"A BETTER UN FOR A BETTER WORLD"

STATEMENT BY THE RT HON MR ROBIN COOK, MP

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS

UNITED KINDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND

President, Distinguished Delegates,

I am conscious that the central problem for all of us when we rise to speak to this General Assembly is that there are too many issues of concern to hope to address in one speech. There is no shortage of challenges to the UN 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 been more divided between rich and poor. In the year ahead, we must make sure that all the UN agencies and its international financial institutions work together to promote development and to reduce debt.

It is also a world bound together by the growth in trade between our countries. But we failed at Seattle to agree to 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.

And 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 find agreement at the Sixth Conference of the Parties to bring into effect the Kyoto measures to stabilise climate change.

Each of these is an important challenge. They are strategic priorities for our work programme for the next year. This morning, though, I want to focus my remarks on the urgent challenges facing us on peacekeeping.

In his opening address, the Secretary General invited us to give a swift response to the Brahimi report on peacekeeping. The UK is happy to respond to his invitation by offering our support for its conclusions and pledging our commitment to its implementation.

The Brahimi 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 pain and the terror of brutal conflict. We must be frank in admitting those failures if we are to learn their lessons. And we must be determined to improve the capacity of this organisation to keep the peace if we are to succeed in the future.

I wish to set out six tasks which we must address if we are not to repeat past failures.

We must equip the UN with a more effective and a more rapid capacity for peacekeeping.

In a space of about one year, the number of troops on UN peacekeeping missions around the globe has trebled. The UK has forces operating in eight different theatres where peacekeeping has been authorised by the UN.

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 UN forces were typically deployed to observe a ceasefire between two states both of whom 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 these circumstances, our 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. UN peacekeepers who witness violence against civilians should be presumed to be mandated to halt it.

But, if our peacekeepers are to act with determination, then we must equip them with the capacity to do so. The UN 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 among Member States who are trained in the principles and practice of peacekeeping. That is why the UK has proposed that there should be a permanent staff college for UN peacekeeping. The UK has offered to act as the host country to such a resource for UN peacekeeping, if that would be welcome to other members.

The second task for us 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 denial of freedom or 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 trade or to defeat the drugs barons would prevent conflict by denying the resources with which to wage it.

The third task is to take tighter control of the flow of arms which supplies 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 on the Non Proliferation Treaty underlines the importance which each of us attaches to this strategic issue. The United Kingdom has ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, reduced by half its planned strategic nuclear warheads, and 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 five 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 UN Conference on Small Arms. We need to reach agreement to mark firearms at the point of production, so that they can be traced. The UK would support 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 their surrender with development aid.

The fourth task is to provide the UN with the civilian resources to promote reconciliation and reconstruction.

In Kosovo, and again 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 peacebuilders.

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 organisation has only nine civilian police on its headquarters staff, administering 8600 civilian police in the field around the world. I am confident every one of them is the very best, in keeping with the tradition of the UN. 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 decade, the UN has been called upon to undertake a transitional civilian administration. We need a better, permanent, capacity here at the centre to support those 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 UK has given strong support to an 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 must 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 who have joined as members since the Security Council was set up.

The UK would support a doubling of the Permanent Membership to include Germany and 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, to make the Security Council more representative of this General Assembly.

For seven years, we have been debating this question. It is becoming an issue of

credibility for the UN. How can we pretend to end conflict, if we cannot end

disagreement among ourselves? A more representative, modern Security Council would speak with more authority when it challenges those who breach the peace.

Mr President, I have been frank about where we must improve our capacity for peacekeeping and strengthen our will to halt conflict. But we should not under‑rate the immense achievement of the United Nations. Our Charter begins by recalling the untold sorrow to mankind inflicted by two World Wars. It was 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 industrialised 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 halfcentury, peoples elsewhere on the globe have lived through violence and conflicts, which have broken their human rights and impoverished their standard of living. It is largely poor countries that now experience the scourge of war, which our Charter sought to banish.