ROBERT FOWLER, OUTGOING SECURITY COUNCIL PRESIDENT AND PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE OF CANADA, HOLDS PRESS CONFERENCE AT HEADQUARTERS
Press Briefing
ROBERT FOWLER, OUTGOING SECURITY COUNCIL PRESIDENT AND PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE OF CANADA, HOLDS PRESS CONFERENCE AT HEADQUARTERS
20000428The hallmark of the Security Council's activities in April had been human security, Robert Fowler, Permanent Representative of Canada and President of the Security Council for that month, told journalists at a press conference at United Nations Headquarters today.
Mr. Fowler held the briefing, at the end of what he described as possibly Canada's last chance to preside over the Council for perhaps a decade, to draw attention to his conclusions about what had been done and why.
[The Security Council Presidency changes each month, rotating alphabetically among its members. It has five permanent and 15 non-permanent members. Non-permanent members are elected from among United Nations Member States for two-year terms, and are not eligible for re-election immediately following the end of their terms. Canada is currently serving the second year of its two-year term as a non-permanent Council member; a term that will expire in December 2000.]
The April programme had been productive, ambitious and varied, he said. Most of what Canada had set out to achieve had been achieved, and this had not been something about which he could be certain until the last moment. He hoped that Canada had done something in April that would enhance the moral authority of the United Nations and the credibility, in particular, of the Council. The objectives going into the month had been to pursue the themes of human security, Council transparency and credibility, and the projection of Canadian values.
Under the human security theme, Canada had sought to broaden the interpretation of the Security Council's mandate to protect people, Mr. Fowler explained. It had aimed to draw attention to the plight and suffering of people, rather than just nations, in the crises under Council consideration.
Canada had been very active in pursuing more transparent working methods for the Security Council, he said, but it had not been alone. There had been enormous support for greater transparency, from the elected members of the Council and, more recently, from the Council's permanent members. If one compared the Council Canada had joined 16 months ago, and its order of business, with what one saw today, he thought a real difference would be evident. Statistics would support this, and there were many more open meetings and open discussions.
Simply counting the number of Council meetings was not an adequate way to determine activity, because the Council sometimes held very short formal meetings. The key issue was whether meetings invited substantive and full participation by non-members of the Council in the discussion of Council issues.
At the end of 1999 a note on Security Council procedures had created a new type of meeting, somewhere between closed informal consultations and open meetings where everybody participated, Mr. Fowler explained. There had been
Canada Press Conference - 2 - 28 April 2000
some difficulty explaining this new type of meeting, particularly in the context of the Open-ended Working Group on Security Council Reform, because some Member States which shared Canada's views on Security Council transparency felt these "new positions of the switch between on and off" actually impaired transparency. Canada had sought to explain to them that "the default position would be off", unless interim choices were available. So things -- like open briefings -- had been developed where others could simply witness the Security Council considering an issue.
Another example of this new style of meeting had been the recent Council briefing on his role by the Neutral Facilitator of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, former President Ketumile Masire of Botswana, which had been private, but in which the representative of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been allowed to participate. At least the country concerned had been allowed to "play".
He said he thought there had been a shift in the way the Council worked, from primarily issuing press releases and press statements, and providing comments from the "stake-out" position outside the Council Chamber, to actually engaging in a way that provided more participation, and therefore more opportunity for success in dealing with matters before the Council.
Within April, Canada had been happy about the discussion on Afghanistan, and its focus on the plight of women and girls in that country, he said.
He had also been pleased by the Council's open discussion, with former Swedish Prime Minister, Ingvar Carlsson, on the expert report on United Nations' responsibility regarding the 1994 Rwanda genocide. That report, commissioned by the Secretary-General, had been issued in December 1999. Prior to April, the Secretary-General had responded to it, but the Security Council had said nothing. Canada believed that the Council had to come to terms with such a vitally important report, although it was not easy for it to do so. From the outset, no statement or resolution on the matter had been planned, but the "deliverable" was the 15 Council members coming to terms with their collective and gross failure in their response to the genocide. It was important that the Council should remember, in the days ahead, as it tackled other large, difficult issues, what was said in the Rwandan debate.
Regarding sanctions, there had been "a three-act play" this month, he said. The first act had taken place outside the United Nations, under the aegis of the International Peace Academy, with the launch of that body's excellent study titled "The Sanctions Decade", produced with some money from Canada. It outlined the very varied experience with sanctions over the past decade and engaged a wide audience of Council members, other Member States, non- governmental organizations, academics and media. The meeting focused on sanctions as an instrument of international diplomacy.
