POLITICS-UN: Annan Makes Plea for Preventive Diplomacy

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 6 1998 (IPS) - The United Nations does not do enough to prevent conflicts and has run out of excuses for inaction when wars inevitably result, says the Secretary-General of the world organisation, Kofi Annan.

Annan, speaking at the presentation Thursday of a report by the Washington-based Carnegie Commission on conflict prevention, criticised nations and the U.N. system for lacking the will and the integrated strategies needed to forestall wars.

“A Chinese proverb holds that it is difficult to find money for medicine, but easy to find it for a coffin,” Annan said. “The last decade’s intra-state and ethnic wars have made this proverb all too real for our time.

“Have we not seen enough coffins – from Rwanda to Bosnia to Cambodia – to pay the price for prevention?”

Despite past bloodbaths, “we seem never to learn…time and again, warning signs are ignored and pleas for help not heard. Only when it is too late do we value prevention,” Ann added

The U.N. chief’s assessment was shared by the Carnegie Commission, which formally presented its report, “Preventing Deadly Conflict” at a joint forum held at the United Nations. The 16 members of the commission, funded by the Carnegie Corporation, a New York-based charity, urged governments to conduct the first serious review of preventive measures since the United Nations’ founding.

“The international community has not had a fundamental debate about the first principles of peace and security since the gathering in San Francisco in 1945” which gave rise to the United Nations, noted Cyrus Vance, former U.S. Secretary of State and co- chairman of the commission. “The time is at hand to raise the agenda and undertake another debate about these issues.”

Since completing the report in December, the commissioners have urged the United Nations to take several specific steps to prevent conflicts, including greater use of diplomatic ‘good offices’ and gathering of friendly nations to respond to developing crises.

By launching the report at the United Nations, the group now also intends to push for greater U.N. response capabilities. Among them, said Jane Holl, the commission’s executive director, is the need to provide the world body with a rapid reaction force, comprising some 5,000 to 10,000 troops, which could be deployed to worsening situations before they explode.

Annan has been urging nations to help build up such a force, which he contended is essential to avoiding a repeat of the international inaction during the first months of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. “Have we not heard (former Rwanda peacekeeping commander) Gen. (Romeo) Dallaire say that 5,000 peacekeepers could have saved 500,000 lives in Rwanda?” the secretary-general argued.

The commission also asks Annan to convene regular meetings of the heads of regional organisations, such as the Organisation of African Unity and Organisation of American States, to discuss potential violence in each region and preventive strategies. The U.N. system should improve its overall early warning and human rights networks, the report adds.

Holl said that part of the revamping of the U.N. system will have to include an exploration of the current implementation of sanctions, by targetting them more clearly on leaders who incite violence.

In many recent conflicts, she noted, “sanctions often affect innocents.” Instead, the Carnegie report asserts that targeted sanctions “offer a way to focus the penalty more directly on those most responsible for the crisis . Such targeted sanctions include freezing leaders’ personal assets or denying them access to hard currency.”

Following criticism of U.N. embargoes in Libya, Iraq and the recently-ended sanctions on the former Yugoslavia, the U.N. Security Council has begun in recent months to consider such narrowly focused sanctions. Last year, the Council approved the freezing of the overseas assets of the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and also briefly cut off air travel to Iraq’s leadership.

Those actions underscore what Holl says is a major lesson of preventive diplomacy: “There are no leaderless fights.”

Annan told the commission Thursday that the United Nations is already following much of the course the report suggests. U.N. troops have performed preventive deployment tasks in Macedonia, while U.N. good offices have been set up or renewed over the past year in Cyprus, East Timor, Western Sahara, Afghanistan and central Africa, Annan said.

Much of the focus on preventive diplomacy comes at a time when traditional U.N. peacekeeping – fallen into disfavour since the catastrophic Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda operations of the early 1990s – is in decline. The Security Council has authorised only small new operations in recent years, while the number of U.N. troops worldwide has shrunk from a peak of more than 70,000 in 1993 to fewer than 20,000 today.

Former U.N. Under-Secretary-General Brian Urquhart, who is also one of the commissioners, sees the shift from peacekeeping to prevention as a temporary lull at a time when there are fewer severe conflicts.

“At the moment, peacekeeping seems to be on the back burner,” Urquhart said. “But I don’t think that means the Security Council and secretary-general are not still thinking of keeping the organisation reasonably well-prepared to deal with such situations in the future.”

The worry, he added, is that if support for peacekeeping declines, it could create a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in which the United Nations lacks the resources to perform peacekeeping tasks adequately if new crises erupt.