UN: Failure to grasp the nettle of UN reform this year, on its 60th anniversary, could condemn the organisation to the same fate as the League of Nations, the president of the International Crisis Group, Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister, warned a meeting in Dublin last night.
Mr Evans, a member of the UN secretary-general's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, was speaking last night at the second Sean Lester lecture at Dublin City University. "Sixty year olds - as I can personally testify - are notoriously unreformable," Mr Evans said.
"But this year - 2005 - is as good a chance as we will probably ever have to wrench the UN system into the shape it needs to be to confront the challenges of development, security and ensuring respect for human rights that the world and its peoples will face for decades ahead."
He paid tribute to the idealism of Irishman Sean Lester and his work in the League of Nations. "It was people like Sean Lester who lived that ideal for most of their working lives, and did keep it alive in the dark years when it was under heavy international assault." It was wholly appropriate that the lecture should be named in his honour.
Mr Evan said that "with the end of the Cold War, there came the chance to make a third try at getting the international system right, to create a United Nations system that worked as its founders intended it to.
"For a time that looked like happening. The first Iraq War of 1991, with the Security Council leading the global response to a case of naked cross-border aggression, saw the UN Charter working exactly as it was supposed to.
"The Cambodian peace settlement - with the crafting of which I was much involved - showed what the UN could do in peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding with real cooperation among the Security Council's Permanent Five.
"And peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding worked in many other places as well: more civil conflicts have been resolved by negotiation in the last fifteen years than in the last 200 and the number of violent deaths occurring in the course of conflict has, after averaging over 200,000 a year through most of the 1990s, now dropped to something closer to 20,000-30,000 a year. These are extraordinary achievements, and ones with which the UN system had everything to do.
"But just as not everything went wrong for the UN during the Cold War years, certainly by no means has everything gone right in the years since. Above all, the UN system failed utterly to deal effectively with a number of catastrophic internal situations involving massive human rights violations: the debacle of Somalia in 1993, the indefensible betrayal of Rwanda in 1994 in the face of the genocidal killing of some 800,000 people; the pathetic inadequacy of the response in Bosnia - worst of all with the Srebrenica massacre of 1995; and even in the case of Kosovo in 1999, when key countries were willing to act as morality demanded, but had to do so without the legal authority of the Security Council because of the threatened Russian veto, marginalising the UN yet again.
"Above all there was the debacle of the second Iraq War in 2003. The UN Security Council was bypassed again; this time without any general consensus at all, that war was justified.
"Worse, it occurred in the context of the US apparently challenging the fundamentals of the international system - asserting the right to take unilateral, preventive action against a threat not claimed to be imminent, and suggesting in effect that as the world's greatest power, but an inherently virtuous power, it could not and would not be bound by the same rules as everyone else."
All the elements are in place for taking a giant step forward, he argued. "As to the agenda for change, this has been mapped in detail in the two big reports commissioned by Kofi Annan - the Sachs Report on the Millennium Development Goals, the Report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change on 21st century security threats - and then by the Secretary-General's own report, In Larger Freedom, superbly distilling the essence of those two earlier reports in a blueprint for change ranging over development issues, security issues, human rights issues, and the basic architecture of the international system."