FIFTY YEARS OF UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING HAS HELPED PAVE ROAD TO PEACE, SECRETARY-GENERAL TELLS SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE MEETING OF ASSEMBLY

6 October 1998

Press Release
SG/SM/6732
PKO/74

FIFTY YEARS OF UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING HAS HELPED PAVE ROAD TO PEACE, SECRETARY-GENERAL TELLS SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE MEETING OF ASSEMBLY

19981006 While Not Answering Every Conflict during Half-Century History, United Nations Peacekeepers Have Saved Tens of Thousands of Lives

The following is the text of the address given by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the special commemorative meeting of the General Assembly held today to mark the fiftieth anniversary of United Nations peacekeeping:

Today, it is my great honour to commemorate with you the fiftieth anniversary of United Nations peacekeeping -- the fiftieth anniversary of the year when soldiers were sent on to the battlefield under a new flag and with a new mission: a mission of peace.

It would be no exaggeration to say that that mission was without precedent in human history. It was an attempt to confront and defeat the worst in man with the best in man; to counter violence with tolerance, might with moderation, and war with peace.

That mission has earned its place in history as the first example of what has come to be known as "peacekeeping". Ever since then, day after day, year after year, United Nations peacekeepers have been meeting the threat and reality of conflict, without losing faith, without giving in, without giving up.

Since 1948, there have been forty-nine United Nations peacekeeping operations. Thirty-six of those were created since 1988, the year in which United Nations peacekeeping was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Well over 750,000 military and civilian police personnel, and thousands of other civilians, from 118 different countries, have served in United Nations peacekeeping operations. Fourteen thousand peacekeepers are serving this very day.

No figures, however, can do justice to the ultimate sacrifice that more than 1,500 peacekeepers have made over this half-century. Today we pay tribute, above all, to the brave "blue helmets" who gave their lives in the cause of

peace. Whatever success we have had is owed to their sacrifice, their dedication, their heroism.

I am therefore particularly honoured to announce that later today I shall bestow on three of our fallen peacekeepers, in the presence of their families, a new Medal named after one of them: Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.

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". Undoubtedly, peacekeeping falls fairly and squarely within the spirit of that pledge. Yet you will search the Charter in vain for any specific provision for such operations.

"Peacekeeping", from the start, has been an improvisation. To my mind, that is one of its great merits. It proved, and continues to prove, that the United Nations is not a static or hidebound Organization, but a dynamic and innovative one. Indeed, peacekeeping has been one of many activities through which our Organization has shown its ability to adapt to circumstances, to find its way round obstacles, and to make itself relevant to the actual problems at hand.

Not that the evolution of United Nations peacekeeping -- from patrolling clearly-marked buffer zones and cease-fire lines to the far more complex, multi- dimensional operations of the 1990s -- has been either smooth or simple.

Often the expectations placed on peacekeepers have outstripped the resources given to them. Often the demands made of them have cruelly ignored realities on the ground.

Over the decades, we have had some unmistakable successes, such as Namibia, Mozambique and El Salvador. But we have also found ourselves maintaining calm in some seemingly intractable stalemates, such as Cyprus and the Middle East.

And in some places -- Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia -- we have found ourselves standing by, in impotent horror, while the most appalling crimes were committed. There, the limits of peacekeeping were graphically demonstrated: we learned, the hard way, that lightly armed troops in white vehicles and blue helmets are not the solution to every conflict. Sometimes peace has to be made - - or enforced -- before it can be kept.

We yield to no one in our regret and our pain over those calamities: the loss of life; the wanton destruction of towns and villages; the shredding of the very fabric of humanity which, in normal times and places, allows men and women of different ethnic origin to live peacefully side by side. We will forever measure our proudest achievements against the memory of those worst of days.

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But that does not mean we succumb to the fatalism of those who would rather stay at home when conflict rages and fellow human beings are suffering in a distant land. That is the cynic's answer and the coward's solution. It is not ours.

We are not here today to declare victory. We cannot claim that peacekeeping has been the answer to every conflict; still less, alas, that it has prevented the recurrence of genocide. What we can and do claim proudly is that, in the first half-century of their existence, United Nations "blue helmets" have saved tens of thousands of lives.

In recent times the pendulum may appear to have swung away from support for United Nations peacekeeping. But I have no doubt that history will see it as one of the Organization's most important and lasting contributions to international peace and security.

The mission of United Nations peacekeeping must continue. Too much remains to be done, too many innocents are dying even as we speak, for us to think of leaving the field now. Peacekeeping's promise, after all, was never to end war. Peacekeeping is not the same as peacemaking. It can help prevent, or at least delay, a recurrence of conflict.

It can even be used, as we have shown in The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, to help prevent conflict from breaking out in the first place. Above all, it gives time and space for conflict resolution: it gives peace a chance. If the chance is not taken, the peacekeepers are not to blame.

Isaiah's words - "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more" - will never be more than an ideal for humanity. If, in our service as United Nations peacekeepers, we can help make that ideal more true than false, more promising than distant, more able to protect the innocent than embolden the guilty, we will have done our part.

The will to peace must exist among the peoples and the parties, but the path to peace is one that we -- the United Nations -- can help pave. We have done so for the last half-century, and I am confident we can continue in the century to come.

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