IN STATEMENT TO SECURITY COUNCIL, SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS PLIGHT OF CIVILIANS IN ARMED CONLFICT CAN NO LONGER BE NEGLECTED
Press Release
SG/SM/7134
SC/6729
IN STATEMENT TO SECURITY COUNCIL, SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS PLIGHT OF CIVILIANS IN ARMED CONLFICT CAN NO LONGER BE NEGLECTED
19990916Following is the text of Secretary-General Kofi Annans statement to the Security Council today on the subject of the protection of civilians in armed conflict:
I am pleased to have the opportunity to present to the Security Council my report on The Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict. This report takes as its starting point the worst acts of humankind and calls for our best efforts to defend civilians where they are most imperilled.
More than just the victims of crossfire, civilians have themselves become targets in todays conflicts. During the past decade, many millions have been killed. Over 30 million have been displaced. Countless men, women and children have been denied access to life-saving food and medicine.
These statistics are made all the more shocking by the calculated methods used by so many belligerents. We have observed, in each of the five continents, that belligerents are increasingly taking care to avoid direct confrontation with each other.
Instead, their favoured strategy to gain ground is the exercise of terror against defenceless civilians. Their actions, regardless of any reason that may motivate their struggle, demonstrate a shocking disregard for human life and human values.
The Emergency Relief Coordinator addressed this issue in January in a meeting of the Security Council. Eight months later, it is fair to ask whether the situation has changed. Has there has been any improvement?
Since January, conflicts have erupted or have been re-ignited or intensified, in Angola, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo and East Timor. Each of these situations reminds us, in different ways, of the scale of commitment needed to transform a fragile cease-fire into a secure and stable peace.
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Years of careful work in Angola have been undone by the desire of warring parties to control economic resources. The Lusaka Protocol has collapsed and the civilian population is paying dearly for this failure. Many have lost their lives and hundreds of thousands are again displaced.
In Sierra Leone, too, the quest for power and control over economic resources has driven belligerents to acts of depravity. The mutilation of so many people demonstrates that international law means nothing without effective measures to back it up.
In East Timor, the international community is faced with another situation where human rights have become a casualty of aggression. Militia groups are attempting, by a campaign of terror, to overturn the result of a democratic poll in which they were overwhelmingly defeated.
None of these countries at present have the institutions or the democratic political culture necessary for peace to take hold. They all require sustained and comprehensive efforts to support those who favour peace over war, stability over banditry.
To ensure that these crises are brought to an end, the United Nations must be ready to respond with more than meetings, speeches and reports. It must take action in the name of the principles of the Charter and the values of humanity.
The essence of the United Nations work is to establish human security where it is no longer present, where it is under threat, or where it never existed. This is our humanitarian imperative.
We are at the end of a century that has seen the creation and refinement of much of the corpus of international law. Yet civilians have rarely been so vulnerable. That the conventions of international humanitarian and human rights law are being disregarded so willfully by combatants -- and are being enforced only sporadically by the international community -- is deeply disturbing.
Contained in this report are a total of forty concrete recommendations, which I believe can help to improve the security of civilians in armed conflict. These recommendations provide the Council with tools and strategies, which it can use to respond to particular situations.
To make best use of these tools, the Council may wish to set up a standing mechanism through which it can seek expert advice on specific issues. Such a mechanism would allow the Council to develop a range of responses to deal with issues of legal protection, prevention of conflicts, and physical protection.
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The Council should make use of this expertise, not simply for briefings on humanitarian situations, but as a source of concrete solutions to the problems being confronted. For example, recommendation 39 refers to humanitarian zones and security zones. In situations where such options are being considered, expert advice should be sought from the Secretariat.
All the recommendations but the last one could help to prevent future hostilities and assist in the protection of civilians already in armed conflict.
Tragically, they will not always be enough. If they are not, the final recommendation, enforcement action, will need to be undertaken. There must, of course, be objective criteria to determine the threshold for any form of intervention, but its use must always be on the table.
There is no doubt that enforcement action is a difficult step to take -- it often goes against political or other interests -- but there are universal principles and values which supersede such interests, and the protection of civilians is one of them.
I have given high priority to the protection of civilians in armed conflict and I am willing to work in close support of the Council. I am prepared to use my good offices to put in place a system for monitoring progress in the implementation of all forty of these recommendations, and to report back to the Council on a regular basis. The Council should then be able to measure its progress and evaluate the effectiveness of its efforts.
Those who founded the United Nations believed that despite a bloodied history, humanity was ultimately redeemable.
Yet we see that civilians are still forced from their homes, driven to borders which are open one minute and closed the next, forced into hiding, separated from their families, made to act as human shields, stripped of their identities and callously killed.
The plight of civilians is no longer something which can be neglected or made secondary because it complicates political negotiations or interests. It is fundamental to the central mandate of the Organization.
Failure to address these issues will erode respect for the Councils resolutions and so diminish the authority of the United Nations as a whole. More important, it will take away the one thing that sustains the many millions who have lost all in conflict: the hope that something called the international community is willing to uphold the basic dignity of humankind.
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