Ladies and Gentlemen.

And thank you, in particular, to the Swedish Government, and the other partners in the Challenges project, for this initiative. And to our British hosts.

This being the centenary year of Dag Hammarskjold, I wanted to say a few words of special recognition to him, and to Sweden .

It is to Hammarskjold, and to the Swedish government, that we owe the idea and the reality of active peacekeeping.

That idea, in the service of which Hammarskjold lost his life, started with a relatively limited goal in mind.

Hammarskjold's immediate aim, in 1956 and 1957, was to facilitate the withdrawal of foreign forces from the Suez canal area, to clear the canal and to reopen it for international traffic. And in that, as in much else, he was entirely successful. Bruised, unpopular, attacked, scorned, but successful.

And the idea has grown. UN peacekeeping – just to pick up the more recent examples – has since ushered in the transition to democratic rule in Namibia . It has supported similar transitions in El Salvador , Nicaragua and Guatemala . It has seen the withdrawal of foreign forces from Cambodia , and brought on the elections that put the awful Khmer Rouge out of business. It has led the way to the peace that has brought sustained economic growth in Mozambique , and helped it to become a beacon of hope in Africa .

As I speak, it is in the shadow of Hammarskjold that the militias have been defeated in East Timor , and that country has emerged into independence. It is in his shadow that the peace has held in Sierra Leone for almost five years, and that the war has been ended in Liberia . It is with the hope that his vision offered, that Burundi 's war may also be ending.

Urquhart's biography describes how Hammarskjold's body was thrown from the wreckage of the plane crash that killed him in Northern Rhodesia , so that he alone of the 17 people aboard was not badly burned. According to that account, those who discovered the body found it lying, face up, some distance from the plane. His back was broken, and one hand was stretched out, clenching a tuft of grass. But his face was at rest, as if asleep.

If it true that there was any measure of rest in that death, then it was amazingly well deserved.

For it is not just this list of UN peacekeeping missions that confirms Hammarskjold's reputation. It is, as ever, the flattery of imitation that speaks loudest.

Peacekeeping, from being at the absolute margin of human affairs, has moved closer to the centre. NATO, the EU, the AU, ECOWAS – not to mention coalitions led by the US, the UK, Russia and Australia – have all made peacekeeping a core part of their work.

We welcome it. Historically, there is a strong inverse correlation between peacekeeping deployments and war casualties. As peacekeeping goes up, war casualties go down. It is true in the short term, and in the longer term. On average, about half of peace agreements break down within five years. With a peacekeeping operation, the ‘survival rate' for peace agreements, if I can call it that, goes up to about 80 per cent. According to research done in this country by Paul Collier of Oxford University , peacekeeping – in purely economic cost-benefit terms, without looking at all at the human cost – is one of the best possible investments.

And Hammarskjold must have some of the credit, for having left the world this basic tool of conflict management.

For all of this, we do owe a salute to Hammarskjold and to the Swedes and the other friends of peacekeeping.

That salute must be as he would should surely have wanted – quiet, steady commitment.

Yet, for all this, UN peacekeeping needs to change.

The central challenge for UN peacekeeping in 2005 and 2006 is raising our game.

Three major challenges to UN peacekeeping make it essential that we do so.

The first challenge is over-stretch: the UN peacekeeping system is simply overloaded by the current surge of mission activity, and unless we raise our game, the possibility of a major breakdown is there.

The second challenge is competing demands on TCC resources. Sinking ceilings and growing commitments create a squeeze that squeezes peacekeeping hard.

Third, the international system is more brittle than it has been in the past: the reserve of good will required to keep the organization going in adversity is simply not there. One or two major peacekeeping failures, whatever the reasons, and support for the whole system could evaporate.

Before saying something about how we can raise our game, just a few words on each of these threats.

First, over-stretch. When I came to UN peacekeeping – a little over four years ago – we had about a dozen missions and some 30,000 men and women deployed. We now have over 70,000 men and women deployed.

The United Nations has had this many personnel deployed before. It was in mid-1990s, just before the wheels came off -- at the time of Somalia ; Bosnia and Rwanda .

Things are different now, of course. I think the Security Council has learned lessons. I don't think that the Council would again deploy a force like UNPROFOR into the middle of a hot war. Of all the things that a peacekeeping force can do, I think we have learned that ending open warfare between 400,000 fighting men is not one of them. One can understand NATO's decision, in a way, not go into Bosnia at all until after the war was over, and then only with 60,000 heavily armed troops of its own.

Inside the Secretariat, some of the systems that drive UN peacekeeping are clearly stronger. Our capacity to support our core functions, with quick finance, with strategic stocks, with air and sea lift from the sport market, and so on, are much improved. The day after the Council gave us a mandate in Liberia , we have four container ships at anchor in the free port of Monrovia .

Our capacity to work, as it were, on our flanks is also improved. We have a serious and growing capacity to fill what some call the ‘law and order gap'. In Liberia we not only keep the peace, but we provide the backbone to the police force, and help run the prison system. We can also manage the demobilization and disarmament of forces better.

But, for all that, this is simply not a system that can carry on the way it is without something giving.

We have 17 missions, in nine time zones. The sun, as it were, never sets on UN peacekeeping. And I say that less with pride than with concern.

120,000 men and women cycle through our operations each year, from over a hundred countries. We moved some 580,000 passengers last year alone. We moved almost half a million tonnes of freight. We operate 14 hospitals, and 120 clinics, most of them in the most hostile environments on earth.

The structures – from the Council to the remotest UNMO observation post – to provide proper command and control to this machinery, are pretty rudimentary, and strained to the limit.

