HEADQUARTERS PRESS BRIEFING ON CONFLICT PREVENTION

                The Security Council’s specific request of the Secretary-General last year to prepare a comprehensive report on conflict prevention indicated that there was a growing interest among Member States to move the Organization from a culture of reaction to a culture of prevention, Danilo Turk, Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs, told correspondents this afternoon.  At a Headquarters preview of the corollary report, Mr. Turk added that two open debates held in the Council -– in November 1999 and July 2000, respectively -– had possibly served to expand the wider international community’s sentiments about prevention, a defining principle of the Organization enshrined in Article I of the Charter.

Mr. Turk said the information provided in the report would attempt to shed light on experiences and the practical challenges of conflict prevention.  But compiling such information was difficult since successes were often difficult to describe, while failures were regularly seen and more routinely reported.  That did not mean that overall conflict prevention efforts could be primarily characterized by failures.  The picture was indeed a bit more balanced. 

For example, he said that everyone would agree that the international community’s inability to address the widely reported ethnic tensions that resulted in the horrible genocide in Rwanda as well as further complications in the Great Lakes region was a “failure of prevention”.  Also, he noted that prevention did not prevail in averting the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, even though discussions in the Security Council had described the situation there as “preventable and unnecessary”.

On the other hand there were also several examples of successful prevention efforts, Mr. Turk continued.  In some cases, those successes had been reported and then forgotten.  He noted two instances –- the situation in Albania and the situation in Afghanistan, respectively.  In Albania, an international military presence organized by the Security Council had been remarkably successful in containing the economic meltdown which had led to dissolution of the armed forces and the subsequent takeover by the civilian population.  That military initiative had been followed by development assistance and an arms disposal programme, and today, Albania was on the right path. 

On Afghanistan, he said a 1998 incident which had led to the killing of a number of Iranian diplomats had been followed by a period of great tension between Iran and the Taliban as well as the serious threat of armed conflict.  In that situation, the Council had intervened politically, sending the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, to the region, and a diplomatic solution to the problem was reached.

The report, scheduled for release later today, ahead of the Council’s upcoming open debate on conflict prevention next Thursday, did not deal with prevention on a case-by-case basis, he said.  It tried to give a system wide account of activities and a comprehensive set of recommendations.  It did so on

the basis of examining the distinction between operational prevention –- diplomatic actions yielding immediate effects –- and long-term structural

prevention.  He hoped the report would provide a good basis for discussion in the Council and in the formulation of policies by Member States for strengthening prevention efforts in the future.

A correspondent asked whether the lessons learned from the past -- namely the situation in Rwanda, had prepared the United Nations to prevent future flare-ups in places like Burundi, which had been described by the Security Council as being “on the brink”.  Mr. Turk said that while he was not prepared to give a detailed analysis of the situation in Burundi, he did believe the Organization was better prepared to deal with situations of that nature.  It had established an extensive diplomatic communications network in the region and was very active in a preventive sense.  And while the nature of the United Nations involvement was complex and perhaps might not lead to immediate results, there was no comparison between the situation of Rwanda in 1994 and Burundi today.  The main difference, he reiterated, was the intensity of diplomatic efforts, highlighted by the active role being played by the facilitator, Nelson Mandela.  “There is hope that the situation will not escalate further,” he added.

Another correspondent asked if the report addressed the changing nature of conflicts today which, as the Secretary-General had repeatedly noted, was no longer classic State-to-State combat but more regularly intra-State or civil war. How would the message reach rebel groups like the revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone?  Mr. Turk said the report recognized the changing nature of contemporary conflicts as well as the primary responsibility of Member States as a result of those changes.  He added that no far-reaching conclusions could be reached based on experiences with the RUF.  That group was a very specific case.   While there was a problem in relating to rebel groups, those problems often arose because of the failure to recognize such groups.

He added that there was currently a need to address one of the Organization’s main weaknesses:  enhancing the analytical capacity of the Secretariat.  It was imperative for the Organization to be able to more comprehensively analyze existing information and to formulate more imaginative, realistic recommendations. 

Following the suggestion that Macedonia might be an excellent proving ground for the Organization’s renewed prevention efforts, Mr. Turk said that in that case, the Security Council had indeed formulated the political platform on which all international action during the last six months had been based.  On a related question about United Nations coordination in the region with other international organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the European Union, he said that Kosovo remained the United Nations primary focus in south-eastern Europe.  So while the role of the Council in establishing the framework of the political negotiations in the region should not be diminished, at the same time it was felt that the European Union should lead the political negotiations in Macedonia, with further political assistance provided by NATO.  That organization should also assist with the situation in Southern Serbia.  All this was an example of a situation in which the roles of international actors had been pretty well defined, he added.  Indeed, it was better to have one organization in the lead when international initiatives were well coordinated.

A correspondent wondered if the report presented any recommendations on the number of staff that would be needed to carry out such an ambitious programme aimed at true conflict prevention.  Mr. Turk said that the current report did not propose any numbers, mainly because the Secretariat would like to engage Member States in a very serious discussion on policy.  It was generally felt that numbers would arise easily in the context of such discussions.  However, in another forum, currently discussing the implementation of the recommendations of the Brahimi Panel’s report on peacekeeping operations, there were specific references to the establishment of a unit to assist the Executive Committee on Peace and Security. 

The report on conflict prevention, he continued, discussed the need to further develop the system of the United Nations in that regard.  He hoped that Member States would use it as a tool to help formulate policies and decide what types of increased capacity would be needed.  Prevention was one of the key purposes of the United Nations, and in order to expand its efforts it would need to have the entire organization fully behind the idea.  The report had brought together all the agencies, funds and programmes, and the task now was to engage Member States to see what kind of support they would give to move enhanced prevention initiatives forward. 

While he did not set a time frame for putting programmes in place, he said things could move rather quickly.  He hoped the report would help advance the Council’s notion of the importance of conflict prevention.  The report included some recommendations on that body’s methods of work.  He also hoped that the report would form the basis for a discussion of conflict prevention in the Assembly during its current session, with the possibility of achieving concrete decisions before the end of the calendar year.

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