SECRETARY-GENERAL STRESSES UNITED NATIONS UNIQUE ROLE IN PREVENTING CONFLICT, RESOLVING DISPUTES
Press Release
SG/SM/6531
SECRETARY-GENERAL STRESSES UNITED NATIONS UNIQUE ROLE IN PREVENTING CONFLICT, RESOLVING DISPUTES
19980420 Speaking at University of California, Emphasizes Need To Regain Trust of World CommunityFollowing is the text of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's address on "War, Peace and the United Nations", delivered today at the School of International and Area Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
Thank you, Dean Buxbaum, for your warm and generous introduction. I am deeply grateful to be receiving the Berkeley medal and wish to thank you for honouring not only me but the entire United Nations with this award. Berkeley has over the years -- and in many ways -- left its distinguished imprint on the United Nations. Indeed, as some of you may know, Berkeley printed the original Charter of the United Nations.
I am grateful for the opportunity to address this distinguished audience on the role of the United Nations in preventing war and promoting peace around the world. 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 the decline of ideological and political allegiances to one great Power or another over the last decade, movements for national self- determination and political liberalization have been given free rein -- peacefully, in some cases, and violently, in others.
When these movements have triggered wide-spread violence, the global response has, to an alarming degree, been one of despair and resignation. It is said that these State failures and the civil and ethnic wars that too often have followed in their wake are inevitable. It is said that the difficulties occasionally faced by international interventions only confirm the intractability of these problems.
I wish to propose a different view. And that is that these failures, these wars, these convulsions, reflect political and economic problems with political and economic solutions. There is nothing inevitable about conflict in one part of the world, or tyranny in another. Freedom, peace and human
rights are concepts as universal as they are political, amenable to human action across all borders.
They affect the lives of all men and women, irrespective of their passports, their colour or their creed. Let us not forget that the Charter of the United Nations was written in the name of "We, the Peoples of the United Nations".
I will concentrate today on what I consider to be the basic condition for the achievement of a lasting international order: the credibility and legitimacy of the international community's efforts to prevent conflict, promote the peaceful resolution of disputes, and, when necessary, end them by force. I will argue that only the United Nations can satisfy these conditions, but that in order to do so, it must seek, and re-gain, the confidence and the trust of the world community.
The United Nations, forged from the battles of two World Wars, was dedicated, above all, to the pursuit of peace and, in the enduring words of the Charter, to saving "succeeding generations from the scourge of war".
In the half-century since those soaring and hopeful words were endorsed by the nations of the world, United Nations "blue helmets" have deployed in more than 40 operations on four continents. They have patrolled inter-State borders and contained intra-State conflicts. They have observed ceasefires and they have protected humanitarian convoys.
They have saved tens of thousands of lives.
The evolution of United Nations peacekeeping from the traditional kind of patrolling buffer zones and ceasefire lines to the modern, more complex manifestations in the former Yugoslavia has been neither smooth nor natural.
It has created conceptual confusions and inflated expectations, betrayed hopes and blemished reputations. It has made us review our responsibilities and question our most basic assumptions about the very nature of war and the very high price of peace in the post-cold ear era.
This evolution has been characterized by expectations outstripping abilities and by demands ignoring realities on the ground. Peacekeepers were asked the impossible, and sometimes, therefore, even failed to achieve the possible.
Should we, in Rwanda, have done more to prevent the catastrophe? Should we have been able to seize the arms caches and eliminate the threat to the Tutsi population from the Hutu extremists when they began their campaign of genocide? With hindsight, yes.
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Should we, in Bosnia, have been able to prevent the safe areas from falling and protected the population of Srebrenica from terror and death at the hands of their enemies? Of course.
But could we, in either of these cases, have done so, with the means and mandate at hand? Absolutely not.
Any assessment of United Nations peacekeeping must begin with this recognition, if its credibility and legitimacy is to be restored. No one laments the tragic incidents of Bosnia and Rwanda more than we at the United Nations do. We were asked to step in when all others had failed, and when no power or alliance equipped to act on behalf of the world had the political will to do so. When global opinion calls for the world to "do something" about a crisis, we become the "doers", whether we have been given the tools or not.
It is clear that the reports of peacekeeping's demise, to paraphrase Mark Twain, are much exaggerated. For one thing, the number of peacekeepers around the world are still at roughly the same levels as they were at the peak of United Nations peacekeeping, in 1994.
It is just that most of them today do not wear "United Nations blue": they keep the peace under the banner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), or the Economic Community of West African States. None the less, there are many parts of the world where such regional organizations are not available, or not able, to undertake peacekeeping operations. And in such cases, it is bound to be the United Nations that is called upon to "do something".
What might that something be?
Traditional peacekeeping operations of the kind deployed during the cold war are unlikely to be repeated for the simple reason that the structures that sustained the cold war also limited the threats to peacekeepers and to their mandates.
But what sort of peacekeeping challenges do we have to face in the new world disorder?
Peacekeeping today requires not only rethinking the means but also the method of implementing the mandates set out by the Security Council. We have learned that while impartiality is a vital condition for peacekeeping, it must be impartiality in the execution of the mandate, and not just an unthinking neutrality between the warring parties.