It is an enormous tribute to the men and women with whom I serve that this huge machinery – this life-saving machinery – works as well as it does.

The second issue is the squeeze. Most of the world's armies are getting smaller. Most of the world's military budgets are still getting smaller, despite the events of the last few years. Meanwhile, at least for the world's most capable armies, commitments are going up. The US , the UK and others are still heavily committed in Iraq . NATO is committed both in the Balkans and in Afghanistan .

And, overlapping with these new commitments, is the rise of regional peacekeeping. Regional organizations ran no peacekeeping missions a decade ago, but have led more than a dozen in the last 24 months alone.

All of this makes it harder for UN peacekeeping to secure the contributions it needs.

The third problem that impacts on our strategic approach is the brittleness of the multi-lateral system. The divisions left by Iraq have left the system weaker. It used to be said that the United Nations was like Voltaire's God: if it did not exist, it would have to be created. No longer. The world is changing, and it can no longer be accepted as given that the major powers will truly support the organization in a time of crisis.

So, how do we raise our game? And how do we do it while already over-stretched?

Broadly, three words can sum up what needs to be done -- faster, broader, deeper.

Faster. We need to be able to get quality troops, police and civilian personnel into position faster.

The UK Government has been active in supporting a strategic reserve for UN peacekeeping forces. This needs further support. Without forces paid to maintain a high degree of readiness to deploy to assist missions in times of crisis, our experience has been that there is no such readiness. If we want to have UN-commanded forces ready to provide for the uncertainties of peacekeeping life – mission start-up, rapid reinforcement, bridging operations – we will have to make it happen.

Similarly, we need to have police units ready to deploy as soon a mandate is passed. The present system, where we have to wait for a Security Council resolution before officers can be seconded is pointlessly inefficient. Let us recognize that, from time to time, we will need officers – trained officers, who know the UN, know the country they are going to, and know how to work together – to plan missions before they arise, and to deploy while larger numbers of secondees can be identified.

Broader. We have to expand the range of partners with whom we can work effectively.

This includes the regions. Part of the solution to the problem of outsiders not contributing in Africa must be strengthening Africa 's own capacity. The Africans themselves want it, and are moving forward. We are committed to that, and would like to partner with the African Standby Force in creating the UN strategic reserve.

But regional peacekeeping is a double-edged sword, and strengthening African peacekeeping must not be an acceptance that outsiders need not play their part. We welcome regional peacekeeping, but we cannot support what has been called peacekeeping apartheid – the logic that keeps a larger force, of the world's best troops, in tiny Kosovo, than is kept in Congo, where millions have died.

So the agenda of a broader peacekeeping must mean more than just working with the regions. It must also mean broader in a functional sense. We must work towards an inter-locking system of capabilities that is flexible, working across and between regions.

Almost all new peacekeeping operations take place in fragile states. That is, they take place in countries in which peacekeeping is only one part of the solution to the country's problems. There is also a need for civilian peace building programmes. And there is a need for a longer-term development strategy.

Yet, very often, there is not really any shared strategic vision, or even coherence, between the security stabilization work that is at the centre of our effort, and the work in governance and development. Our own integrated mission planning remains far from perfect. As a result, we have peacekeeping operations that succeed, only to lapse back into conflict. Successful operations, as it were, in which the patient dies. Haiti was one case; Liberia was another. And we will have to be careful in Sierra Leone . It is stable while there is an international force there. But it was ranked 177 out of 177 on the Human Development Index when we arrived, and it remains, five years later, number 177 on the list.

Our department, along with OCHA, is managing an external review of integrated missions. We need to know what arrangements work best, not from the peacekeeping point of view, or the humanitarian one, or the development one – but from the perspective of the overall international effort to stabilize and provide the sustainable basis for decent life in a particular country. Even in advance of that study's recommendations, the department is pioneering, with partners in UNDP and elsewhere, a radical overhaul of the way the international system runs its DDR systems. This needs your support.

Beyond the Secretariat, the Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats and Challenges has proposed that a peacebuilding commission be set up, that would try to link the decisions of the Security Council to the work of the major donors, international financial institutions and others. We support this, and would urge all of you to support that initiative and the effort to establish a peacebuilding support office to back it up.

Deeper. Finally, there is the need to deepen the capacities we have.

The allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers in the Congo and elsewhere are shocking. Shocking, but perhaps also symptomatic of a wider weakness of doctrine, training, discipline, command and control, and so on.

As well as dealing with the symptoms of the problem – through arrests and repatriations, and so on – there is need to develop more robust control systems. Not just in the area of sexual abuse, though that is where we must start: proper systems to prevent, detect and eliminate problems before they spin out of control. Across the board, doctrine – or guidance, as I prefer to call it – training and leadership need to be strengthened, or we will simply be unable to cope with the weight of responsibility with which we are now charged, on four continents.

By the end of 2005, we need, at least, to have a basic template for guidance in place – policies, guidelines, SOPs – which now does not exist at all; we need to have a training programme that trains peacekeepers to the guidance standards we set; and we need and we need to more professional system of mission leadership selection, including some transparency in the appointment of SRSGs and their deputies.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

In his last address to the staff before the mission that took him to his death, Hammarskjold spoke about the need to create a truly professional civil service.

His concern was that, in order to the navigate the very stormy seas of international politics, the United Nations must be served by a cadre of men and women at the top of their field, and beyond reproach. Without that, the Organization, however successful in objective terms, would be skewered by those unhappy with its political position on any particular issue.

That his death cut him off from that next great goal is another reason to remember Hammarskjold, and to mourn his passing.

Thank you.