NATIONS UNIES

EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL CABINET DU SECRETAIRE GENERAL

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CONFIDENTIAL REF:CDC/54/6-10/00 DATE:6 July 2000

TO: Mr. Lamin Sise FROM: S. Iqbal Riza // /] / Secretary-General's Party Chef de Cabine^/ (J /'/ C/o UNDP EOSG //< /V^Q Lome New York f ' / \

FAXNO: 228 21 5708/1641 FAX NO: (212) 963-2155 ^, SUBJECT: Shawcross Book c^^^ TOTAL NUMBER OF TRANSMITTED PAGES INCLUDING THIS PAGE £" '

You will find the attached review by Gareth Evans of direct interest. If SG has not seen it, it would be good in flight reading on departure .7^^-

Thanks and regards.

cc: Deputy Secretary-General DELIVER US FROM EVIL: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict By William Shawcross Simon & Schuster 445pp

Reviewed by Gareth Evans

As I write, the United Nations is being humiliated in Sierra Leone, rendered impotent in the Congo, struggling to consolidate peace in East Timor, and playing no role at all in stopping the bloodshed in Sri Lanka. The Balkans are still a tinderbox, Ethiopia and Eritrea are back at war, Chechnya is still ugly and Zimbabwe is disintegrating. Warlords and thugs still flourish; political leaders still make appalling misjudgments; killing, maiming and destruction continue apparently unabated; the notion of an "international community" seems as oxymoronic as ever; and everyone finds something to criticize in the response to it all of the United Nations. Welcome to William Shawcross's "world of endless conflict" - one where we remain conspicuously undelivered from evil, despite all the learning experience we accumulated in the 1990s.

In his important new book Shawcross writes compellingly about that experience. The best part of it may be the sense it conveys of what it is like actually to be there, in the corridors and aeroplanes of the UN and elsewhere^ as people who are not, by and large, fools, knaves or drones wrestle with a tumult of intractable problems. The commentators and historians never seem to see it this way, but when you are the Secretary General of the United Nations, or the Foreign Minister of a major country (or a minor one, for that matter, although then it doesn't matter so much) those problems don't come at you neatly sequenced like containers on a freight train, able to be rolled one at a time into a siding, systematically unpacked and repacked, and appropriately despatched. They just land on your head, lots of them at once. And you have to deal with them as best you can, usually with incomplete information, not much agreement from others who matter, and in the case of the UN, practically no resources - military, civil, material or financial - at your immediate disposal. From this perspective, it's more a matter for remark that things ever go right than that they so often go wrong.

There are those who think that Shawcross overdoes the empathy. David Rieff, for example, in a fierce attack in the New Republic, has written off Deliver Us from Evil as a pathetic apologia for the UN in general and in particular, so misconceived, and so blind to the faults of his hero, as to be worthless. Shawcross has been accused before of getting too close to those he writes about, notably and the Shah of . Certainly his style is not that of the tub-thumping Antipodean school. He does try to get inside the heads of his protagonists, identifying their agonies of choice and suffering with them, even when disagreeing with what they say or do. But when his empathy runs out and his anger is engaged he is a formidably effective polemicist.

1 Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of is brilliant in this respect. I'll declare my hand. Looking back, I think that 1979 book was for me the single most influential work on foreign policy I have ever read, a wonderful evocation of how people in high places who are, again, neither stupid nor evilly motivated, can nonetheless do wrongheaded and awful things - in this case, although they couldn't have known it, creating the conditions for the most harrowing genocide since the Holocaust.

In his current book Shawcross is once again less than kind to the . Particular fire is directed, and deservedly so, at Warren Christopher for rejecting the Vance-Owen plan for Bosnia, apparently without reading it; at Madeleine Albright for persuading the Security Council to turn its back on Rwanda; and , passim, for rarely if ever matching the moral rhetoric of his foreign policy with timely and useful practical commitments. And there are plenty of other senior figures, especially from other Security Council member countries, who get a pasting along the way for their tendency to be more responsive to national interest, narrowly conceived, than to the world's continuing villainy.

