KEEPING THE PEACE Former UN Under-Secretary General, SIR MARRACK GOULDING discusses methods for preventative dipolmacy and peacekeeping
MIRACLES DO HAPPEN. This year’s miracle may be reform of the United Nations. It has been sought many times, but the seekers have rarely agreed on what they are looking for; long reports and longer debates have produced little change, little reform. There have nevertheless been changes for the better – for instance, the evolution of the doctrine and practice of UN peacekeeping. But the changes have not been due to report, debate and Charter amendment. They have resulted from the accumulation of small changes – in the field, in the Glass House in New York, in the chancelleries of Member States – which gradually make it possible for the UN to do things differently and better.
But this year we are back in the realm of Napoleonic mega-reform, not good old Anglo-Saxon piecemeal reform. Two major reports have been produced: one by the ‘High-Level Panel’ appointed by Kofi Annan, and Annan’s own report. They are to be debated in New York in September in the hope that a programme of reform can be approved by the Member States. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be the outcome. The United States is in the hands of a government which has repeatedly flaunted its contempt for the UN. This has generated a high degree of resentment amongst Washington’s allies and in the Third World. Consensus will be hard to achieve.
There is not space in this article to review the many issues which will feature in the debate. Instead, I will take one UN function and explore how the UN’s capacity to perform it could be enhanced by reform. The function is the prevention and resolution of conflict – a function which the Charter called ‘The Pacific Settlement of Disputes’, and is now called preventive diplomacy and peacemaking. For the founding fathers of the UN this was the most important means of “sav[ing] succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. Chapter VII, ‘Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression’, was the second choice, to be implemented only if peacemaking had failed.
The Charter assumed that war meant war between states. The assumption was wrong. The great majority of wars since 1945 have not been wars between states; they have been civil wars within states. The world today is plagued with them. But wars do eventually come to an end and they usually end as a result of successful peacemaking through negotiation, not because one side has defeated the other on the battlefield.
The UN has mediated many negotiations that have led to peace; it has mediated many more that have yet to succeed. Patience and perseverance are essential for peacemakers. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the fifth Secretary- General of the UN, never gave up. He would repeat the same message time and time again: “neither side can win this war; neither side benefits from it; the best option you have is to negotiate a settlement; the UN can help you do that; give us the opportunity and you will find that we are right”.
Mediators come in different shapes and sizes: inter-governmental organisations like the UN or the European Union; ad hoc groups of states (eg, the ‘Contact Group’ which negotiated a plan for peace in Namibia); individual states (eg, Norway); non-governmental organisations (eg, the Catholic Sant’Egidio which mediated an end to the conflict in Mozambique); or distinguished individuals (eg, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter).Whatever the shape or size, the budding mediator has to fulfil ten conditions, which are detailed opposite, if he or she or it is going to succeed – these are listed on the right.
The conditions given essentially constitute a catalogue of practices and techniques that the UN and other international mediators have developed in the field, especially during the 16 years since the Cold War ended. They have not been formally adopted by the Security Council or the General Assembly. They are customary practices whose legitimacy comes from their repeated use by the Secretary-General in the implementation of mandates entrusted to him by the Security Council or the General Assembly.
There are, however, two fields in which reform is needed if the UN is to enhance its peacemaking capacity.
The first relates to sovereignty. The primacy of sovereignty is a major obstacle both for peacemakers and for the providers of humanitarian relief. The UN Charter is relentless: “Nothing in the present Charter shall authorise the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state”. Even Pérez de Cuéllar declared, towards the end of his Secretary-Generalship, that international law must keep pace with change; perhaps, he said, a balance was being established between the rights of states, as in the Charter, and the rights of individuals, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it is inconceivable that the General Assembly or the Security Council would vote to dilute the primacy of sovereignty; it is too precious to governments. So reform has to come not in Napoleonic mode but in pragmatic Anglo- Saxon mode, through the accumulation of precedents. That has begun but it will take a long time, and meanwhile sovereignty will remain an obstacle for peacemakers.
The second field is one relating to all UN activities. It is the complexity and inefficiency of the UN’s administration. When I was in charge of the UN’s peacekeeping operations, I often violated regulations and other standing orders. This was not because I did not know the rules or was in rebellion against them. It was because I knew that if I meticulously followed the rules, I would not be able to carry out the tasks entrusted to me, via the Secretary- General, by the Security Council. Nor were my administrative colleagues to blame for the complexity. That complexity resulted from micro-supervision of the Secretariat by the member states. Their distrust of us simply made us more inefficient.
