Can the U.N. stop the wars?

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By Robin Oakley
CNN.com European Political Editor

LONDON (CNN) -- Will the 150 world leaders assembled for the U.N. Millennium Summit indulge in anything more than back-slapping and group therapy?

Most U.N. anniversaries have the members reflecting on changes needed and what the organisation’s role should be. The last big bout of such introspection came with the U.N.’s 50th anniversary in 1995.

VIDEO CNN's Jerrold Kessel explains the pressure on Arafat Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media) Senior U.N. Correspondent Richard Roth explains the visit Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)     MESSAGE BOARD Millennium Summit     RESOURCES CNN Cold War, Historical Documents: United Nations Charter

But little has changed since then and three key European players -- France, Germany and the UK -- are hoping to use this latest jamboree to spark off a much sharper debate on re-shaping the U.N. to cope with new needs in the new century.

To legitimise decision-making they want to see:

  • The five permanent members of the UN’s Security Council -- the U.S., Russia, China, France and the UK -- expanded to include Germany, Japan and others.

  • Clear terms set out on when and how the U.N. should intervene to prevent or resolve conflicts.

  • The U.N. given the tools it needs for its escalating peace roles, including much better follow-up systems when the firing stops.

Most times the world's leaders get together to discuss the U.N. they talk in public about its high ideals and moan off-stage about excessive bureaucracy, imprecise chains of command, poor housekeeping and an excess of overlapping agencies.

The problem is that the U.N. is no better than the sum of its individual parts. Governments act in national interests, rarely to express an international concept.

At the same time they recognise that if there is a moral imperative to stop war then the U.N. is virtually the only body available to turn those impulses into reality. It is the only available strong arm for the interests of the world community.

The opening words of the U.N. charter pledge to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” And Article 42 of the Charter effectively gives the U.N. the right to make war in the name of peace.

The end of the Cold War saw a new period of optimism about the possibilities for conflict prevention and resolution. It was hoped that an ever-friendlier West and Russia, working through the U.N., could sort most situations between them.

But that optimism had evaporated by the time tensions showed between the West and Russia over Bosnia and Kosovo.

Regional conflicts have grown rather than diminished since the end of the Cold War. The whole nature of “peacekeeping” has changed. It used to be a case of moving in when two sides had fought themselves to standstill. Now it is normally a case of intervening in civil wars.

More than 30 civil wars around the world are estimated to have cost something like five million lives in the past decade. And the role changes in almost every conflict.

One expert, General Sir Michael Rose, once the commander of the U.N. force in Bosnia, has warned politicians of the difference between peace-broking, peace-keeping in the form of guarding a peace to which the formerly warring parties have agreed and enforcing peace against the will of some of the parties.

There is also no consistency about the scenarios which provoke U.N. intervention. It tends to be a case of the media acting as the sixth permanent member of the Security Council.

The U.N. goes in where a media presence has energised the world’s conscience and made it politically impossible for democratic governments to remain inactive about the suffering seen on TV.

But although people demand that “something must be done” and condemn governments which fail to support humanitarian efforts, they do not always thank them for doing so when things go wrong and the body bags start coming home.

Although there has been comparative success in Namibia, Mozambique, Cambodia and El Salvador, the record of intervention has not been an altogether happy one.

In Bosnia, the U.N. sometimes proved incapable of protecting its own personnel, let alone those they were sent in to help. In Somalia U.S. troops were ordered out, leaving their weapons to be taken over by the local warlords. Rwanda turned into a bloodbath. In Angola U.N.-monitored elections were followed by civil war.

Little wonder that a cynical diplomat once said that participation in U.N. peacekeeping initiatives had limited appeal for members, who suffered all the penalties of colonialism without the benefits. “Your soldiers die on a foreign field and you don’t even get to loot the country.”

The U.N. has acknowledged problems with its peacekeeping role, some of them identified in a report commissioned recently by Secretary General Kofi Annan from a panel chaired by Lakhdar Brahimi, Algeria’s former foreign minister.

The problem is that the U.N., asked to pick up the pieces when everybody else has failed, is expected to solve problems without having a standing army, the power to administer the areas it pacifies or dependable sources of finance.

Its decision-making is too slow and many of its members are suspicious that intervention cases are decided by an elite in the interests of that elite-the five permanent members of the Security Council.

Political sensitivities complicate the choice of who leads an operation or which nations participate. The U.N. constantly has trouble getting its members to pay their subscriptions. And the U.N. is short of administrators and police to provide the follow-up action as part-pacified nations struggle back to some kind of normality.

The British and the French have joined lately in pressing for a 60,000-strong rapid reaction force to boost the European Union’s contribution to peace-keeping efforts. They have been the two European nations most heavily involved in Kosovo and the French acknowledge that there is now “much overlapping” on the two countries’ thinking about reform of the UN’s role.

In advance of the U.N.’s Millennium Summit, the British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook set out publicly, with the support of the opposition Liberal Democrat party, his government’s plans for U.N. reform, including a clearer framework for intervention decisions and a “robust mandate” for U.N. troops. Those ideas are being given a favourable wind in Paris.

President Chirac of France has in the past called for a trained corps of U.N. diplomats to be sent into countries for conflict avoidance and he is making plain his belief too that Germany and Japan should be admitted to a Security Council widened by “some great states from the south”.

Germany’s Chancellor Schroeder has expressed his readiness for Germany to take up a permanent seat on the Security Council and called for the U.N. to prepare itself to be able to act more swiftly over threats to security or human rights.

Europe is helping to give a new impetus to U.N. reform. But the key question which seems unlikely to be resolved is whether the U.N. should have its own standing army. Some say the U.N. should have such a force permanently available to avoid inevitable delays in cobbling together multi-national contingents in time of crisis.

They argue that would be better than picking up pieces after a situation has been allowed to deteriorate and countries have been wrecked.

But many others are reluctant to see an international body set up its own independent force. They like the experience and variety their own troops get participating in U.N. operations.

They suspect empire building and they doubt the willingness of their fellow U.N. members, especially the U.N.’s chief paymaster in the shape of the U.S. to provide adequate finance for such a force.

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