By contrast, he is very kind indeed to Secretary General Annan, and certainly more kind to several other UN personnel (including some of those involved in Cambodia) than, in my own experience, he should have been. Kofi Annan does have the makings of a great Secretary General, in the Hammarskjold mould. He is intelligent and principled; a committed institutional reformer; a decent and attractive human being; and has made some very courageous policy calls, not least in his insistence on the right and obligation of the UN to override claims of state sovereignty when gross violations of human rights are perpetrated. But Shawcross's unrelenting homage is a tad cloying. The deal that Annan did on weapons inspections with , his first really major foray into personal diplomacy as Secretary-General, had a predictably short shelf-life. And he now frankly acknowledges that, back in 1994 when he was in charge of peace keeping, he was one of the many officials whose performance over Rwanda deserved censure, but it is only since the devastating report last December by Ingvar Carlsson's inquiry (which, to be fair, the new Secretary General commissioned) that he has been prepared to acknowledge that. Though anything is possible with the present Pope, most observers would feel Kofi Annan's sanctification a little premature.

Shawcross certainly knows the right kinds of questions to ask about the world as we now find it, and there are a multitude of them. Whose responsibility is it to stop people killing and maiming each other? When the people of Bosnia or Rwanda or Somalia or Sierra Leone want to tear each other apart, why should any Australian or American or Bangladeshi life be put at risk to stop them? If it is the collective conscience of mankind that demands intolerance of gross human rights violations, what is the point at which that conscience should cut in? Who should make the call, when, and by what criteria? If it was right for the UN to protect Kuwait, why not Chechnya? If sovereignty matters for the UN, why didn't it in South Africa or Bosnia or Haiti or Somalia? If regional organisations like NATO can do what the UN sometimes cannot, why don't they always do it? If sovereignty mattered to NATO in Russia, why not in Yugoslavia when it came to Kosovo?

And more. When the responsibility to intervene is accepted, how should it be discharged? If it's a matter of humanitarian support, should people be fed come what may, even if genocidaires are going to benefit, as they certainly did in Central Africa ? Is any well- intended intervention better than none? If 22 000 UN troops were needed to keep the peace in Cambodia, how could 8 000 ever have been enough in Sierra Leone, or 5 500 in a Congo the size of Western Europe? If there's a distinction to be made, as there is, between keeping a peace already agreed, and enforcing one that hasn't been, how could 600 troops ever have been enough to enforce the peace in the "safe area " of Srbenica? Who ultimately is responsible when United Nations performance falls so lamentably, and so often, behind the promise? Is there, at the end of the day, an "international community" worth the name? Or are those of us who spend our time trying to mobilise that community simply wasting our time?

I'ts not a serious criticism of Deliver Us from Evil to say that Shawcross is better at asking these questions than answering them. His purpose throughout is not so much analytical as informative and polemical - to describe how the world is presently responding to conflict, and to cry out for us to do it better. And he does all that very well. But that leaves the job of analysis and prescription - of describing what can and should be done to improve the world - still to be done. How should we go about it?

The first step is to have it recognised and accepted that the problem is a manageable one, and becoming more so as time goes on. It might not seem like that from the daily news bulletins, but the evidence is unequivocal. Wars between states have almost completely disappeared, for a number of reasons: the impact of economic interdependence; the impact of the spread of democracy; the hugely destructive costs when weighed against problematic benefits; and both underlying and reflecting these developments, the virtual disappearance in industrialised states of the ideology of bellicisme., that saw virtue and nobility in war.

What is harder to intuitively accept, but just as true, is that wars within states - the ethno- nationalist conflicts that have driven so many headlines in the last decade - are also dramatically on the wane. As meticulously tracked by Ted Gurr and his Maryland University team, among others, the story is that many of the fires lit when Cold War restraints were lifted have now burned out, and we are gradually getting better at dampening those still smouldering. After a high point in 1992, fewer separatist wars are now being fought than at any time since the 1970s; more old wars have ended than new ones have begun; the number of internal conflicts has fallen by over a third during the nineties; and many of those that remain are de-escalating rather than escalating..

Some will see this as a perfect excuse for inaction: don't just do something, sit there. The trend is clear, and sooner or later it will all go away. This position gets some extra nourishment from commentators like Edward Luttwak, who has famously argued that most forms of external intervention actually make things worse and that it is better to "let minor wars burn themselves out". But just how much injustice and misery should we be prepared to live with? The truth of the matter is that more often than not wars within states, just as between states, do require competent intervention if they are to produce any kind of timely resolution and just and lasting peace. One can, and Luttwak does, point to an uncomfortable number of cases when intervention has done more harm than good - when, for example, parties have taken ceasefires and the presence of international observers simply as R & R opportunities, or where they have used Western-supplied camps as militia training grounds. But as Chester Crocker has put it in a telling recent reply in Foreign Affairs, "These are not examples of 'interventionism' - they are examples of incompetence."

