United Kingdom, 1993

Mr. President, may I

first of all congratulate you on your election, and on the

dignified and effective way in which you are already

presiding over this Assembly. You have a burdensome job

and we wish you all good fortune as you discharge it.

I have sometimes heard speakers from this rostrum

patrol the world in their speeches in the general debate,

dealing at length with one continent after another. Indeed,

I have done so myself in past years. There is much to

describe: events in the Middle East and South Africa are

particularly encouraging, and developments in Russia, as we

have just heard from Mr. Kozirev, are particularly important.

But today it seems to me that in the time available, the focus

of interest should not only be on distant events or distant

tragedies, but here, in this building, on this institution.

Never has there been a time when the United Nations has

been so discussed, so misunderstood, so needed.

The international task of this decade is managing

disorder. I believe it is possible. But it demands cool

heads, low voices, and an understanding of what we can and

cannot do. It demands concertation between all countries

that take on part of the responsibility for steering the world

through channels which are certainly strewn with rocks.

This concertation takes place in many forums, but nowhere

with greater legal and political authority than here at the

United Nations.

We can now see the events of 1989 in their true

perspective. They did not usher in a new world order. I

think we have to be sober about this. What happened in

1989 was not the birth of a new world order, it was the

collapse of one super-Power and the end of communism as

a threat to world peace.

The tragedies of the world have continued. Indeed,

they have probably increased since 1989. "Tragedy" is a

better description than the usual, and overworked, term

"crisis", because "crisis" implies a threat to world peace.

Now that the cold war is over and super-Powers no longer

exert themselves on behalf of clients, it is no longer a crisis

in that sense - a threat to world peace - if Sudan, Bosnia,

Angola, Liberia, Georgia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia,

Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and others are racked by civil war.

But these are appalling tragedies for those who are killed or

driven from their homes, and indeed for all of us, because

we are all diminished when the bell tolls.

18 General Assembly - Forty-eighth session

Some of these tragedies are illuminated by the

haphazard light of television. In those cases, millions of our

citizens, in all our countries, share feelings of sympathy,

indignation and horror. But other tragedies equally foul are

played in a darkened theatre: no television, no audience,

little pressure. But all these tragedies are a reproach to those

of us who are convinced that it is possible slowly and

painstakingly to construct a more decent world.

How do we do that? Not, it is clear, by the remaining

super-Power using its superiority to impose its own solutions

by force. In the 10 tragedies that I listed, the United States

has intervened with troops only in one, Somalia - and that

now on a reduced scale and under the United Nations -

because the United States, quite rightly in my view, is not

prepared to send its troops all over the world, as Rome once

sent its legions all over Europe, to fight, to pacify and to

rule. There are British, French, Spanish and other European

troops in Bosnia today under the command of the United

Nations. But their role is to save Bosnian lives - they do

that daily - implementing United Nations decisions.

Likewise, they are not imposing a European imperium on

that country.

If America and its allies are not to exert themselves as

a joint imperial Power, imposing on other countries and

sustaining laws and rulers of their choice, then the answer

can only lie in reforming and making much better use of the

international institutions to which we belong. They were

mostly built after the Second World War for one purpose

and are now, after the end of the cold war, being hurriedly

adapted for another. The British architect Norman Foster

has just been given the responsibility of designing in Berlin

the new parliament house for a united Germany. If his plans

are accepted, he intends to include the old Reichstag

building alongside the line of the Berlin Wall in a splendid

new structure reaching across the old Wall into East Berlin.

There is a parable here for us as well as for Germany.

Inevitably, we have to cope as best we can with what

we have. A man, after all, may take some shelter in an

unfinished building. I do not believe that an international

organization like ours, which is not a colonizing Power, will

ever be able to guarantee solutions to civil wars or even to

that pernicious variant of a civil war which we see today in

Bosnia. But if there are no guarantees of success, the

United Nations can be helped greatly to improve on its

record. With greater experience, greater resources for

preventive action and effectively coordinated humanitarian

efforts, it can act before the situation gets out of control and

the demand grows for the implementation of sanctions and

for peace enforcement.

I hope that within the next few weeks the European

Community will move into a new phase of working together

on a common foreign and security policy once the Treaty of

Maastricht is ratified by all 12 member States. Our

President, Willy Claes, the Foreign Minister and Deputy

Prime Minister of Belgium, has just illustrated that point.

But one of our main aims as European partners must be to

support and strengthen the role and the work of the United

Nations, for the United Nations is not "them"; it is us, all of

us. We have to take responsibility for it and its failures.

