Secretary-General wants bigger Security Council role in peacekeeping

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday expressed regret at the UN Security Council’s increasing tendency to leave peacekeeping to regional bodies. “It is ... unfortunate that in recent years the Security Council has been reluctant to authorize new United Nations peacekeeping operations, and has often left regional or subregional organizations to struggle with local conflicts on their own,” Annan said. “That puts an unfair burden on the organizations in question,” he noted in an address he gave at Georgetown University in Washington on receiving the Jit Trainor Award for Distinction in the Conduct of Democracy. “It is also a waste of expertise in peacekeeping which the United Nations has developed over the years.” While the United Nations has been developing “a sound infrastructure for directing and supporting peacekeeping operations”, he said, the number of UN peacekeepers has been shrinking: from nearly 80,000 in 1994 to just 14,000 in 1998. At the same time, local powers and regional organisations in Africa, for example, are “turning more and more to the United Nations for help”. “We must not dismantle the capacity to provide that help,” a UN press release quoted him as saying. Citing the DRC as an example of the need for international assistance for regional bodies, he said: “You only have to list the countries which make up a “regional force” in the (DRC), for instance, to realize that many of them are already involved in the hostilities on one side or the other.” Experience has shown that “peacekeeping is best done by people outside the region, who are more easily accepted as truly detached and impartial”, he added. The United Nations, he continued, “must be prepared for a conclusion which many African leaders have already reached: that if a peacekeeping force is required in the Congo, the United Nations would probably have to be involved”. However, “...no force can be deployed unless it is given sufficient strength and firepower to carry out its assignment, and assured of the full backing of the Security Council when it has to use that power.”