United Kingdom, 2000

I am conscious that

the central problem for all of us when we rise to speak

to the General Assembly is that there are too many

issues of concern to hope to address them all in one

speech. There is no shortage of challenges to the

United Nations as we meet for the first time in a new

century to debate the issues of a modern world.

It is a world united by the new technologies of

communication. We have never had so much

opportunity to share the know-how for economic

growth. Yet our world has never before been so divided

between rich and poor. In the year ahead, we must

make sure that all the United Nations agencies and its

international financial institutions work together in a

coordinated way to promote development and to reduce

debt.

It is also a world bound together by growth in

trade between our countries. But we failed at Seattle to

make further progress on removing the obstacles to that

trade. In the year ahead, we must launch a world trade

development round which is fair to those countries

whose main exports are agricultural rather than

industrial.

It is a world which faces a common threat to its

global climate. We are each learning the alarming rate

at which that climate is changing as the result of our

own actions. Before the end of the year, we must try to

reach agreement at the sixth Conference of the Parties

to the United Nations Framework Convention on

Climate Change to bring into effect the Kyoto

measures to stabilize climate change.

Each of these is an important challenge. Each of

them is a strategic priority for our work programme for

the coming year. This morning, though, I wish to focus

my remarks on the central theme of the Millennium

Summit and of this fifty-fifth session of the General

Assembly.

How do we equip the United Nations with the

capacity in peacekeeping that matches the real

demands for it around our world?

In his opening address, the Secretary-General

invited us to give a swift response to the Brahimi

report on peacekeeping (A/55/305). The United

Kingdom is happy to respond to that invitation by

offering our support for the report's conclusions and

pledging our commitment to its implementation. The

report begins by reminding us that the United Nations

was founded, in the words of its Charter, to save

succeeding generations from the scourge of war'. Too

often, though, we have failed to save those who needed

our protection from the suffering, the pain and the

terror of brutal conflict. We must be frank in facing up

to those failures if we are to learn their lessons. And

we must be determined to improve the capacity of this

Organization to keep the peace if we are to succeed in

the future.

I want to set out six tasks which we must address

if we are not to repeat past failures. First, we must

equip the United Nations with a more effective and

more rapid capacity for peacekeeping. In the space of

about one year, the number of troops on United Nations

peacekeeping missions around the globe has trebled.

The United Kingdom has forces operating in eight

different theatres where peacekeeping has been

authorized by the United Nations.

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But it is not the new size of our peacekeeping

effort that demands changes. It is the different

character of the peacekeeping challenge. It used to be

the case that United Nations forces were typically

deployed to observe a ceasefire between two States

both of which wanted to end the fighting. Today, our

peacekeepers are typically deployed within States, not

between them, and often where one or more parties to

the conflict is not seriously committed to peace. In

those circumstances, United Nations peacekeepers need

a robust mandate. As the Brahimi report puts it, where

one side is violating a peace agreement, treating both

sides equally can amount to complicity with evil.

United Nations peacekeepers who witness violence

against civilians should be presumed to be mandated to

halt it.

But if those peacekeepers are to act with

determination, then we must equip them with the

capacity to do so. The United Nations needs a

Headquarters unit capable of rapid deployment within a

few weeks, not a few months, of a Security Council

resolution. And each of us must develop the number of

troops who are trained in the principles and practice of

peacekeeping whom we can commit to the United

Nations. That is why the United Kingdom has proposed

a permanent staff college for United Nations

peacekeeping. The United Kingdom has offered to host

such a resource for United Nations peacekeeping, if

that is welcome to other members of the General

Assembly.

The second task is to be more rapid and more

imaginative in tackling tension before it results in

conflict. By definition, any mission to restore peace is

an admission of failure to prevent conflict. As well as

coping with the consequences of conflict, we need to

address the root causes of conflict: poverty, bad

governance and the denial of freedom or of minority

rights. I welcome the Secretary-General's intention to

submit a report on conflict prevention early next year.

It will be a natural companion to the Brahimi report. I

hope it can enable us to develop an early warning

system which will alert us to potential conflict and give

our agencies the chance to offer help before it becomes

a real conflict.

Too often, internal conflict is fuelled by the

external demand for the illicit trade in diamonds or the

evil trade in drugs. Measures to ban conflict diamonds

from international sale or to defeat the drugs barons

must be key elements of any comprehensive strategy of

conflict prevention.