Achieving peace in Cambodia is one of many counter-examples, including Namibia and Mozambique, where the international community, genuinely acting as a community, really made a difference. The civil war in that benighted country, with the supported by China, was dragging on endlessly; hundreds of thousands of occupied refugee camps on the Thai border; many people were dying and for many more life was barely worth living. The basic point of the UN peace plan was to create, through introducing a UN administration with the participation of all warring elements (including, controversially, the Khmer Rouge), a face-saving way for China to withdraw from the play, allowing in turn the Khmer Rouge to wither into impotence - which is exactly what happened. The plan, in the event, did not consolidate democracy and human rights in the way we would all love to have achieved, but it created at least the foundations on which they could be built over time, and the process did bring a durable peace, the return of all refugees, and hope back into people's lives'.

It is not to generate complacency that we should be emphasizing the fact that internal conflict is declining. It is to make clear that competent, well-resourced and successful intervention by the international community, which has been all too rare and reluctant in the past, should be much more readily deliverable in the future. The hard cases are still very hard, but there are not many of them, and every reason to believe they will be fewer in the future, as the logic of the forces which have already operated to dramatically cut inter-state conflict gradually works its way intra-state.

All that said, it is important to go on making the argument as to why states should care about deadly conflict in small or insignificant places far away. That's the second big task for advocates of a saner and more civilised world. Part of the argument is simply moral, and always will be: we should care when fellow human beings suffer grievously, whomever and wherever they are, and not only in cases of fully-fledged genocide. Polling evidence from country after country is that people do care, once they are made aware of these situations and can see them in human terms - the CNN factor. And they do want their governments to do something about them, even to the extent of risking national blood as well as national treasure. Governments, by and large, are more reluctant to do the right thing than their own citizens.

The argument is also very practical. National interest advocates like Josephy Nye Jr have been arguing that, genocide apart, there is no case for America squandering its unique military and political capital on lower-order conflicts. But this ignores the extent to which many apparently minor scale conflicts have much wider regional ramifications. Chester Crocker again puts the answer succinctly: "Regional crises exist, they get worse when left unattended, and they have a way of imposing themselves on the Western agenda through humanitarian activism or concerns over terrorism, criminal business networks, failed states, ecological disaster, and global health crises."

But it is still very difficult to persuade most governments to accept the principle of humanitarian intervention. Kofi Annan found that after his pathbreaking speech to the UN General Assembly last year, arguing that what he called "individual sovereignty" deserved as much respect and protection as the more traditional UN preoccupation with state sovereignty. In subsequent Assembly speeches, far more member states opposed than supported him. But the argument is immensely worth pursuing, not least because support can be found for it in the UN Charter itself.

For a start, the Charter is full of references to the obligation to protect human rights, and the most basic human right of all, that of life, is constantly violated on a very large scale in'intra-state conflict. The Article 2.7 prohibition on the UN doing anything to intervene in matters "essentially within the domestic jurisdiction" of any state did not inhibit the General Assembly's enthusiasm for the application of sanctions (a classic enforcement tool, if not always a very successful one) against South Africa over the question of apartheid. Nor has it inhibited military interventions, for example, in the internal conflicts in Bosnia (to protect ethnic-cleansing threatened civilians in "safe areas") and Somalia (to relieve starvation in a country torn apart by war lords): whether the mandate and resources were appropriate in either case is, of course, another question. The point is simply that gross violations of human rights are everybody's business.

Similarly, there is a growing move to recognise that the Charter's many references to "international peace and security" can and should be read as being as much about threats to citizens as to borders. "Human security" is certainly at least as much threatened by major intra-state conflicts as by war between states. Article 99 authorises the Secretary General to bring to the Security Council "any matter that in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security". Article 2.7 is not a show-stopper: here as with human rights, it leaves open the question of what is within domestic jurisdiction.

