United Kingdom, 1999

It is just over half a

century since the then British Prime Minister, Clement

Attlee, presented the Charter of the United Nations to our

Parliament. He told our Parliament:

“We are seeking not merely good relations

between nations but between the human beings

within nations”.

The concept he saw expressed in the Charter of the United

Nations was revolutionary. That responsibility for the

security, freedom and development of people does not

belong solely to each State acting individually, but to all

nations of the world acting as a united body.

Over the past 50 years, the United Nations has done

much to discharge that responsibility. The United Nations

and its agencies have led programmes around the world that

have released the potential of individual human beings on

every continent. We have helped double the literacy rate

among women in developing countries. We have helped

immunize 80 per cent of the world's children against some

of the most lethal diseases. We have established the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the benchmark

for freedom for individuals. And this General Assembly

played a leading role in insisting on equal democratic

rights, regardless of race, and in forcing an end to

apartheid. Today the United Nations provides shelter and

sanctuary to refugees in every corner of the world.

As we meet this week, United Nations agencies

provide homes, food, welfare, health and education to 19

million refugees — more than the population of most

Member States. We should take pride in these

achievements, because it will help give us the confidence

to tackle the challenges that remain.

But we must also be frank about where we have

failed. We have failed to deliver peace to many of the

peoples of the world. We have not realized the vision of

our founders, of nations and peoples within them living

in peace with each other. We have averted world war. But

we have not averted a world with too much war.

That is why I want to support the excellent opening

address by our Secretary-General by focusing my remarks

also on what we must do if we are to replace failure to

halt war with success in preventing conflict. The

harrowing scenes we have witnessed this past year from

Kosovo, from Sierra Leone, from East Timor and too

many other places underline the urgency of improving our

performance in preventing conflicts and also in stopping

them once they have started.

I propose five priority areas for action. First, we

must tackle the root causes of conflict, starting with the

poverty that breeds it. War is becoming a poor man's

burden. In the modern world, wealthy nations no longer

experience the trauma of conflict on their soil. The

soundest basis for peace is prosperity, and the best way

we can prevent conflict is by promoting sustainable

development. The forthcoming Millennium Assembly

must make a reality of the commitment to halving the

proportion of people in extreme poverty and reducing the

number of nations in heavy debt.

Secondly, we must promote human rights and good

governance. Development of a nation will be more rapid

where people have the right to develop their full potential.

Conflict is more likely where governments rule without

the consent of their people.

Thirdly, we must curb the supply of weapons that

fuel conflict. For decades, the United Nations, rightly, has

focused on halting the spread of weapons of mass

destruction. Yet in truth, in those same decades, the

weapons that have killed masses in conflicts have been

the most common of small arms. In Friday's debate in the

Security Council, we will have the opportunity to take

forward action to halt the illegal trade in small arms, to

promote regional moratoriums on small arms and to limit

arsenals of military firearms to legitimate Government

agencies.

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Fourthly, we must stop the illegal trade in diamonds

and other precious commodities which pay for the small

arms — and all too often the mercenaries — which sustain

conflict. The markets for these commodities, especially the

market in diamonds, are small and tightly located in a few

centres. We must encourage cooperation with those who

manage those markets to cut off the supply of funds to

those who are promoting conflict.

Lastly, I strongly endorse the view expressed by our

Secretary-General this morning that we must counter the

culture of impunity. Those who break international

humanitarian law, from Kosovo to East Timor, must know

that they will be held to account by the international

community.

The international criminal tribunals have shown what

can be done. We must build on their work by getting a

permanent international criminal court up and running with

all speed.

But we will not always succeed in preventing conflict.

We need, therefore, to be better equipped to restore peace

when war breaks out. As my Prime Minister, Tony Blair,

said in Chicago earlier this year, working out the conditions

and identifying the circumstances when it is right in the

modern world to intervene is the most pressing problem in

foreign policy today. His speech demonstrated that Britain

is anxious to play its full part in that debate. Our starting

point is that our common interest in preserving the world

from major conflict is greater than our individual interests

as nations.

