UNITED NATIONS NATIONS UNIES EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL CABINET DU SECRETAIRE GENERAL OUTGOING FACSIMILE 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 Kofi Annan 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 Rupert Murdoch and the Shah of Iran. 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 Cambodia 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 United States. 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 Bill Clinton, 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 Saddam Hussein, 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.