SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS FUTURE OF PEACEKEEPING WILL DEPEND, IN LARGE PART, ON MOBILIZING NEW FORMS OF LEVERAGE TO BRING PARTIES TOWARDS SETTLEMENT

23 February 1999

Press Release
SG/SM/6901
PKO/80

SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS FUTURE OF PEACEKEEPING WILL DEPEND, IN LARGE PART, ON MOBILIZING NEW FORMS OF LEVERAGE TO BRING PARTIES TOWARDS SETTLEMENT

19990223 CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY Kofi Annan Stresses at Georgetown University, Once Peacekeeping Operation Is Authorized by Council, Everyone Must Pay Their Share of Cost, Promptly, in Full

Following is the address of Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- focusing on the theme "The Future of United Nations Peacekeeping" -- upon receiving the Jit Trainor Award for Distinction in the Conduct of Diplomacy, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., today:

Thank you, Don, and Father O'Donovan, for those very kind words. I am greatly flattered by what you have said and greatly honoured to become the eighteenth recipient of the Jit Trainor award.

I am more than happy to speak to you this evening about United Nations peacekeeping. As Don has mentioned, I was head of the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations for four years before I became Secretary-General. It was a very exciting time and, on the whole, a very inspiring one. So the subject has remained close to my heart.

The United Nations can, I think, fairly claim to have invented both the word and the concept of peacekeeping, but it did so by improvising in response to specific situations and events. Not surprisingly, therefore, peacekeeping has evolved over time, and has taken different forms as it adapted to different circumstances.

Since the end of the cold war, our operations have became more ambitious and more complex. Almost without exception, the new conflicts which have erupted since 1991 have been civil ones. Although, often, there is outside interference, the main battle is between people who are, or were, citizens of the same State. This has obliged the United Nations to redefine the tasks that peacekeeping involves.

Instead of maintaining a ceasefire while waiting for a political solution to be negotiated, we are now more often deployed as part of an agreed process, to help implement a fledgling political settlement. This involves us

in such activities as collecting weapons, disarming and demobilizing militias, supervising elections, and monitoring -- sometimes even training -- police forces.

Putting a war-torn society back together is never easy, and one can seldom say with real confidence that the point of no return has been achieved. But we can claim some success stories. Not all the wounds of conflict have yet healed, but Namibia, Mozambique, El Salvador, even Cambodia are countries which have now lived several years without war, and which have at least a fair chance of lasting peace, thanks to the hard work of United Nations peacekeepers in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

To some extent, we have been victims of our own success. In the early 1990s, expectations ran very high, and some of the assignments we were given were ones which could only have been carried out successfully by much larger forces, armed with heavier equipment and, above all, with clearer mandates.

The international community has drawn lessons from these sad experiences, but perhaps not always the right ones.

In Africa, the effect was to make external Powers more reluctant to expose their forces. Indeed, the tragedy of Rwanda was caused, in part, by fear of repeating the experience of Somalia, which haunted some members of the Security Council.

In Europe, thankfully, a different lesson was drawn. External Powers, especially the United States, became more involved, not less. We saw diplomatic skill and military muscle combined -- late in the day, but with great effect -- to produce the Dayton Agreement.

The Implementation Force in Bosnia, and the Stabilization Force, which has succeeded it, have to my mind been model peacekeeping forces. Heavily armed, and authorized to use their arms if challenged, they have, in practice, hardly used them at all because their authority has not been challenged.

But, although authorized by the Security Council, they are not United Nations peacekeeping forces, in the sense that they do not wear blue helmets. As you know, they are under North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leadership.

But another success was the parallel operation in Eastern Slavonia.

There, too, a force was deployed strong enough to intimidate the local parties, so that the Transitional Administration was able to see off early challenges and fulfil its mandate without being dragged into combat. But this was a United Nations operation in the full sense of the term. It brought

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together a broad range of international responses -- military, political, and humanitarian -- under the authority of a Special Representative of the Secretary-General, who happened to be a very distinguished American, Jacques Paul Klein.

The result was an integrated strategy, and the force was able to withdraw on time, without leaving renewed bloodshed behind it.

But peacekeeping is not, and must not become, an arena of rivalry between the United Nations and NATO.

There is plenty of work for us both to do. We work best when we respect each other's competence and avoid getting in each other's way. In fact, the United Nations Charter explicitly encourages regional arrangements and agencies, like NATO, to deal with regional problems, provided they do so in a manner consistent with the purposes and principles of the United Nations. So I welcome NATO's role, as I welcome that of other regional organizations in other parts of the world.

But few others have, or would claim to have, the same operational capacity that NATO has. It is, therefore, unfortunate that in recent years the Security Council has been reluctant to authorize new United Nations peacekeeping operations, and has often left regional or subregional organizations to struggle with local conflicts on their own.

That puts an unfair burden on the organizations in question. It is also a waste of the expertise in peacekeeping which the United Nations has developed over the years.

As a result, the number of United Nations peacekeepers fell precipitately between 1994 and 1998. If only that meant there had been a drop in the need for peacekeeping, we could all rejoice. But that is far from the case. In fact, the overall number of peacekeepers deployed around the world remains roughly constant. It is only the proportion of them wearing blue berets that has declined.

Ironically, this happened just when the United Nations, with the support of its Member States, was developing a sound infrastructure for directing and supporting peacekeeping operations.

It is a paradox that, in technical terms, we are better equipped now that we have only 14,000 soldiers in the field than we were five years ago, when we had nearly 80,000. And if our capacity continues to be underutilized, there is an obvious risk that Member States will no longer give us the resources we need to sustain it.

