Annan report stresses “culture of conflict prevention”

Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette on Thursday emphasised the need to make conflict prevention a central pillar of the international security system, in a follow-up to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s 7 June report to the UN Security Council, the first ever on the issue. “If this report has one message, it is that we must intensify our efforts to move from a culture of reaction to one of prevention,” she said, echoing the message of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the subject. “The international community has a moral responsibility to ensure that vulnerable peoples are protected. On two occasions at least, in the recent past - in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia - we failed to live up to this responsibility,” she added. Preventive strategies were not easy to implement, and the costs of prevention had to be paid in the present while its intangible benefits lay in the future, she said. Yet, Kofi Annan’s report on conflict prevention clearly demonstrated that conflict prevention was the most desirable and cost-effective approach for promoting a just and peaceful international order, Frechette added. She cited a study by the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict in the US, the international community spent about $200 billion on the seven major interventions of the 1990s: in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, the Persian Gulf, Cambodia and El Salvador, exclusive of Kosovo and East Timor. And such calculations did not, she added, reflect the human costs of war - death, injury, destruction, displacement - and their repercussions for families, communities, local and national institutions and economies, and neighbouring countries. “The question remained: Why is effective conflict prevention still so seldom practised, and why do we so often fail when there is a clear potential for a preventive strategy to succeed?” she stated. Past experience offered two main answers to this question, according to Frechette. First, if the government concerned in a given situation refused to admit that there was a problem which could lead to violent conflict, and rejected offers of assistance, then there was very little outside actors, including the UN, could do. Second, “the international community, including the Security Council and the member states of the UN, all too often lacks the political will to take effective action in time,” Frechette added. But such attitudes alone were not the only obstacle to effective preventive action; no less significant were the ways in which nation states defined their national interest in any given crisis, according to Frechette. “As the world has changed in profound ways since the end of the Cold War, our conceptions of national interest have failed to follow suit,” she said. She argued that a new, more widely conceived definition of national interest would induce UN member states to find far greater unity in the pursuit of fundamental goals, including peace. As Kofi Annan had stressed, “in a growing number of challenges facing humanity, the collective interest is the national interest”, Frechette added. The UN Under-Secretary-General outlined Kofi Annan’s proposals on a number of means by which the Security Council could help identify and capitalise on windows of opportunity for preventive action. One was the practice, which Annan said he intended to initiate, of providing periodic regional or sub-regional reports to the Council on disputes with a potential to threaten international peace and security. Another was the proposition that the Council establishing new mechanisms, such as an ‘ad hoc’ informal working group or some other informal technical arrangement, for discussing prevention cases in a more sustained and structured way. Annan suggested that the Council may also wish to consider sending fact-finding missions with multidisciplinary expert support to potential conflict areas, with the aim of working out comprehensive prevention strategies. As to the preventive role of the UN Secretary-General’s office, Annan considered that it could be enhanced by increasing the use of inter-disciplinary fact-finding and confidence-building missions to volatile areas, and by developing regional prevention strategies with regional partners and relevant UN agencies. He also suggested establishing an informal network of eminent persons; and improving the capacity and resource base for preventive action in the UN Secretariat. [for Kofi Annan’s Report on the Prevention of Armed Conflict, go to: http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/reports/2001/sgrep01.htmon] Drawing on those lessons learned from past experiences, and failures - especially from the Brahimi report of August 2000, which advocated a dramatic overhaul of the psychology and methodology behind UN peacekeeping - Frechette proposed 10 principles that should guide the UN’s future approach to conflict prevention. [The Brahimi panel, chaired by former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, reaffirmed commitment to the principles of the UN Charter but advocated a re-examination of the concept of impartiality and its role in peace operations.] The 10 new proposals suggested by Frechette included: · That conflict prevention was one of the primary obligations of UN member states, and that UN efforts in conflict prevention must be in conformity with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. · That conflict prevention must begin with national governments and local actors; otherwise it was unlikely to succeed. They had primary responsibility, with the UN and international community supporting their efforts and assisting them in building national capacities. · The most useful instruments of prevention were those described in Chapter VI of the Charter, which deals with the peaceful settlement of disputes. Measures under Chapter VII were normally taken only after a conflict has broken out - though they may still have a preventive effect by deterring other potential conflicts. There may also be cases where certain measures under Chapter VII, such as economic sanctions, could be used preventively. · Preventive action should be initiated as early as possible. The sooner a dispute or problem which might lead to conflict could be identified and addressed successfully, the less likely it was that it would deteriorate into violent conflict. · The primary focus of prevention should be the multi-dimensional root causes of conflict. The proximate [immediate] cause of conflict may be an outbreak of public disorder or a protest over a particular incident, but the root causes were more likely to be found in socio-economic inequities, systematic ethnic discrimination, denial of human rights, disputes over political participation, or long-standing grievances over the allocation of land, water and other resources. · An effective preventive strategy required a comprehensive approach that encompassed both short-term and long-term political, developmental, humanitarian and human rights programmes. · Conflict prevention and sustainable development reinforced each other. An investment in prevention should be seen as a simultaneous investment in sustainable development, since it was obvious that the latter was more likely to happen in a peaceful environment. · There was a case for looking at UN development programmes and activities from a conflict-prevention perspective. This, in turn, required greater coherence and coordination in the UN system, with a specific focus on conflict prevention. · The UN was not the only actor in prevention, and may not always be the actor best suited to take the lead. Member States, international and regional organisations, the private sector, non-governmental organisations, and other civil society actors also have very important roles to play. · Effective preventive action by the UN required sustained political will on the part of member states. This included a readiness to provide the UN system with the necessary political support and resources for undertaking effective preventive action and developing its institutional capacity in this field. In her briefing to the Security Council on Thursday, 21 June, Frechette also singled out the need for UN member states to follow up on high-level conflict prevention and peace-building meetings between the UN and regional organisations, and to provide increased resources for the development of regional capacities in these two fields. She also emphasised the need for donor countries to increase the flow of official development assistance which, she said, had dropped to alarmingly low levels in recent years. “Development assistance cannot by itself prevent or end conflict, but it does facilitate the creation of opportunities and the political, economic and social environment within which national actors can build a peaceful, equitable and just society,” she added. Frechette stressed that effective conflict prevention required action beyond what was recommended in Kofi Annan’s report, and beyond any institutional mechanism the UN may establish. The message was clear, she added: governments which peacefully resolve a situation that might deteriorate into a violent conflict, and call for preventive assistance as soon as it is needed, provide the best protection for their citizens against unwelcome outside interference. Used in this way, international preventive action could significantly strengthen the capacity of states to preserve and exercise their national sovereignty, Frechette added.