Australia

I warmly congratulate Ambassador Insanally, on his election as President of the forty-eighth session of the General Assembly. As a fellow Commonwealth member with Guyana, Australia is very pleased to serve in the Assembly under his presidency. This session of the General Assembly will deal with a particularly heavy and important agenda. It will do so at a time when hopes for, and expectations of, the United Nations have never been greater - but when, at the same time, many doubts have been raised about the capacity of the United Nations system to cope. We will be relying very much, Mr. President, on your wisdom and your experience as you preside over our deliberations. The world is a rather less happy place than we all hoped it would be after the end of the cold war. Economic and social deprivation continues to be a harsh daily reality for many of our countries and our peoples. Not even the most advanced countries are immune. The developed Western economies are limping, with low growth rates, historically high unemployment rates, increasing disparities as a result between rich and poor, and a continuing inability so far to reach agreement - either between themselves or with the rest of the world’s trading nations - about the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade liberalization measures so necessary to give a new kick-start to world trade and economic growth. In the non-Western world, rates of growth have been extraordinarily uneven. The spectacular advance in some regions, in particular East Asia, has been in stark contrast to the continuing terrible deprivation and poverty in others. Some States have simply been unable to cope with exploding internal economic, political and social problems, and for all practical purposes have collapsed, leaving the international community to respond, somehow, to the humanitarian crises that have followed so often. In security terms, the end of the cold war has seen the end of the super-Power nuclear-arms race and has relieved us of the immediate threat of nuclear devastation. We have seen major achievements in nuclear-arms reduction; and for the first time in the history of the nuclear age a comprehensive test-ban treaty, which would ban all nuclear tests in all environments for all time, seems within our reach. We could help to make it even more so by adopting by consensus a resolution in this Assembly supporting the negotiation of that treaty. A very great deal, of course, depends on the current moratorium on all nuclear testing being maintained. We in Australia very strongly support what President Clinton said in that respect this morning. This year we signed at last, after 20 years of negotiation, the chemical weapons Convention. But much remains to be done to bring this and other instruments into effective operation. And there are still too many countries unwilling to submit themselves to the disciplines, more important and more necessary now than ever, of the nuclear non-proliferation Treaty. The threat of conflicts between States has certainly not diminished with the end of the cold war. If anything, the removal of the cold-war gridlock - the discipline imposed by the super-Powers on each other and their respective supporters - has created more room than ever for States to manoeuvre. Some are beginning to do so, and some are bound to seek to do so in the future. Some of the emerging economic Powers have yet to acquire political or military profiles commensurate with their new wealth, and the process of adjustment certainly has ample potential to generate regional tensions. Should those tensions escalate into conflict, the unhappy reality is that proliferation of more sophisticated conventional weapons and proliferation of the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction make any prospect of major regional conflict an alarming one for the world as a whole. The release of cold-war pressures has been associated with another major new development of security concern with which we are all now disturbingly familiar: the resurgence of ethno-nationalism, often taking a violent form. Some ethnic groups are being prepared to pursue their claims for self-determination within the framework of existing States, arguing essentially for minority human rights protection - claims of right which, on first principles, we should all be prepared to acknowledge and support. But many other such groups have made clear that they will be satisfied by nothing less than their nations becoming States, causing the fragmentation of existing States in the process, and creating some very real dilemmas for the international community as a result. Again, the proliferating availability of weaponry of every degree of sophistication has given a sharp new edge to these concerns. Looking out upon a world with all these characteristics, it is easy to be pessimistic and fatalistic. But I do not think we should retreat into that habit of mind. For everything that has gone wrong over the last few years, there is something else that has gone right. To match against the awful continuing tragedy in the former Yugoslavia, we have, for example, this month’s peace agreement in the Middle East - of course, only the first step in what remains a long journey, but an enormously encouraging one notwithstanding. And to match against the continuing chaos and uncertainty in Somalia, and the at best very limited success of the United Nations operation there, we have now the unquestioned success of the United Nations operation in Cambodia - and the end at last to more than 20 years of what has been a real twentieth-century tragedy involving bloody war, civil war, genocide, invasion and civil war again. A terrible conflict continues in Angola, but peace is at hand at last in Mozambique; and in South Africa the final death of apartheid is imminent, as testified last week in this place by Nelson Mandela. Military regimes have given way to democratic ones throughout Latin America. Many problems remain to be solved in the former Soviet Union, but Governments that can credibly claim to reflect the will of their peoples are in place throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The military regime in Myanmar, or Burma, continues to resist the obvious mood of its people for liberty and democracy, but elsewhere in the region traditionally monolithic government structures - driven in many cases by economic imperatives - are beginning to show signs of flexibility and responsiveness. But while I do not believe that we should be unduly pessimistic or fatalistic about the condition of the world around us, nor can we afford to be complacent. There is much more that we can and should be doing to reinforce and strengthen the international community’s capacity to govern itself better, and in particular to better guarantee the maintenance of peace and security in the post-cold-war world. It is on this subject - the role of the United Nations and the international community generally in securing peace in the world of the 1990s and beyond that I want specifically to focus my remarks today. A little over a year ago, following a unique meeting of the Security Council, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali published "An Agenda for Peace". It was and remains a remarkable document, one which poses most of the questions we need to address if we are to have a fair chance of maintaining international peace and security in the world of today and the foreseeable future. Since that time, a worldwide debate has taken place on the issues described in "An Agenda for Peace", which has involved not only Governments and officials, but has reached out to embrace Forty-eighth session - 27 September l993 25 universities, foundations, non-governmental organizations and many organs of the public media as well. This debate generated resolutions at the last session of the General Assembly, several worthwhile changes to some procedures and structures within the Secretariat, and the prospect of further changes to come. It cannot be said, however, that the issues raised by "An Agenda for Peace" are now all settled, either in theory or in practice. We still do not have even a completely clear and consistent shared vocabulary to define the ways in which it is possible for the United Nations and other organs of the international community to respond to security problems: "peacemaking", for example, means different things still to different people; so do "preventive diplomacy" and "peace building"; the conceptual boundary between "peace-keeping" on the one hand and "peace enforcement" on the other is not drawn in the same way by everyone who uses these terms. Nor do we seem yet to have clear and universal agreement even as to the kind of problems which justify a security response by the international community. Should we recognize, for example, a humanitarian right of intervention and, if so, in what circumstances and to what extent? When does an economic or social problem become the kind of security problem which justifies the mobilization of the response strategies spelt out in Chapters VI and VII of the United Nations Charter? Even when it comes to applying a very familiar response to a new problem - for example, establishing a peace-keeping operation like the 30 which have now been initiated since 1946 - there does not yet seem to have been developed a commonly accepted check list of criteria to guide decision-makers in determining when precisely the operation should be set in train, how it should be structured, managed and resourced, or how long it should continue. Every situation, of course, has its own characteristics, but is it really necessary for decisions on these matters by the Security Council or others to be made on so evidently ad hoc a basis? When it comes to thinking about how the United Nations - and others in the international community, including regional organizations - might best be structured, organized, managed and funded to most effectively address the international peace and security agenda, it is not clear to me that we have yet heard the last word in that debate. An extraordinary amount has been achieved in the tumultuous period since 1989 in responding to the new demands and challenges that have been unceasingly hurled at the United Nations, but a good deal more remains to be done if the United Nations in particular, the only fully empowered body with global membership that we have, is to be as effective as we would all want it to be. It is much easier, of course, to ask all these questions than to answer them. Identifying problems is always easier than defining acceptable solutions. But I believe that we all have a responsibility to each other and the international community to try to answer these questions and to keep on working away at the answers until we find common ground. So it is in that spirit that I put before the Assembly today a detailed study of these questions, which tries to answer them in a way which might help us find a little more of that common ground. The study, in the form of a book entitled Cooperating for Peace, has been distributed, I hope, to delegations as I speak. I do not pretend for a moment that this says the last word on any of the enormously complex and sensitive issues with which it deals. It is simply an Australian contribution to the debate which was so thoughtfully and constructively initiated by the Secretary-General last year. The study seeks to do three things in particular. First, it suggests ways of bringing a little more clarity - to the extent this is presently lacking - into the concepts and vocabulary that we use in defining security problems, defining possible responses and matching responses to problems. Secondly, it suggests specific criteria that might be applied by decision-makers in deciding what, if any, response is appropriate to a particular new security problem. And, thirdly, it suggests a priority list of areas in which further United Nations reform might usefully be pursued. In the short time that remains to me I shall try to give a quick, outline sketch of what we are trying to say in each of these respects. First of all, on the issue of concepts and terminology, it is perhaps worth making the point at the outset that this is not just something for academics to wrangle about. It matters in practice. If decision-makers do not share the same basic way of looking at issues and the same basic vocabulary in defining them, there is a very real risk that they will talk past each other - or, at the very least, find it very much harder to produce responses which are timely, properly graduated, effective in practice, affordable and broadly consistent from one case to the next. Just as importantly, the choice of words can sometimes significantly influence the way in which we think about matters of