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This would not matter if the peace around the world were being successfully kept. But the truth is that the role played by NATO in Bosnia has proved very hard for regional arrangements or defence alliances to reproduce elsewhere.

In Africa especially, I find that local Powers, and indeed regional organizations, are turning more and more to the United Nations for help. We must not dismantle the capacity that can provide that help.

Of course, we must be careful to avoid the mistakes of the past. We must never again send a United Nations force, just for the sake of it, to keep a non-existent peace, or one to which the parties themselves show no sense of commitment.

That, perhaps, is the lesson of Angola, where, as you know, civil war is now raging once again, and I have had to recommend the withdrawal of the United Nations force.

But let us not forget the positive lesson of Mozambique, which, 10 years ago, seemed quite as tragic and hopeless a case as Angola.

There, the presence of 7,000 United Nations troops had a calming effect, helping to reassure vulnerable parties and people, and to deter disruptions of the peace.

Conflict was successfully channelled into legitimate political institutions, so that interests no longer had to be pursued at the point of a gun.

This required working with the parties to strengthen national institutions and broaden their base. And to ensure that the parties could make use of the new institutions, we had to help them -- especially the guerrilla opposition -- to transform themselves from an army into a political party.

Had we not done that, the opposition leaders would quickly have become disillusioned with the political process and would have been tempted to return to the battlefield.

We also provided incentives for individual combatants, many of whom had been pressed into service as children, had come of age as fighters, and knew no other way of life.

And so, with a little help from the United Nations, the parties in Mozambique were able to make peace. What was once a violent and ruthless rebel movement has become a constructive and peaceful opposition party.

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No doubt we got some things right in Mozambique, which we got wrong in Angola, but surely the main difference lies in the behaviour of the political leaders, on both sides, in the two countries.

So yes, we have to be cautious about taking on new mandates in countries where many different interests and ethnic animosities are involved.

But, let us not nurture any illusions that regional or subregional bodies will be able to handle these problems on their own, without help from the United Nations.

You only have to list the countries which might make up a "regional force" in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, to realize that many of them are already involved in the hostilities on one side or the other.

Indeed, the experience of decades has shown that peacekeeping is often best done by people from outside the region, who are more easily accepted as truly detached and impartial.

So I think we must be prepared for a conclusion which many African leaders have already reached: that if a peacekeeping force is required in the Congo, the United Nations would probably have to be involved.

But, equally, we must be prepared to insist that no such force can be deployed unless it is given sufficient strength and firepower to carry out its assignment, and assured of the full backing of the Security Council when it has to use that power.

I see no need for it to include American troops. But, I think, in other respects, the Bosnian model is just as relevant to Africa as it is to Europe.

Increasingly, we find that peacekeeping cannot be treated as a distinct task, complete in itself. It has to be seen as part of a continuum, stretching from prevention to conflict resolution and "peace-building".

And these things cannot be done in a neat sequence. You have to start building peace while the conflict is still going on.

It is essentially a political task, but one which is part and parcel of a peacekeeping role. More than ever, the distinctions between political and military aspects of our work are becoming blurred.

I have no doubt that in future we will need to be even more adaptable.

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The future of peacekeeping, I suspect, will depend, in large part, on whether we succeed in mobilizing new forms of leverage to bring parties towards a settlement.

In the past, when a peacekeeping operation ran into trouble, the most effective response was to report this to the Security Council, whose permanent members would then put pressure on their respective proxies, mainly by extending or reducing economic and military aid.

In today's conflicts, that kind of government-to-government aid is less important. Conflicting parties now finance their armies with hard currency earned by exporting the commodities they control.

How do we obtain leverage over those sources of income? It may involve a new kind of relationship with the private sector, where the foreign customers and backers of the parties are to be found.

Also, given the civil nature of today's conflicts, which are always, in some degree, a battle for hearts and minds, we may need to engage on a broader front with the civilian population. At the very least, we must ensure that they have access to reliable and objective information, so that they are not an easy prey for artificially fanned fear and hatred.

It is sadly clear that the need for United Nations peacekeeping will continue and, indeed, will probably grow. And it is very much in America's national interest to support an international response to conflicts -- even those which seem remote -- because, in today's interconnected world, they seldom remain confined in one country or even one region.

Take Rwanda, for example. The failure of the international community to respond effectively led not only to genocide in Rwanda itself, but also to the exodus of refugees and combatants across the borders.

Because we failed to act in time, seven countries are now fighting each other in a mineral-rich region which should have been a prime area for investment and development. Is this something the United States can afford to ignore?

Personally, I shall always be haunted by our failure to prevent or halt the genocide in Rwanda until nearly a million people had been killed. The peacekeeping force was withdrawn at the very moment that it should have been reinforced.

But whether we express remorse or outrage, or both, our words are of little value -- unless we are sure that next time we will act differently.

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Which means that next time we will not hide behind the complexities and dangers of the situation. Next time we must not wait for hindsight to tell us the wisest course.

Nor must we set impossible conditions, thereby ensuring that the Security Council takes no decision until too late.

We must be prepared to act while things are still unclear and uncertain, but in time to make a difference.

We must do so with sufficient resources -- including credible military strength when a deterrent is necessary -- to ensure the mission's success and the peacekeepers' safety.

And once the Council has authorized an operation, everyone -- but especially those Council members who voted for it -- must pay their share of the cost, promptly and in full.

Only if we approach our work in that spirit can we dare hope that peacekeeping in the twenty-first century will build on the achievements of the twentieth.

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