SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS PEACEKEEPING CAN NO LONGER BE SEEN IN ISOLATION, ON RECEIVING HONORARY DEGREE FROM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND,
Press Release
SG/SM/6870
SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS PEACEKEEPING CAN NO LONGER BE SEEN IN ISOLATION, ON RECEIVING HONORARY DEGREE FROM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND,
19990122 Kofi Annan Calls Peacekeeping Part of Continuum Of Tasks Stretching from Prevention to Conflict ResolutionFollowing is the text of the speech of Secretary-General Kofi Annan upon receiving an honorary LL.D. from the National University of Ireland in Dublin today:
I am deeply grateful for the honour you have bestowed on me today, and for the very kind words Dr. Smyth has said about me. It makes me personally proud, of course -- I am human, after all. But I know that through me you are honouring an organization, the United Nations.
Above all, you are honouring the ideas on which that Organization was founded, and which it exists to uphold. You are recognizing that the world belongs to all its peoples, and that all of them have an equal right to peace, security and development. You are proclaiming that disputes must be solved peacefully; that problems must be solved through cooperation and common endeavour. You are acknowledging that human beings are only truly themselves when they respect each other's rights, and pool their efforts to ensure that no one is left alone in the struggle against poverty, injustice and oppression.
It gratifies me, but it does not surprise me, that these things should be recognized by a great Irish national institution.
Ireland, if I may put it that way, is well known at the United Nations. We know you as a small country which has always played a part beyond its size in efforts of international solidarity.
I think, when I say that, not only of your official development assistance, which has been continually growing since the early 1990s, at a time when too many other donors have been cutting back. I think, even more, of the thousands upon thousands of individual Irish men and women who devote all or part of their lives to helping their fellow human beings, often amid landscapes far removed from the soft greens and greys of this beautiful island.
Wherever in the world, people are suffering; wherever there is difficult or dangerous work to be done for little or no material reward, there -- in my experience -- you always find Irish people in the front line. Often you will find them in voluntary agencies, engaged in the work of development, of humanitarian relief, or of advocacy for human rights and human well-being. But often, too, you will find them doing these things in the service of the United Nations itself.
In my previous job, as Under-Secretary-General in charge of peacekeeping operations, I was particularly impressed by the contribution Ireland made, and continues to make, in that most arduous and hazardous area of the United Nations' work.
Yesterday, I was privileged to visit the admirable Peacekeeping School at the Curragh, where you train so many of your own and other nations' soldiers for this difficult task. And this morning, I had the honour of laying a wreath at Kilmainham in memory of those brave Irish peacekeepers who made the supreme sacrifice in the cause of peace.
This afternoon, I should like to try and set the work of peacekeeping in a broader context.
You Irish know the value of peace, not least because you have ample experience of its opposite. Your nation lived through a long and bitter struggle for independence, which left a divisive heritage of irredentism and communal conflict. Even as recently as last summer, we all shared with you the horror of the young boys burned alive at Ballymoney, and the senseless carnage which disfigured the city of Omagh.
And yet, as we now approach the third millennium, you have also given the world great reason to hope.
I know that there are still many problems to be overcome before one can say confidently that peace in Northern Ireland is here to stay. But it would be wrong if I did not salute the remarkable, courageous steps taken last year by political leaders of both communities there, and by the British and Irish Governments, in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement and making a bold start on implementing it.
At a time when new conflicts are breaking out in too many parts of the world, and when the efforts of the United Nations to resolve old ones are too often frustrated, it is a great comfort to be able to point to one place where courage and imagination have been shown. Where long-standing and deeply felt claims of sovereignty have been set aside in the interests of peace. Where new formulae have been devised which enable people of different traditions to express their competing loyalties and identities, without needing, in the process, to assert dominance over their neighbours.
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Success may not yet be assured. But I trust the different communities and parties of Northern Ireland know that the hopes and prayers of all humanity are with them, as they struggle to make this agreement work.
Were they to fail, it would be a tragedy for people far beyond Ireland and Britain. If they succeed, the whole world will take heart from their achievement. It is a formidable responsibility.
One of the things we at the United Nations have learnt in the last few years is that, just as conflict never occurs in a vacuum, so peace is never simply a matter of signing agreements or treaties. It always has to be built from the ground up.
This is especially true, I think, of the civil conflicts which form such a large part of our agenda these days. When there is war between two States, you can sometimes negotiate an armistice which takes effect at a given time on a given day, and the fighting stops.
But in wars within States it rarely, if ever, happens like that. Conflict and peace form a continuum: it is often hard to tell just where one stops and the other begins.
That fact has profound implications for all our work in peace and security, and the categories in which it is organized. Indeed, even the category of "peace and security" itself proves to be much less watertight than we used to think.
Our intellectual journey started with the change in the character of United Nations peacekeeping, which came at the end of the cold war.