substance. To give just one example: If we use, as many people still do, the expression "peace-making" to describe military enforcement action, then, simply because this is such an innocuous and constructive sounding expression, there is a danger that we may over time become a little more relaxed than we should be about taking such action. It is much better, I suggest, to confine the expression "peace-making" to diplomatic-type activity to resolve conflict and to reserve the expression "peace enforcement" to describe the always dangerous, always messy, and what should always be the last-resort, activity of applying military force. In the study we define security problems, in more or less escalating order of seriousness, as "emerging threats", "disputes", "armed conflicts" and "other major security crises." We make the point that security is not strictly or solely a military concept and that threats to security, as many speakers in the general debate have already said, can these days come very much from factors such as exploding population pressures, environmental degradation, mass involuntary movements of people and the illicit narcotics trade, among other things. Equally, we define possible responses to security problems, again in escalating order of severity, in terms of "peace- building," "preventive diplomacy," "preventive deployment," "peace- making," "peace-keeping," "sanctions" and "peace enforcement." We are at pains to emphasize that it is only as a last resort that security solutions should be seen as coming out of the barrel of a gun. We give much more emphasis than has been common elsewhere to the concept of "peace-building," which we define in the study as extending not just to post-conflict economic development and institution-building strategies, but to a whole variety of preventive strategies, both within particular countries and in the form of international treaty-type régimes addressing both military and non-military threats to security. In defining criteria for embarking on peace operations - whether peace-keeping or peace enforcement - the most crucial consideration is that there be a clearminded focus on the objectives of the exercise and the likely effectiveness of the operation in achieving those objectives. No operations of this kind should ever be embarked upon for the sake of being seen to be doing something. Although it is not always possible to analyse or predict with certainty, it should always be possible to avoid embarking on operations which are manifestly likely to be ineffective and which, as such, put at risk the most crucial United Nations resource of all, its credibility. In the case of peace-keeping we suggest in Cooperating for Peace that there are seven basic conditions for ensuring an effective operation: clear and achievable goals; adequate resources; close coordination of peace-keeping with any ongoing peacemaking activity; a capacity to be and to be seen to be absolutely impartial as between the parties who have been in conflict; a significant degree of local support for the peace-keepers; evident support for the operation from external Powers that may have been involved previously in supporting one side or the other; and a "signposted exit", that is, a clearly designated termination point, or set of termination criteria. When it comes to peace-enforcement operations, our suggested criteria for determining involvement are quite complex and vary according to whether one is talking about an operation in response to cross-border aggression, as with Iraq and Kuwait; about one in support of peace-keeping operations, the basic rationale for United Nations involvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina; or about peace enforcement in support of humanitarian objectives, as in Somalia. Without going into all the necessary detail now, I think the basic considerations always come down to the following: widespread international support; clear and achievable goals; adequate total resources to meet those goals; and clearly defined termination or review points. If the United Nations is to play with maximum effectiveness the central role it needs to play in maintaining international peace and security, then further change, further reform in the United Nations system, really is necessary. Some of that change is bound to be painful for some people, but that is the way of change. Putting it simply and starkly: Unless the United Nations develops a comprehensive capacity to address today’s and tomorrow’s problems - not yesterday’s - there is a very real risk of the United Nations gradually losing, with Governments and peoples around the world, the credibility it needs to survive. In the study we identify a number of priority areas for change. The first is to restructure the Secretariat to ensure that the Secretary-General has an effective chain of command exercising authority over major United Nations operations and to consolidate and coordinate in a more orderly and manageable way the present sprawl of departments and agencies. We support the proposal that the Secretary-General create a new senior structure at United Nations Headquarters under which he would have four Deputy Secretaries-General responsible, respectively, for peace and security, economic and social operations, humanitarian operations and administration and management. Each such Deputy Secretary-General would have full executive responsibility for the operational issues falling within his or her portfolio, subject only to direction by the Secretary-General. This would be a big change, and it is not the first time it has been proposed, but it is the one that, more than anything else, would create the conditions for more orderly and effective management throughout the United Nations system. The second priority need is to resolve once and for all the United Nations critical funding problem. Various adventurous ideas have been canvassed for external funding - money coming from sources other than Member States - and we suggest that at least one of those ideas, namely, a small levy on international airline travel, be further explored. But overwhelmingly, of course, the problem is one that has been created by Member States, including the richest of our number, and it is entirely within our ability to resolve by meeting our assessed contributions for regular budgets and peace operations in full and on time. It is an abuse of good management principles