54th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations
Address by H.E. Mr. Robin Cook
Foreign Secretary of Britain
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I want to focus my remarks today 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 in stopping them when they have started.
I propose five priority areas for action. [...]
Lastly, we must counter the culture of impunity. Those who break international humanitarian law, from Kosovo to East Timor, must know they will be held to account. 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. [...]
Following the whole Statement
Mr President,
Just over half a century ago, the then British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, presented the Charter of the United Nations to Parliament. He told the House of Commons:
'We are seeking not merely good relations between nations but between the human beings within nations.'
The concept which gave rise to 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 the nations of the world acting as a united body.
Over the past fifty years, the UN has done much to discharge that responsibility.
The UN and its agencies have led programmes around the world that have released the potential of individual human beings in every continent. They have helped double the literacy rate among women in developing countries. They have helped immunise 80% of the world's children against some of the most lethal diseases.
The UN has established the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the benchmark for the freedoms of individuals. And this General Assembly has played a leading role in insisting on equal democratic rights regardless of race and forcing an end to apartheid.
The UN has provided shelter and sanctuary to refugees in every corner of the world. As we meet this week, UN 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 realised the vision of our founders - of nations and the peoples within them living in peace with each other. We have averted world war. But we have not avoided a world with too much war.
That is why I want to focus my remarks today 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 in stopping them when they have started.
I propose five priority areas for action.
First, we must tackle the root causes of conflicts, 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 base for peace is prosperity and the best way we can prevent conflict is to promote 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 will be more likely where governments rule against the consent of their people.
Thirdly, we must curb the supply of weapons that fuel conflict. For decades, the UN, rightly, has focussed on halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Yet in the same decades, the weapons that have killed masses in conflicts have been the most common small arms. In Friday's debate in the Security Council, we have the opportunity to take forward action to halt the illegal trade in small arms, to promote regional moratoriums on them and to limit arsenals of military firearms to the official agencies of legitimate governments.
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 conflicts. Many of the markets for these commodities, especially in diamonds, are small and tightly located in a few centres. We must encourage cooperation with those who manage these markets to cut off the supply of funds to those who are promoting conflict.
Lastly, we must counter the culture of impunity. Those who break international humanitarian law, from Kosovo to East Timor, must know they will be held to account. 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 our 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.
Globalisation is the common term 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 deepening links in trade and investment, in travel and communication.
What happens in one country can have a direct impact on the prosperity, the security and even the climate of countries on the other side of the world.
And we are bound together by the consequences of conflict:
* In Britain, 90% 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 destabilised 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 thousand citizens of the Former Yugoslavia who have fled to seek sanctuary from repeated conflicts there.
Just as few nations can stand alone in the modern world, there are few major conflicts which remain only an internal matter with no impact on the rest of the world.
If we are to respond satisfactorily when conflict breaks out, then the UN needs to develop three strengths Credibility, Consensus and Capacity.
If the UN is to have the credibility to press the parties to 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 that would come from a more representative permanent membership.
But greater credibility will be pointless without consensus on when the authority of the UN should be invoked. Intervention must always be the 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 confronted with genocide, mass displacement of people or major breaches of international 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 they will be repeated.
But credibility will also require us to demonstrate not just the consensus, but also the capacity to act. We often hear demands that the UN should do something. Let us be honest. The UN is nothing more than the aggregate of its member states. The UN cannot do something except when we, its member states, are prepared to provide the means.
Britain has signed a Standby Agreement earmarking forces we are prepared in principle to provide for emergency peacekeeping work. Such agreements enable the UN to plan for emergencies, with greater confidence that it can rapidly put in the field the right skills with the necessary equipment. A score of other countries have signed up to similar agreements, and the more of us who do so the greater will be the capacity of the UN in brokering a basis for peacekeeping deployment.
But in Kosovo, we have discovered that it was less difficult to put together an armed force to end the military violence than it was to assemble a UN police force to keep civil order. Today, therefore, I can announce that Britain will follow up our Standby Agreement with the UN on troops, with a similar agreement increasing the number of UK police officers available for UN operations. 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 UN a flagship training course in Britain to train police from around the world to play their part in UN missions.
Mr President. The agenda I have set out is an ambitious one. But it is much less ambitious than the visionary programme set out half a century ago by the founders of the UN. As our Secretary General said earlier this year, unless we can unite around the aim of confronting massive human rights violations and crimes against humanity then we will betray the very ideals of those founders.
In 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 to an emergency. Modern technology has made all of us each other's neighbours. We need to match that technology with an international doctrine that also reflects the modern world. And it should be founded on the principle that the only war we agree to wage is one in which our nations are united in combating conflict.