The second act had taken place in the Council on the same day - 17 April -- when the Council had taken up the same issue, he said. The Council had held a broad and very innovative discussion on the application of sanctions generally, and a working group was established within the Council to continue that discussion. All Member States were involved, and their views would inform the working group in its efforts over the next six months in its efforts to determine lessons learned from previous applications of sanctions and to draw future conclusions.
The third act was the following day, when the Council passed an extremely ambitious resolution on Angolan sanctions, he said; a matter with which Canada was intimately concerned given that Mr. Fowler had chaired the Council's Angolan sanctions committee. One month previously, he had tabled the report of the expert panel the Council established in May 1999, to examine where violations were occurring and what could be done about them. The panel had made 39 recommendations in its report, and he had no idea how many of them would be approved by the Council. He thought about 80 per cent had been accepted. A couple of big recommendations had not been accepted, but the really big ones were accepted completely. The most obvious success was the idea that, after 55 years, the Council would enforce its decisions and in principle take actions against people who did not respect its decisions on sanctions.
The mere fact that the Council made that decision was "a pretty big deal", he said, and it was controversial. There was extreme worry within the Council about where the decision would take it, and what it would mean. However, those arguing that the Council could not expect to remain credible and have its decisions respected if it was not prepared to ensure those decisions were enforced had prevailed. Some commentators had said the seven-month "delay fuse" that the resolution included was a mark of failure, but, from his perspective, he never expected that measures would be enacted against sanctions busters 30 days after the expert panel reported. This was just never going to happen.
The "delay fuse" had been established, he said, and during that seven months several things would occur. The Council would continue to consider the recommendations of the expert panel, now defunct. The Council would also continue to hear explanations, protestations and other evidence from those accused of violations. Finally, a mechanism was established - a new five-member panel, the membership of which was yet to be determined - that would verify that the responses of those accused were, in fact, correct. The follow-on panel would continue to "shine light on all the dark corners" and keep people honest with respect to those sanctions.
It was a fairly innovative approach, he said. Some heavy burdens had been put on organizations that worked closely with the Sanctions Committee on the application of the sanctions, but all the evidence from Angola, from intelligence services and from neighbouring countries suggested that the public attention that followed the report was having a dramatic effect on the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola's (UNITA) ability to resupply. That was not disputed, even by UNITA itself. Therefore he would declare the effort successful.
The other major achievement in the month occurred on 19 April, he said, when the Council passed a long, complex resolution on the protection of children in armed conflict. That, too, was the end of "a three-act play", in this case acted over 14 months. The first act was a two-day open debate on the subject in February 1999 that had taken place during Canada's last term as President of the Council. The second act took place in September 1999, when the Secretary- General issued his comprehensive report - perhaps one of the best the United Nations had ever produced - on the protection of civilians. There were some 40 recommendations in that report, of which about 29 applied to the Council's area of concern. The Council had worked those 29 recommendations into its long resolution, which Canada was very happy to see the Council adopt last week.
Mr. Fowler said he was also very pleased to see Hans Blix, the Executive Chairman of the new United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), get his organizational plan for that Commission through the Security Council. Whether that would mean there would be sudden and dramatic change in Iraq was another question, but obviously it was a first and important step to see if a new and effective monitoring regime could be set up in that country. Similarly, it was good to receive the report to the Council on efforts to address the situation of Kuwaiti prisoners and third-party nationals.
Two Council missions had been identified, one of which was in Kosovo at that moment, he said. The Council was planning to dispatch the second mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and beyond, next Tuesday. Those missions reflected a new determination within the Council to be directly engaged, to seek first-hand information, and to be in touch with what it talked about in its Chambers.
Over the remaining eight months of Canada's term on the Council, it would seek to anchor the trends he had identified. As for the legacy it wished to leave at the end of its term, he hoped that people both inside and outside the Council understood better now what motivated it.
A correspondent asked about the composition of the two Council missions, in which four of the five members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on the Council were travelling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, leaving -- according to the correspondent -- Russia and China to dominate the Kosovo mission. Mr. Fowler explained that Council members had each chosen which mission they wished to join. There had been no decision about which participants would go where, based on political niceties. All that had been decided was that each Council member would only attend one mission. The countries themselves decided.