If we want the United Nations to work better, it is up

to us to give the Secretary-General the support he needs in

thoughts, words, deeds and money. I suppose there are few

more lonely or more demanding jobs than that of the

Secretary-General of the United Nations, and the present

Secretary-General certainly has the misfortune to hold his

office in interesting times. He has already given and

continues to give a firm and effective lead. He needs and

deserves our support.

The United Nations is unique. It alone conveys the

word of the international community. Only the United

Nations has the legal powers to translate those words into

action for the maintenance of world peace. We need, as

President Clinton said yesterday, to look at tasks closely, to

ensure that they are properly defined and that the resources

are there to meet them. We may on occasion have to accept

that a mandate should not be given because in reality it

cannot be fulfilled.

Let me follow that by looking briefly at the way we

carry out peace-keeping operations, the way we deploy

preventive diplomacy and the way we run our finances.

Peace-keeping: United Nations blue-helmets are

deployed on nearly every continent. We can reel off the

statistics, but actually we hear too little of individual soldiers

and small detachments. Who knows, for example, of the

single military observer in a remote part of Cambodia who

found himself not only acting as the local arbiter of family

disputes but also providing a local, much appreciated,

medical service using a handbook called When There is No

Doctor, who kept on securing supplies from his wife in

Germany and the field hospital in Phnomh Penh for his

Khmer community? Or the United Nations military observer

who spent his leave in Bangkok fund-raising for a water

filter for a remote Cambodian village? Now, they happen to

be British, but such servants of the world come from many

countries.

Forty-eighth session - 28 September l993 19

We in Britain are committed to our peace-keeping

contribution. We now have over 3,300 men and women in

blue berets around the world.

In June the Secretary-General asked Member States to

identify for him those areas of United Nations peace-keeping

operations which needed strengthening and for our ideas on

positive steps we could take. I look forward to his report

drawing all those responses together.

Useful steps have certainly been taken. There is now

a 24-hour operations room, improving the ability of those

here in New York to oversee operations around the world.

The standby force planning project has been started. A new

Department of Peace-keeping Operations is responsible for

all United Nations field missions. We can build on these

improvements.

Good organization involves clarity and sobriety in

setting out our objectives. That means that any operation

must have clear and achievable objectives linked to a

political process which offers reasonable hope of a solution,

and to which all parties should be committed. The mandate

should be precise and finite. That means adequate support

at Headquarters for planning and reconnaissance missions.

It means that the Security Council must resist the temptation

to become involved in the detailed conduct of operations. It

means the mandate must not create impossible obligations

for a force commander on the ground. Once an operation is

agreed, command and control relationships could be more

clearly defined.

Unity of command at the highest level is essential.

Where the United Nations is charged with executing as well

as authorizing a peace-keeping operation, all aspects of it

should be handled by a single department in New York.

That is why we have suggested the creation of an expanded

planning and operations staff. This in effect is a general

staff for peace-keeping. These men and women, civilian and

military, would be able together to provide the necessary

core of the United Nations strategic-planning chain. They

would operate mainly here in New York, but also in the

field. They would provide the United Nations with the

nervous system for which its present staff is neither

structured nor resourced.

We are not proposing here some new and heavy

bureaucracy. On the contrary, we are talking about core

staff: trained staff officers, United Nations civil affairs and,

increasingly, humanitarian advisers, and chief administrative

officers. The example of the Office of the United Nations

High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), of a special

envoy for all humanitarian and refugee aspects of an

operation, is good.

Then, there must be flexibility in running peace-keeping

operations. The more comprehensive a bureaucracy

becomes, the harder it is for it to stay nimble on its feet.

Doctrinal and administrative difficulties in working with

other international organizations can be overcome. For

example, the United Nations is already building valuable

links with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in

Europe (CSCE) and with the North Atlantic Treaty

Organization (NATO). Many peace-keeping and

peacemaking operations can be run more effectively by

regional organizations or single countries on behalf of the

United Nations. That depends on the nature of the problem

and on the proposed action agreed by the United Nations.

I am thinking, for example, of the Economic Community of

West African States (ECOWAS) in Liberia, the Organization

of African Unity (OAU) in Rwanda, and the European

Community and NATO in the former Yugoslavia.

Regional organizations can also be asked to help with

training. We might look at getting certain nations with well-

trained, equipped and available forces to provide the first

wave of a peace-keeping force, allowing other nations the

time to train and equip their forces to the required standard.

A commitment to deploy early would of course need to be

matched by a United Nations commitment to agree a firm

end-date for the deployment, because exits can be as

important as entrances.

