UN defends its record

A senior UN official has rejected as "uninformed work" a human rights group's report on Angola that accused the United Nations of failing to avert renewed civil war in the country. "If I am to believe the news reports I have seen on it (the report, it would seem that there is a misunderstanding of what UN peacekeeping is about," the official told IRIN on Wednesday in an interview by telephone from New York. "Peacekeeping is based on consent and cooperation, if the parties don't want (peace) it doesn't work." New York-based Human Rights Watch issued a 205-page report on Monday in which it accused the United Nations of turning a blind eye towards breaches of the 1994 Lusaka peace accords by both sides, which eventually eroded confidence in the peace process. "The public record and the reports by the Secretary-General to the Security Council clearly shows that this was not the case," the UN source familiar with the Angolan mission said. "The violations of the Lusaka Protocol were reported and we said that(the rebel movement) UNITA bears primary responsibility for what happened, although the government didn't do all that it could have done." He added that the supervision of the Lusaka agreement was the responsibility of a Joint Commission comprising the Angolan government, UNITA, the UN Special Representative and representatives of the observer states - Portugal, Russia and the United States. "No blind eye was turned, as every issue was raised by one side or another," the official said. "But when parties to a peace agreement decide not to abide by it and go to war, no peacekeeping operation can stop them," the official at UN headquarters stressed.