UNITED NATIONS FORCE ON ISR"L, SYRIA BORDER HELPS KEEP PEACE, PREVENT INSTABILITY, SECRETARY-GENERAL TELLS TROOPS
Press Release
SG/SM/6500
UNITED NATIONS FORCE ON ISRAEL, SYRIA BORDER HELPS KEEP PEACE, PREVENT INSTABILITY, SECRETARY-GENERAL TELLS TROOPS
19980323 Following is the text of remarks by Secretary-General Kofi Annan on his visit to Al-Fawar Camp of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) in Syria on 22 March:I am very pleased to return to UNDOF as Secretary-General of the United Nations, only 18 months after I last had the opportunity to visit the mission. For almost 25 years, you have kept the peace and maintained stability on one of the most volatile fault lines in the world. The United Nations is in your debt.
I have come to the Middle East at a time of concern and uncertainty, when the importance of impartial monitors and mediators is as great as ever. Your mission, together with the other United Nations missions, is a key element of this stabilizing presence. As a force patrolling the border between Israel and Syria and providing humanitarian and other services, you perform a dual service: keeping the peace and preventing instability.
You are also serving a larger cause, vital to the future of the United Nations. By sustaining the success of a quarter century in the Golan Heights, by diligently performing the duties of peacekeepers and holding our flag high, you give the world reason to believe in the United Nations. That is an invaluable accomplishment and I salute you for it.
The demands of peace and security increasingly require the United Nations to meet threats having serious international implications. In our efforts to meet these challenges, the international community has suffered some setbacks, but has also achieved more successes in which all of us can take pride.
Those accomplishments as well as setbacks have provided important lessons that can serve us well in the international community's efforts to contain and resolve conflict: the timely availability of troops in emergencies; the need of the United Nations to be able to deploy troops more quickly; common standards of training and education.
Finally, there is the question of the political will of the parties themselves to make peace -- a will and a sense of community that cannot be
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imposed. You serving in UNDOF know this as well as anyone. The United Nations responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security is our cardinal mission, the first purpose declared in the Charter. How we carry out that mission will have a profound influence on our future and on the legitimacy and credibility of international society as we know it.
With your continued service and excellence in the maintenance of peace, the Middle East is kept safe for a future of true reconciliation and partnership. Until that time, the world needs you as much as ever.
I would like to take the opportunity to make clear to you the nature, the demands and the promise of the agreement I reached with the Government of Iraq. I went to Baghdad, with the full authorization of all members of the Security Council, in search of a peaceful solution to the crisis. That crisis has, at least for now, been averted.
The mandate of the Security Council has been reaffirmed. The access of United Nations inspectors has not only been restored, but expanded to include any and all sites. The authority of the Executive Chairman of the United Nations Special Commission has been acknowledged and strengthened. Whether the threat to international peace and security has been averted for all time is now in the hands of the Iraqi leadership.
It is now for them to comply in practice with what they have signed on paper. If they do, it will bring nearer the day when Iraq can fully rejoin the family of nations. In them meantime, the expanded "oil-for-food" programme should help alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people.
The agreement reached in Baghdad was neither a "victory" nor a "defeat" for any one person, nation or groups of nations. Certainly, the United Nations and the world community lost nothing, gave away nothing and conceded nothing of substance. But by halting, at least for now, the renewal of military hostilities in the Gulf, it was a victory for peace, for reason, for the resolution of conflict by diplomacy.
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