Rwanda failure fuels UN peacekeeping reform

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has set up a new commission of international experts to examine UN peacekeeping operations, past and present, and make recommendations to improve them in the future.

The UN had been “propelled much faster” towards necessary reforms by recent highly-critical reports on the UN’s role during the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the 1995 fall of Srebrenica in former Yugoslavia, he told a news conference in New York on Tuesday.

The Secretary-General set out two main reasons for establishing the new commission, which will be chaired by former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi. It was “partly a question of being clearer about what we are trying to do” and “partly a question of getting the nuts and bolts right” when the UN decided to act.

He said it was not enough just to issue reports on Rwanda and Srebrenica “and leave it at that”. It was “essential” to take a critical look at past lessons and improve the structure and management of UN response. Annan recalled that the adequacy of a UN mandate, especially in light of whether or not it could protect vulnerable citizens, was keenly debated during recent Security Council discussions on deploying further military personnel to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A key issued that had been noted, said Annan, was that when some individual member states took on peacekeeping operations under multinational force arrangements, they usually went in with much larger forces than when the UN itself was involved. UN peacekeepers were often given a very low and arbitrary ceiling on troop numbers, and resources that did not always match the mandate.

The Brahimi commission would look at the quality of mandates given to UN peacekeeping operations, as well as “the sort of resources that the member states put in to back these operations”.

The commission is due to present a report by July, so that governments and other interested parties can digest it before the UN Millennium Summit in September, which is expected to help shape the future of the organisation in the new century.

“We need a clear set of recommendations on how to do better in future in the whole range of UN activities in the area of peace and security,” Annan stated.