It was also important to remember what the purpose of the trips was, he added. Some Council members felt they needed to go to Kosovo to see first-hand what was happening. Some other Council members had already been to Kosovo. For whatever domestic or other reasons, members had elected to go on either one mission or another.
Asked for a reaction to the announcement that some members of the Council's Kosovo mission would also be travelling to meet Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Mr. Fowler said he personally was extremely disappointed. Countries made their own decisions, but he personally felt that the visit would not make dealing with the issue in the Council any easier.
A journalist asked whether Council members could provide written texts to media when they intended to make prepared speeches in the Council, to which Mr. Fowler said that journalists could certainly encourage them to do so.
Asked whether the representative of the Russian Federation had subsequently backed away from approval of the UNMOVIC organizational plan, Mr. Fowler said that in consultations the Russian Federation had made it clear that it expected to have ongoing dialogue with Executive Chairman Hans Blix on all kinds of things related to UNMOVIC, some of which were currently unforeseeable. Only the Russian Federation could explain exactly what they intended, but what he understood from the discussion was that they wished to ensure it was understood that approval of the organizational plan was not a once-and-for-all approval of the workings of the Commission, and that they would continue to maintain a "line" into the way this commission carried out its business.
Obviously, he added, some people were "looking into the rear-view mirror" on this matter, and he suspected that might be the motivation behind some statements.
Asked what still frustrated him regarding Security Council reform, he said he genuinely believed that the Council had come a long way. He could not have reasonably expected, in January 1999, to see the Council performing in the way and with the rhythm it demonstrated in April. In the "tectonic" time-frame in which the United Nations functioned, so much change in so short a time could not have been anticipated. Further change was certainly possible.
Many people had pointed out that by the time the Council heard the last speaker in its new long open debates, the Council "first team" was no longer in attendance, he said. Distressingly, this was very often the case. But, in reality, everyone on the Council had a great deal to do, including preparing for the next day's Council meeting. You could not realistically have a Council that met in continuous open session, and when there was an important issue under discussion, where every Member State believed it must speak to go "on the record", meetings would take a long time. And if the Council membership was larger, as was being proposed, it would take even longer.
The limits of the possible were beginning to be seen, at least given the way it currently did business. It was conceivable that at some stage it could behave like other United Nations legislative bodies which heard speeches from representatives of regional groups on behalf of their members. However, the Council's non-permanent members were not at present elected as representatives of any group, but in their national capacities.
He was truly very satisfied about the way the Council had evolved, he said. He could be happier, for example, about the way peacekeeping missions were currently authorized. He would wish to see the Council much less constrained financially. When the Council was discussing situations where 200 or 300 people were dying every day, the punctilious discussion about whether the force should be 5,437 or 5,619 - a discussion that could go on for many days - was hard to accept. However, the reality was that all governments were constrained in what they could afford, and decisions of the Security Council were binding on all Member States, including Canada. In the past, Canada had not been heard asking whether the last battalion was really necessary.
Canada would like to see the Council able to act not only with more latitude and flexibility, but also more expeditiously. For five years, Canada had been whining about the lack of a rapidly deployable mission headquarters, and the fact that it took so long for the United Nations to get into the field. This was happening now with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For two weeks now there had been a separation of forces and ceasefire agreement which was holding, to everybody's surprise, but where was the United Nations? he asked.
Questioned about how things were going in Council deliberations on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, given that there had been a number of private Council meetings on the subject this week, Mr. Fowler said the principal focus of meetings with the Neutral Facilitator for Inter-Congolese Dialogue had been aimed at getting the Facilitator the staff, budget and support he needed to get on with his job effectively. They had been held to introduce him to the people in New York who could help him.
It had also been the Council's first chance to meet with the Secretary- General's new Special Representative for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kamel Morjane, he explained. Mr. Morjane had provided the Council with a very full briefing of how things were going, and the Council was enormously impressed with his energy and vision.
The Council trip to that country was still a "work-in-progress", he said, and it was not yet clear how many places beyond Kinshasa and Lusaka the mission would visit. It was a timely visit - more so than when it was first envisaged because of the agreement on the separation of forces.
The Department of Peacekeeping Operations continued to try to find troops for the mission, but the recruitment process was not complete, he said. They were still organizing a deployment into one of the most logistically-challenging places in the world.