What we cannot do, we should not pretend to do. If

we play a game of bluff, we can deceive and disappoint

others, and sometimes we deceive and disappoint ourselves.

Rarely can we attain our ends that way. It is empty to

pretend that we can impose peace with justice on every

disorder, every dispute, outside our national borders.

But what the United Nations can do, it should do well.

Cambodia, for example, is a success story. So was Namibia.

Our peace-keepers have been able to limit, though not stop,

conflict and to assuage, though not bring to and end,

suffering in Bosnia and Somalia. But the authority of the

United Nations will suffer if it fails to approach new

challenges realistically and flexibly.

However important peace-keeping may be, successful

preventive diplomacy would be better. I have just been

reading the book published this week by our Australian

colleague, the Australian Foreign Minister, Senator Gareth

Evans. His new book, Cooperating for Peace, brings this

point out well and is full of fruitful ideas. Defusing trouble

20 General Assembly - Forty-eighth session

costs a great deal less than a military operation. You can

field plenty of emissaries for the price of a battalion. But to

be useful, of course, an emissary has to set about his work

before the excitement of violence has taken hold.

The Secretary-General has been energetic here. He has

sent missions to several areas of tension - to Tajikistan and

other regions of the former Soviet Union, to Macedonia, to

South Africa and elsewhere.

But in this as in other parts of the United Nations

system money is tight. Many missions create an acute need

for additional international staff with the necessary skills. I

am thinking not just of eminent people, of retired ministers

or distinguished ambassadors who can head such missions.

The Secretary-General will find them when he needs them.

What he needs from Member States is personnel at a more

junior level with local experience and negotiating skills.

Now, we have discussed this problem in particular with

the French Government, and as an Anglo-French initiative

we stand ready to provide the Secretariat with a list of such

people, people who have experience in Government service -

sometimes outside Government service - and whom we

would be prepared to make available for particular missions.

We would also be prepared to provide a certain amount of

equipment where personnel provided by the United Kingdom

were involved. We are ready to respond to the invitation of

the Secretary-General in "Agenda for Peace" to provide

information crucial to the task of preventive diplomacy. The

British and French Governments are both committed to

support him in this way, and we hope that others may join

in a similar enterprise.

All this work means a financial burden. Of course we

should all pay our assessed contribution in full and promptly.

We do so. So do most of our European partners, the Nordic

countries and those with a long tradition of peace-keeping

like Australia and Canada. But others, not entirely or

always through their own fault, others who share the heavy

burden of international responsibility, do not.

The fact is, the United Nations will always be short

of money. Even if everybody pays up in full and on time,

the United Nations will still have to choose priorities within

the resources available to it. That means - and will always

mean - turning down some good causes, and reappraising

and sometimes bringing to an end existing commitments.

The United Nations needs to conduct a rigorous

scrutiny of what it needs and what it spends. Obviously, it

would be able to afford more operations if it ran the existing

ones more economically. Without thrift, without financial

probity, the authority of the United Nations will weaken and

vanish. So we welcome the Secretary-General’s recent

additional senior appointments at the level of Assistant

Secretary-General, covering administrative and financial

affairs. We support proposals for a system of inspection

with teeth, which can match more delegated financial

authority to the field.

I mention these three areas - peace-keeping, preventive

diplomacy and finance. If we can tackle these three areas

constructively and vigorously, there is no reason why even

under present strains the authority of the United Nations

should not grow as strikingly as the burden of expectations

now placed upon it. People will always continue to turn to

the United Nations, even if they will always expect more of

us than is conceivable.

We are discussing, in that context, reform, and we in

Britain welcome the debate on Security Council reform. We

are discussing positively the enlargement of the Council.

This will be complex, as our debate already makes clear,

because there are many currents and cross-currents of view.

I do not doubt that if there were to be consensus on

enlarging the Security Council there are some countries

which, because of their global interests, their contribution to

international security, their contribution to United Nations

peace-keeping, could undertake the full range of

responsibilities of a permanent member and can certainly be

expected to do so.

I have concentrated simply on this Organization for the

reason which I gave. Few tasks are more important than

improving the way the United Nations works if we are to

secure a more stable world. We have lived through the

events of these last few years. They have been dramatic and

exhilarating, they have changed the political and strategic

landscape, but they have not removed from us our

responsibility to work constructively for a better United

Nations. This better world order will not happen because we

make a few speeches or pass a few resolutions. It will be

constructed steadily, brick by brick, learning always the right

lessons from the past, developing steadily our international

institutions and our international relations.

It is fair to say that in the last four years, with its ups

and downs, we have come a long way, and I believe that,

together, we have the will and the wisdom to continue along

that road.