Globalization is the long and rather ugly term which

is used to describe how in today’s world we are

interdependent with each other rather than independent of

each other. We are bound together by our strengthening

links in trade and investment, in travel and communication.

What happens in one country can have a direct impact on

the prosperity and the security — even the climate — of

countries on the other side of the world.

And we are also bound together by the consequences

of conflict. In Britain 90 per cent of the heroin on the

streets of our big cities is grown in Afghanistan under

cover of the generation-long conflict in that land. In central

Africa, the upheavals of population sparked by the mass

genocide in Rwanda have destabilized the region and

caught up half a dozen countries in the conflicts that have

ensued. Across the countries of Europe there are now

several hundred thousands of citizens of the former

Yugoslavia who have fled to seek sanctuary from the

repeated conflicts there. Just as few nations can stand

alone in the modern world, there are now few major

conflicts which remain only an internal matter with no

impact on the rest of the world.

If we are to respond adequately when conflict

breaks out, then the United Nations needs to develop

three strengths — credibility, consensus and capacity.

If the United Nations is to have the credibility to

press the parties to a conflict to a solution, it must be

more representative of the modern world. A small

increase in the size of the Security Council would be a

modest price to pay for the big increase in its credibility

which would come from a more representative permanent

membership.

But greater credibility would be pointless without

consensus on when the authority of the United Nations

should be invoked. Intervention must always be a last

resort. We can all agree that the first responsibility for

reconciling internal conflict rests with the State in which

that conflict arises. But we also have a shared

responsibility to act when we are confronted with

genocide, mass displacement of people or major breaches

of humanitarian law. To know that such atrocities are

being committed and not to act against them is to make

us complicit in them. And to be passive in the face of

such events is to make it more likely that they will be

repeated.

Credibility, though, also requires us to demonstrate

not just the consensus, but also the capacity, to act. We

often hear demands that the United Nations should do

something. Let us be honest — the United Nations is

nothing more than the aggregate of its Member States.

The United Nations cannot do something except when we,

its Member States, are prepared to provide the means.

We need to ensure that the United Nations has a

sound financial base, which requires all of us to meet our

assessed contributions in full, on time. But we must also

ensure that when peacekeeping forces are required, they

are made available. Britain has signed a standby

agreement earmarking forces we are prepared in principle

to provide for emergency peacekeeping work. Such

agreements enable the United Nations to plan for

emergencies with greater confidence that we can rapidly

put in the field the right skills, with the necessary

equipment. A score of other Member States have signed

similar agreements. The more of us that do so, the greater

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will be the capacity of the United Nations in brokering a

basis for peacekeeping deployment.

But in Kosovo we discovered that it was less difficult

to put together an armed force to end the military violence

than to assemble a United Nations police force to keep civil

order. Today, therefore, I can announce that Britain will

follow up our standby agreement with the United Nations

on troops with a similar agreement increasing the number

of United Kingdom police officers available for United

Nations troops. This will include a commitment to a rapid

response squad, ready for deployment at short notice when

it is urgently needed. We shall also be establishing with the

United Nations a flagship training course in Britain to train

police from around the world to play their part in our joint

missions.

I am conscious that the agenda I have set out is an

ambitious one. But, in all humility, I have to say that it is

less ambitious than the visionary programme set out half a

century ago by the founders of the United Nations. As our

Secretary-General said earlier this year, unless we can unite

around the aim of confronting massive human rights

violations, against crimes against humanity, then we will

betray the very ideals of our founders.

In the modern world in which we live — the modern

world of satellite communications — we know instantly

when such violations are taking place. We have the

resources and the mobility to move our assets quickly in an

emergency. Modern technology has made all of us each

other’s neighbours. We now need to match that technology

with an international doctrine that also reflects the modern

world. And it must be founded on the clear principle that

the only war we agree to wage is one in which our nations

are united in combating conflict.