Until then, we had thought of peacekeeping as something essentially static. Two sides in a conflict agreed to a ceasefire, and to help them observe it we put a neutral, lightly armed force on the ground between them. The force was not supposed to concern itself with the politics of the situation. All it had to do was keep things quiet at the front, and so give the politicians time to work out their differences elsewhere.
Sometimes they did. More often they did not, and the force found itself left in place for a much longer period than had been intended. The classic example is Cyprus, where the United Nations force is still on the ground separating the parties after 35 years.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, we found ourselves undertaking a different kind of assignment. In Namibia, for instance, we put forces on the ground not to give time for a political agreement, but as part of a political agreement which had already been negotiated. So, we had to take on a much wider variety of tasks, including the collection of weapons and the supervision of elections.
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In other, less happy, cases -- such as Bosnia and Somalia -- we were sent to perform a humanitarian role in the midst of a conflict that was still raging. We learned the hard way -- and I must say it was very hard -- that there are limits to what lightly armed, impartial peacekeepers can achieve when there is no clear consent to their presence from the parties, or at least no clear understanding of what their role should be.
In the right conditions, a peacekeeping operation can still make a crucial difference in efforts to resolve these new types of conflict. We saw this in El Salvador, in Mozambique and elsewhere. Whether acting alone or in cooperation with others, United Nations peacekeepers can give a unique legitimacy to outside intervention. They can help reconcile competing points of view. And they can focus attention on local problems among the wider international community.
Of course, there is no substitute for a political solution. But once a conflict goes beyond a certain point, political solutions are fiendishly difficult to reach -- especially for outsiders, whose willingness to expose themselves to risk and cost in other people's wars is understandably limited. So, we have become more and more interested in conflict prevention.
In point of fact, preventing conflicts should always have been at the top of our agenda. Article 1 of the United Nations Charter calls for effective, collective measures to prevent and remove threats to the peace. But for most of the Organization's history, there has been too little emphasis on preventive action. Instead, vast resources are spent on efforts to "cure" conflicts, when, for many of the victims, it is already too late.
Effective prevention is certainly a good investment. But, as with many good investments, it is not always obviously worthwhile at the time when you need to make it. Moreover, even when you get it right, it is difficult to demonstrate the return on your investment, because it is essentially a negative return. The conflicts that do happen are there for all to see. But of those that do not happen, who can say which have been successfully prevented? You can always argue that they were never going to happen anyway.
The deployment of peacekeeping troops is, in itself, a form of prevention, but generally it is used only to prevent recurrence of conflict, where it has already happened. There is one interesting exception, though: the United Nations Preventive Deployment Force in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
Connections of cause and effect in such matters can never be proved. But war has so far been avoided in that Republic, despite the tensions between it and its neighbours, as well as between different ethnic groups within it. Most observers would give the Force some of the credit for that fact. I hope
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the Security Council will be willing to build on this useful precedent in the future.
The point I want to make this afternoon, however, is that peacekeeping can no longer be seen in isolation. It is part of a continuum of tasks, stretching from prevention to conflict resolution and "post-conflict peace-building". All these tasks are closely interrelated, because they are all about establishing an infrastructure of mutual confidence.
They are about helping adversaries, or potential adversaries, to see where their interests overlap, and to avoid scenarios which both may find equally threatening, even though each sees them as driven by the other. Such changes of perspective can seldom be achieved at the level of political leaders alone, because political leaders do not exist in a vacuum. They are formed by, and respond to, a whole range of pressures emanating from civil society.
Almost always it is deep changes of perception at the level of civil society which make possible the transition from war to peace. I would venture to suggest that Northern Ireland is a case in point.
And that is why I say that even the broad category of "peace and security" can no longer be seen as watertight. Because the causes of conflict are almost never purely political. Social justice and material well-being may not be absolute guarantors of civil peace, but they certainly make its preservation a lot easier.
For that reason, in our work at the field level, we have started to embrace a new, holistic concept of security. We are trying to promote both development and democratization, not as separate things, but as part of a comprehensive strategy which could fairly be called "preventive peace-building", since it attacks the root causes of many conflicts.
But I believe it is not enough to adopt that perspective at the country level. We need to apply it at the global level too. When we look at the social impact of last year's financial crisis -- not only in East Asia, but in Russia and now in Brazil -- we must surely tremble for the stability of the entire global order.
The phenomenon of "globalization" -- which really means an unprecedented degree of global interdependence -- is not something that can or should be reversed. But it is, emphatically, something that needs to be managed. If we leave its management to unregulated market forces, we risk provoking a backlash that will sacrifice both political and economic freedom.
Too many millions of people, at present, are either victims of globalization or completely excluded from its benefits. Their distress is one
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of the most potent factors of conflict in the world today. If we are serious about conflict prevention, therefore, we must take action in the economic and social field that brings real hope to those who are at present denied it.
And so, the twin goals of the United Nations -- peace and development -- are intimately related. That is something our founders clearly understood. I believe it is also well understood by the Irish people. And that is why I take such great pleasure in being with you today, and in accepting the great honour you have bestowed upon me.
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