States were not thinking of keeping the Organization reasonably well prepared to face such situations if they emerged in the future.

Peacekeeping was an extremely important part of the United Nations' future, he said. "What I hope won't happen is this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where the United Nations is not given any infrastructure or resources or contingency planning to meet future emergencies." The Security Council should

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seriously study the whole question of rapid reaction capability. "As far as prevention is concerned, it is one of the better-kept secrets of the United Nations." Prevention had always been a major preoccupation of the Secretary- General right back to the beginning of the Organization, he said. The difficulty with prevention was that it was not a very popular form of action before the danger became apparent. It was extremely difficult to get governments or the Security Council to focus on a threat until the world saw its horrendous results actually taking place.

Asked about his talks with representatives of Greece and of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Mr. Vance who is a Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General on the matter, said the parties had met last week and that "several days" had been spent on the "final subject, which is the question of name" (for the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). He said they had had "a good meeting", and that another would be held in about three weeks. "Generally, I think things are moving along in a satisfactory way", he said. When the correspondent said the process was moving very slowly, he replied, "Well, you've to be careful and slow, if you've got to get it done right."

Responding to a question, Mr. Otunnu, President of the International Peace Academy, said the Security Council should reflect accurately changes that had taken place in the world since 1945, especially to ensure that there was broader representation, and that some of the emerging powers were represented on it. The Commission had also addressed the problem of the Security Council, sometimes adopting resolutions that were not always backed by resources and the means to implement them.

Samir Sanbar, Assistant Secretary-General for Public Information, in closing comments, said that the Commission's report was one of the few he had seen on conflict settlement which paid attention to the role of the media. That role was very important, he said, and required further study and elaboration; the Commission's comments were of a general nature.

Mr. Hamburg said Commission members had very interesting discussions with some media networks about policy guidelines regarding the coverage of serious conflicts. The Commission intended to have a series of meetings all over the world in the next two years on the subject.

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