and of basic common sense to be forcing the Secretary-General to spend so much of his time pleading for debts to be honoured. In that respect I echo the sentiments expressed a few minutes ago by Mrs. Brundtland. If the bulk of current arrears were to be paid by the end of this year, the United Nations finances would be in a quite healthy position, with the Working Capital Fund, the Peace- keeping Reserve Fund and the Special Account all replenished and the Organization in a position to meet all outstanding troop-contribution costs. The third priority is to improve the management of peace operations, both at Headquarters and in the field. Some very significant and useful steps have already been taken in this regard in the context of the creation of the new Department of Peace-keeping Operations, but more remains to be done, including in particular the development over time of a properly constituted General Staff to plan and manage the military dimensions of such operations. The fourth priority is to give special attention to the machinery of preventive diplomacy, again both at Headquarters and in the field. These efforts have been largely ad hoc in the past, although the Department of Political Affairs is gradually building a core of appropriate expertise. Quite apart from anything else, there is an overwhelming cost advantage in doing more to stop disputes becoming armed conflicts. We estimate the cost of keeping 100 well-qualified, experienced practitioners of preventive diplomacy in the field for a year to be $21 million; compare that with this year’s peace operations budget of $3.7 billion - and compare it, moreover, with the $70 billion that it is estimated to have cost the United Nations coalition to fight the six-week Gulf war. The fifth priority is to rethink the whole system of humanitarian relief coordination. Despite advances that have been made with the creation of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs, we think some basic structural problems remain. We propose that they be addressed in a radical way by the creation of a new disaster-response agency, combining the relief and basic rehabilitation functions of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the World Food Programme (WFP), which would work in turn directly to the suggested Deputy Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs. The sixth priority, as we see it, is to take various steps to raise the profile within the United Nations system of peace-building. This is, after all, the point of intersection between the Organization’s peace and security role and its economic and social role, and it should be given recognition and emphasis as such. The pursuit of peace and security has to include the satisfaction of basic human needs, as well as the direct prevention, containment and settlement of armed conflict. Much of the United Nations system is in fact already concerned with peace- building in the form of activities such as international law-making, disarmament, economic and social advancement, sustainable development, democratization and institution building. But much more can be done, organizationally, to link these activities together, to recognize their security significance, and to ensure that they are pursued with a sense of common purpose. The remaining priority, a very large subject in itself, as we all know, is to regenerate the Security Council - not because it is now working ineffectively, but because its manifest lack of representativeness is beginning to impact upon its legitimacy. The Security Council is the linchpin of the whole United Nations peace and security system, and it is in no one’s interest that its credibility should be allowed to gradually erode. The outstanding questions about the size and shape of the Council should certainly be resolved by the time of the United Nations fiftieth anniversary in 1995. This, indeed, remains an ideal target date for the achievement of a whole range of necessary organizational reforms. Running right through the study - and underlying all the suggestions we have been making about structure and process - is a single sustaining idea, that of cooperative security. This embraces two perhaps rather more familiar ideas, common security and collective security. But the overall flavour of cooperative security can perhaps best be captured by describing it, in a little more detail, as an approach that emphasizes reassurance rather than deterrence; that is inclusive rather than exclusive; that favours multilateralism over unilateralism or bilateralism; that does not rank military solutions over non-military ones; that assumes that States are the principal actors in the security system, but also accepts that non-State actors have an important role to play; that does not particularly emphasize the creation of formal security institutions but does not reject them either; and that above all stresses the value of creating habits of dialogue. A good deal of the spirit of cooperative security is in fact to be found in the Charter of the United Nations. Paragraph 4 of Article 1, a provision much neglected in the past, designates the United Nations as a "centre for harmonizing the actions of nations" - not the sentiments of nations, but the actions of nations. In Articles 55 and 56 Member States pledge themselves to create the "conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations". Underscored in that context are the promotion of higher standards of living, the solution of economic and social problems and respect for human rights. Too often during the cold war we looked past these obligations and concerns, because we were preoccupied with military means of survival. But the threats that concerned us then no longer exist; and what was written in San Francisco, before the cold war froze our capacity to deal with many other kinds of threats to security, should now be seen as a compelling guide. Our survival in the 1990s and beyond will depend on our developing a new understanding of what constitutes security and what contributes to it. It will depend on our capacity to think clearly about how to react to new security problems as they arise. It will depend on our willingness to rethink and to reshape our institutions, including the United Nations, so that they can cope with new realities. But, above all, it will depend on our all developing and sustaining a real commitment to cooperating for peace.