The third big task for those who want the world better delivered from evil is to ensure that when intervention does occur, it is with maximum possible effectiveness. In many ways, it is at this operational level that the record of the international community (not only when working through the UN) has been at its most lamentable. The problems are by now all well known. There's the constant preoccupation, particularly at the Security Council level, with reaching agreed solutions, not workable ones; the willingness to give only Chapter VI mandates (no use offeree except in self-defence) to peace keeping forces when there is manifestly only a tenuous and fragile peace to keep - the Sierra Leone issue; the unwillingness to match even Chapter VII mandates (use of force for civilian protection, or more) with enough resources to enable those mandates to be properly discharged - as now in the Congo; the unwillingness of the risk-obsessed NATO powers to threaten in Kosovo the one form of military response (viz the deployment of ground troops) that would have deterred Milosevic from his ethnic cleansing at the outset; the unwillingness to even think about a standing rapid reaction force that would add some bite, and speed, to the UN's response capability; and the pathetic inadequacy of nearly every civilian-support operation, from Cambodia to Kosovo, that has accompanied a peace keeping mission.

And on top of all this there is the unwillingness by many member states, not least the US, to make available - even in the form of legally owed dues - the financial and personnel resources the UN needs to do anything well. The whole central UN system still operates on a budget of USD 1.5 billion, about a billion dollars less than the Tokyo Fire Department. It is hard to blame the UN Secretariat for a less than admirable record in fire- fighting when, as Kofi Annan put it in his recent Millennium Report, "Every time there is a fire we must first find fire engines and the funds to run them before we can start dousing any flames."

If there is a continuing problem with reactive will, as we have to expect there will be for a long time yet, it ought to be much easier to mobilize preventive will. Getting an international culture of prevention firmly established is the fourth big task for those of us who want a better world than the one Shawcross portrays. In many ways it's the most important task of all, and there is some evidence - at least in the lip service stakes - that this is being recognised. Quite apart from- anything else, prevention is infinitely cheaper than cure. In the early nineties I tasked the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs to do a crude but instructive comparative exercise, on the one hand putting together from all our sources an estimate of what it cost our side alone to fight the Gulf War; and on the other hand assessing the cost of putting in place a world-wide system of early warning and preventive diplomacy support, which might conceivably have avoided it. We estimated that to put one hundred seasoned preventive diplomacy practitioners into a series of regional centres for a year would cost USD 21 million. The actual cost incurred over just six weeks by the Gulf War coalition partners was USD 70 billion.

There are now shelf-loads of books and reports drawing lessons from past failures and showing how preventive diplomacy can be better done. Good policy prescriptions, and creative, fleet-footed statesmanship will go on being crucial in stopping crises escalating into deadly conflicts. But there is, of course, more to prevention than that. Addressing the underlying causes of conflict, when conflict is based, as it so often appears to be, on economic and social deprivation, raises a set of issues as broad, on the face of it, as the whole development debate. But this doesn't mean we are destined to be impotent in the short term. We are learning more all the time about what are the most crucial determinants of conflict. Recent studies, particularly by Frances Stewart at Oxford, have shown that it is not economic deprivation as such that generates intra-state bloodshed, even when there is a dramatic and indefensible gap between the richest and poorest in society. What matters, overwhelmingly, is that the deprivation be experienced, along with other forms of discrimination and alienation, by a particular ethnic or other group in the society in question. Mobilising the political leadership, both domestically and internationally, to respond to this kind of group inequality is never likely to be easy, but at least the task is more intrinsically manageable - with all the political, constitutional and economic techniques now available (and being used in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere) - than trying to reshape and raise the economic foundations of an entire society.

One has to approach all of this with a healthy sense of realism. In the offices and corridors where decisions are made, the urgent does nearly always drive out the important: it is very hard to get senior people to focus on problems that are not right now exploding round their ears. And it is very hard to get most practising politicians excited about a form of activity which, by its very nature, is never going to be noticed if you are successful. Nor can one be naive about the limits on effective action if prevention fails. The biggest global powers, and regional powers, will insist on immunities not available to lesser mortals, and there won't be many volunteers for intervention in them without their consent: thus, in the last year, Russia with Chechnya, and Indonesia with East Timor. Absolute consistency is absolutely unattainable, and some double standards are going to go on being a fact of life.

But there is some ground for the optimistic note on which Shawcross ends his book. However horrible things have been, they're better than they were. The conflicts and potential conflicts that are left are manageable in number, and becoming more so. To the extent that money can solve them, not a huge amount is required compared to what the world is prepared to spend on everything else, including defence. And to the extent that they require, as they all do in one way or another, human intelligence and will to resolve or contain them, publics around the world are much better informed now than they ever were, and are becoming more and more intolerant of folly, dissimulation and indolence on the part of their political leaders. If Shawcross's book has made a wider audience even more intolerant in this respect, it will admirably have served its purpose.

3760 words

15 May 2000