The third task is to take tighter control of the

flows of arms which supply conflict. As an

international community, we have put much effort into

controlling weapons of mass destruction. The good

progress we all made at the Review Conference of the

States Parties to the Treaty on the Treaty on the Non-

Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) underlines the

importance which each of us attaches to this strategic

issue. The United Kingdom has ratified the

Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, has reduced

by half its planned strategic nuclear warheads, and has

supplied greater transparency on our nuclear arsenal.

Yet, over the past decade, the true weapons of

mass destruction have been small arms, which have

killed 5 million people in conflicts around the globe.

Overwhelmingly, those killed were civilians rather than

soldiers. And, overwhelmingly, they were killed in

countries which do not manufacture firearms. We must

make a success next year of the United Nations

Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and

Light Weapons in all its Aspects. We need to reach

agreement to mark firearms at the point of production

so that they can be traced. The United Kingdom would

support at that conference the presumption that military

firearms should not be licensed for sale other than to

legitimate Government bodies. And we must seek the

help of the international economic agencies, including

the World Bank, to fund and to reward with

development aid the surrender of firearms.

The fourth task is to provide the United Nations

with the civilian resources to promote reconciliation

and reconstruction. In Kosovo, and again now in East

Timor, we have learned that the end of conflict is only

the starting point. When the troops have brought peace,

we need judges and administrators to bring justice and

development. The peacekeepers must be followed by

peace-builders. In particular, we need to muster the

civilian police who can establish law and order in place

of violence and conflict. I was astonished to read in the

Brahimi report that this mighty international

organization has only nine civilian police on its

Headquarters staff, administering 8,600 civilian police

in the field around the world. I am confident that every

one of them is the very best, in keeping with the

tradition of United Nations staff. But if we are serious

about succeeding on the ground, we need a more

serious back-up at the centre. Four times in the past

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decade, the United Nations has been called upon to

undertake a transitional civilian administration. We

need a better, permanent, capacity here at the centre to

support our operations in the field.

The fifth task is to enforce the international law

on crimes against humanity. If we are to have

international justice, we must have an international

court. The United Kingdom has given strong support to

the International Criminal Court, and we have just

published our draft legislation to ratify the treaty

setting up such a Court. The International Criminal

Court will send a strong warning to any future tyrants

that they will be called to account for their crimes

before the bar of international justice. It will be one of

the most powerful advances for human rights since we

agreed 50 years ago to the Universal Declaration of

Human Rights.

And finally, we must strengthen the authority of

the United Nations. In 50 years, there has been no new

permanent member of the Security Council. The

Security Council needs to represent the world as it is in

this century, not the world as it was in the middle of the

last century. It needs to be made representative of the

100 or more countries that have joined as Members

since the Security Council was set up. The United

Kingdom supports a doubling of the permanent

membership to include Germany, Japan and three

countries from each of the continents of Asia, Africa

and Latin America. We also want more members

among those who are elected, in order that the Security

Council can be more representative of the General

Assembly.

For seven years, we have been debating this

question. It is becoming an issue of credibility for the

United Nations. How can we pretend to end conflict if

we cannot end this disagreement among ourselves? A

more representative, modern Security Council would

speak with more authority when it challenges those

who breach the peace.

I have been frank about where we must improve

our capacity for peacekeeping and strengthen our will

to halt conflict. But we should not underrate the

immense achievement of the United Nations. Our

Charter begins by recalling the untold sorrow to

mankind inflicted by two world wars. It was a Charter

written by ministers and officials determined to end

war between States. And in this they were remarkably

successful. External aggression between States is now

unusual.

But the benefits have been unevenly shared. The

industrialized nations have enjoyed half a century of

peace. That has provided the security and good order in

which their prosperity has advanced at a rate without

precedent in history. Yet, in the same half century,

people elsewhere in the globe have lived through

violence and conflict which have broken their human

rights and impoverished their standards of living. It is

largely poor countries that now experience the scourge

of war which our Charter sought to banish.

The challenge for the United Nations is to ensure

that the peace and security which have been enjoyed by

many Member States are shared by all. None of us can

prevent humanitarian catastrophe by acting alone. But

this United Nations can, if we act together.

The Brahimi report tells us what we need to do.

As an organization, we publish many reports. Nobody

could fault the capacity of the United Nations to

produce reports. But we are not always as good at

implementing them. Let us make sure that the Brahimi

report does not gather dust on library shelves but is put

into practice before we meet again next year. Let us

show the determination and the conviction that the

right in our Charter to be preserved from war is an

equal right for the people of all our nations, large and

small, rich and poor.