Concerning the additional trip by certain Council members on the Kosovo mission to Belgrade, he clarified that he was objecting not to the members visit to that city, but rather to their plan to meet with President Milosevic - an indicted war criminal. Asked to speculate on the value of the feedback those members might give the Council on their Belgrade meetings, he said he believed the Council would meet this coming Monday to discuss the mechanisms for debriefing on the Kosovo trip.
Asked whether the Council would discuss substantial autonomy for Kosovo soon, he said he did not believe it would. "Why would it?" he asked. He thought it would continue to proceed in Kosovo on a day-to-day basis. There was still a huge shortfall in numbers of police. The Council, he thought, would just continue to try to improve the effectiveness of the administration and the operation in place, and attempt to bring the dollar commitments and the numbers of personnel up to the level needed. He did not think that the political issue would be considered soon.
Asked whether his programme for April had been vetoed by any permanent Council members in private consultations, he explained that the right of veto did not apply to informal Council consultations. However, none had made any attempt to stop discussion of the issues on Canada's agenda, which was not to say there had not been very delicate negotiations on some aspects of the Angolan resolution or the protection of civilians resolution. Both those resolutions engaged large issues of principle and took the Council into areas it had never before explored. They required big steps, which gave a number of Council members pause. Negotiations were long, compromises were made and new language was found.
For example, he would not have believed, when the Council first debated the protection of civilians in conflict in February 1999, that a resolution such as the one adopted in April would be passed early in 2000, he said. It included remarkable language about the Council's legitimate concern for human security -- for individuals threatened and endangered -- and about the kind of issues the Council must consider before it took action to dissipate such threats. Negotiations had been "kind of rough", but he had not faced any Council member stating that he would not allow the resolution to pass.
A journalist said that Bernard Kouchner, the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Kosovo, had said he believed the concept of special autonomy must be discussed in the Council soon. He asked Mr. Fowler for a reaction.
Mr. Fowler explained that he did not think that a Council meeting on substantial autonomy would be scheduled and announced in the United Nations Journal. Every day all kinds of things were happening in Kosovo. Obviously, Mr. Kouchner was trying to set a mechanism in place to generate some revenue; and some of the means for doing so, such as customs duties and the issuing of stamps, could be seen as furthering delineating autonomy for the region.
There were municipal elections planned for Kosovo in autumn, he noted, and those would raise the extremely complex issue of voter registration - in some ways similar to the registration issues affecting Western Sahara. The Council was interested in restoring a degree of normalcy to the life of Kosovars, and some people would claim this meant inexorably moving towards autonomy. He had been asked to speculate, and he speculated that the Council would not soon debate how much autonomy was enough in Kosovo, but he could be completely wrong.
Asked to comment on a report that an American tanker had been found to have Iraqi oil on board, and that subsequently $2 million had been deposited to the Iraq escrow account, Mr. Fowler said he had noticed the report and found it intriguing, but he did not know enough about the incident to comment.
Asked whether Canada would seek to be re-elected to the Council after waiting the obligatory two years, Mr. Fowler said that more than half the Member States of the United Nations had never served a term on the Council, whereas Canada was currently serving its sixth term. Canada believed that all Member States had a right and an obligation to serve on the Council. It was possible that a Canadian Government might seek re-election sooner than he expected, but the rhythm that it had established was one term every 10 years.
The Western European and Other Group of United Nations Member States, of which Canada was a member, had absolutely no rotation system to determine which of its members would stand for election to the Council, Mr. Fowler explained in response to another question. Many Member States of that group had clearly said there never would be one. The Western European and Other Group clearly held the prize for the most ill-disciplined regional group in the United Nations with respect to Security Council elections. However, such a rotation system applied to the election to the Economic and Social Council.
Asked whether a revision to the scale used to determine each Member States individual financial responsibility for peacekeeping, as called for by the United States, would not help address the concerns he had expressed about funding for peacekeeping missions, he said it could. Canada's position was that it was perfectly prepared to see the scale revised, but it was not prepared to see any arrears written off. A debt was a debt. If there was a general agreement among Member States that the proportion for which the United States was responsible be decreased, Canada could live with that, as the amounts - in the context of national accounts - were quite small.
However, the United States debt to the United Nations was not small, he said. United States taxpayers owed Canadian taxpayers over $40 million, and Canadians would like that debt to be paid. He thought that if the issue could be settled once and for all, there was a better chance that the 50 or so Member States that had undertaken peacekeeping on behalf of the Organization and had not been paid would receive what they were owed.
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