UK

It is just over half a century since the then British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, presented the Charter of the United Nations to our Parliament. He told our Parliament: “We are seeking not merely good relations between nations but between the human beings within nations”. The concept he saw expressed in 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 nations of the world acting as a united body. Over the past 50 years, the United Nations has done much to discharge that responsibility. The United Nations and its agencies have led programmes around the world that have released the potential of individual human beings on every continent. We have helped double the literacy rate among women in developing countries. We have helped immunize 80 per cent of the world's children against some of the most lethal diseases. We have established the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the benchmark for freedom for individuals. And this General Assembly played a leading role in insisting on equal democratic rights, regardless of race, and in forcing an end to apartheid. Today the United Nations provides shelter and sanctuary to refugees in every corner of the world. As we meet this week, United Nations 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 realized the vision of our founders, of nations and peoples within them living in peace with each other. We have averted world war. But we have not averted a world with too much war. That is why I want to support the excellent opening address by our Secretary-General by focusing my remarks also 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 also in stopping them once they have started. I propose five priority areas for action. First, we must tackle the root causes of conflict, 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 basis for peace is prosperity, and the best way we can prevent conflict is by promoting 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 is more likely where governments rule without the consent of their people. Thirdly, we must curb the supply of weapons that fuel conflict. For decades, the United Nations, rightly, has focused on halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Yet in truth, in those same decades, the weapons that have killed masses in conflicts have been the most common of small arms. In Friday's debate in the Security Council, we will have the opportunity to take forward action to halt the illegal trade in small arms, to promote regional moratoriums on small arms and to limit arsenals of military firearms to legitimate Government agencies. 34 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 conflict. The markets for these commodities, especially the market in diamonds, are small and tightly located in a few centres. We must encourage cooperation with those who manage those markets to cut off the supply of funds to those who are promoting conflict. Lastly, I strongly endorse the view expressed by our Secretary-General this morning that we must counter the culture of impunity. Those who break international humanitarian law, from Kosovo to East Timor, must know that they will be held to account by the international community. 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 its 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 as nations. Globalization is the long and rather ugly term which is used 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 strengthening links in trade and investment, in travel and communication. What happens in one country can have a direct impact on the prosperity and the security — even the climate — of countries on the other side of the world. And we are also bound together by the consequences of conflict. In Britain 90 per cent 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 destabilized 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 thousands of citizens of the former Yugoslavia who have fled to seek sanctuary from the repeated conflicts there. Just as few nations can stand alone in the modern world, there are now few major conflicts which remain only an internal matter with no impact on the rest of the world. If we are to respond adequately when conflict breaks out, then the United Nations needs to develop three strengths — credibility, consensus and capacity. If the United Nations is to have the credibility to press the parties to a 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 which would come from a more representative permanent membership. But greater credibility would be pointless without consensus on when the authority of the United Nations should be invoked. Intervention must always be a 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 we are confronted with genocide, mass displacement of people or major breaches of 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 that they will be repeated. Credibility, though, also requires us to demonstrate not just the consensus, but also the capacity, to act. We often hear demands that the United Nations should do something. Let us be honest — the United Nations is nothing more than the aggregate of its Member States. The United Nations cannot do something except when we, its Member States, are prepared to provide the means. We need to ensure that the United Nations has a sound financial base, which requires all of us to meet our assessed contributions in full, on time. But we must also ensure that when peacekeeping forces are required, they are made available. Britain has signed a standby agreement earmarking forces we are prepared in principle to provide for emergency peacekeeping work. Such agreements enable the United Nations to plan for emergencies with greater confidence that we can rapidly put in the field the right skills, with the necessary equipment. A score of other Member States have signed similar agreements. The more of us that do so, the greater 35 will be the capacity of the United Nations in brokering a basis for peacekeeping deployment. But in Kosovo we discovered that it was less difficult to put together an armed force to end the military violence than to assemble a United Nations police force to keep civil order. Today, therefore, I can announce that Britain will follow up our standby agreement with the United Nations on troops with a similar agreement increasing the number of United Kingdom police officers available for United Nations troops. 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 United Nations a flagship training course in Britain to train police from around the world to play their part in our joint missions. I am conscious that the agenda I have set out is an ambitious one. But, in all humility, I have to say that it is less ambitious than the visionary programme set out half a century ago by the founders of the United Nations. As our Secretary-General said earlier this year, unless we can unite around the aim of confronting massive human rights violations, against crimes against humanity, then we will betray the very ideals of our founders. In the modern world in which we live — 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 in an emergency. Modern technology has made all of us each other’s neighbours. We now need to match that technology with an international doctrine that also reflects the modern world. And it must be founded on the clear principle that the only war we agree to wage is one in which our nations are united in combating conflict.