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This distinction is crucial, in particular, in civil conflicts, when the destruction of unarmed, civilian populations is sometimes the main aim of a war.
The very notion of "parties" to a conflict also requires reassessing, given the growing number of conflicts in which central control is weak, rival militias operate independently and outside powers insert themselves on multiple fronts. This fragmentation of authority within civil and ethnic conflicts does not, however, prevent them from seeming on one level internal, yet having serious international implications.
The destabilization of neighbouring countries through an escalation of tensions and refugee flows has expanded our understanding of threats to international peace and security.
Operationally, we need to ensure that an in-depth understanding of the root causes exists; that the international community offers positive inducements to halt conflicts even as it recognizes that the will to reconcile ultimately must come from the parties themselves.
We recognize that the rapidity with which we are able to deploy may determine not only the success of the mission, but also the ability to prevent the massive loss of innocent life. We recognize, too, that the peacekeeping force must also be a credible one; sometimes a convincing show of strength can prevent the need for its use.
All these lessons have been brought to bear in the largest current peacekeeping operation, the NATO-led Stabilization Force in Bosnia. But they apply equally to United Nations operations, now and in the future.
In this connection, it is important to put into perspective the much- discussed notion of exit strategies for military operations. Certainly, no one believes that a mission should commence without strict goals and guidelines for its implementation within certain time-frames. Nor does anyone believe in never-ending missions. But this concern, in Bosnia most immediately and importantly, but also elsewhere and in the future, must be balanced.
It must be balanced against the need to prevent a relapse into fighting, not only in order to defend the civilian populations, but also to protect the very considerable investment of the international community in achieving such a peace. That is why I am gratified that the NATO presence in Bosnia will continue beyond next June. Together, we can safely put Bosnia back on track to a peaceful, integrated and law-bound future.
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This multifaceted peace-building effort, incorporating every instrument of the international community reflects, in addition, a recognition of the need to consolidate a peace once it has been created.
Every aspect of national reconstruction must be supported by the various institutions of the international community -- from the United Nations political offices and development agencies to those of the World Bank.
This task includes the repair of roads, schools and hospitals as well as the establishment of regular police trained in upholding, and not abusing, human rights. It includes affirming the rule of law and the creation of democratic institutions, including but not limited to free elections.
Only then will the end of a conflict and a peace agreement sow the seeds of future stability that war-torn countries so desperately need.
Only then will the values of good governance and transparent, responsive, constitutional rule find fertile ground in which to grow and prosper. Only then can we look forward to the creation of an environment that would enable investment and growth in these societies. Only then can we be sure that the ways of war have truly been replaced by the workings of peace.
The use of peacekeeping by the international community, in pursuit of common interests, must be credible and it must be legitimate. Credible force without legitimacy may have immediate results, but will not enjoy long-term international support. Legitimate force without credibility may enjoy universal support even as it is unable to implement the basic provisions of its mandate.
Combined, however, under the umbrella of the United Nations, credibility and legitimacy in the use of force are not only possible, but mutually reinforcing in pursuit of a universal ideal. To achieve this unity of purpose and promise, we must restore the global faith in the United Nations.
Peacekeeping was discredited by its application in situations like Bosnia and Somalia where there was no peace to keep. Properly applied, as in Namibia, El Salvador and Mozambique, peacekeeping is a vital arrow in the United Nations quiver.
For the United Nations, preventing conflict is as important as keeping the peace.
I would like to take this opportunity, therefore, 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
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members of the Security Council, in search of a peaceful solution to the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) 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 been 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.
Iraq's complete fulfillment of these obligations is the one and only aim of this agreement. Nothing more and nothing less will make possible the completion of the United Nations mandated disarmament process and thus speed the lifting of sanctions in accordance with the resolutions of the Security Council.
The agreement reached in Baghdad was neither a "victory" nor a "defeat" for any one person, nation or group 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.
It underscored, however, that if diplomacy is to succeed, it must be backed both by force and by fairness.
The agreement was also a reminder to the entire world of why this Organization was established in the first place: to prevent the outbreak of unnecessary conflict when the will of the world community can be achieved through diplomacy; to seek and find international solutions to international problems; to obtain respect for international law and agreements from a recalcitrant party without destroying forever that party's dignity and willingness to cooperate; to secure, in this case, through on-site inspections and negotiations, the assured destruction of weapons of mass destruction that aerial bombardment can never achieve.
If this agreement is fully implemented and leads over time to a new day in the Gulf; if this exercise in diplomacy, backed by fairness, firmness and force, stands the test of time, it will serve as an enduring and invaluable precedent for the United Nations and the world community.
What we saw then, and can see again, is the achievement of a world of concert, where States faced with a common challenge join forces to reduce the threat of war. A world where differences flourish in peaceful cooperation -- where all cultures and States find a freedom of expression, even as they recognize the limits to isolation and the benefits, in all areas of the human endeavour, of concerted action. That concert of nations, by the way, already exists and has a name: it is the United Nations.
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