That is an area of reform which needs urgent attention if the United Nations is to meet the demands of the 21st century.
Sir Marrack Goulding is the ex-Under- Secretary General of the UN. He was responsible for the organisation’s peacekeeping operations for several years. He is currently Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford [Illustration Tom Rayner]
Mediation The ten conditions for negotiation success
1 To get the two sides to accept mediation. Mediation cannot be imposed; it can function only if the parties give their consent. Winning consent can take a long time, which is why Pérez de Cuéllar so tirelessly repeated his mantra advocating perseverance. Consent is particularly difficult to obtain in civil wars because one of the parties is an internationally recognised government and will regard third party involvement as a violation of its sovereignty.
2 'Integration of the mediation’, by which is meant that there must be only one mediating individual or institution. Otherwise wires get crossed and the parties can play off one mediator against another. This can be a particular problem for the UN Secretary-General if, as happened in the Western Sahara, he or she is mandated to mediate jointly with a regional organization, thereby creating institutional jealousy and duplication.
3 The mediator must be strictly impartial. When one side is cooperating and the other is not, it is tempting to be nice to the good guys and nasty to the bad ones. But the temptation must be resisted; public criticism of the Khmer Rouge by the UN very nearly derailed implementation of the Cambodian peace settlement.
4 The two sides accept that they are political equals in the negotiation. This is always difficult: one side insists that it is the legal government and its opponents are a gang of criminal outlaws; how can they be spoken of as political equals? Again the mediator has to ask the government whether it really thinks that continuation of the conflict is better for it than making this concession. This can take a long time – more than a year [check] in the case of El Salvador.
5 The parties agree to negotiate face-toface. Shuttle diplomacy can work in the preparatory phase but not when issues of substance are under discussion. But it is often difficult to get the parties to cross this bridge. One of the happiest moments in my UN career was when, in an ill-lit corridor in an hotel on the outskirts of Mexico City, I spotted two familiar figures in conversation behind a potted palm; they were the leader of one of the five parties in the Salvadorian rebel movement and the military member of the government delegation.
6 To be realistic about cease-fires. The Bush-Sharon doctrine that there can be no negotiation unless there is a complete cessation of violence is folly. It puts the peace process at the mercy of one lone terrorist. Nor is it the norm: all the successful peace negotiations that I know began when the fighting was still going on and in some cases, eg Angola, the fighting continued until the eve of signature of the settlement.
7 Before going into action, the mediator should have studied the conflict in some detail and formed clear ideas about what the main ingredients of the settlement should be. But the mediator must be ready to adjust those ideas as the negotiation proceeds and he/she acquires a better understanding of the issues and the parties’ needs and ambitions.
8 To ensure that the settlement under negotiation addresses the root causes of the conflict, not just its symptoms. This can take a long time and produce a complicated set of inter-related agreements. This was necessary in Guatemala where the root causes were long-term discrimination against the indigenous people, the economic and social consequences of that discrimination, and brutal law enforcement. The implementation of complex settlements of this kind can prolong the international presence and turn local gratitude into local hostility towards the mediators.
9 Patience is not only a virtue, but vital. The mediator must try to keep the process moving forward but without putting pressure on the two sides. They need time to consult their constituencies and persuade them that concessions are better than continuation of the war. Thoroughly negotiated and well understood settlements are more likely to succeed than sketchy and ambiguous ones, as the UN learnt to its cost in Western Sahara, where the conflict remains unresolved almost twenty years after the parties accepted a flawed settlement proposed to them by the UN.
10 To build international understanding and support for the mediator’s efforts. Here too Pérez de Cuéllar blazed the trail in Central America. When the UN began to mediate a settlement in El Salvador, he asked a few well-disposed countries to become “Friends of the Secretary-General”. In that capacity they were asked to intervene with the parties, individually or collectively, if – but only if – they were so requested by the Secretary- General. This has on the whole worked well in several negotiations. But the Secretariat has to be fiercely watchful to make sure that no Friend puts proposals to the parties unless so requested by the Secretary- General. top back
