ONUSAL: mission accomplished.

• Position: United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador, human-rights mission

Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared that El Salvador had "moved decisively away from the violence and divisions of the past, towards a society based on peace, democracy and human rights". Although the mandate of the UN Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) was ending on 30 April and chat operation was to leave the country 43 months after the initial human rights observers had been deployed, the UN work was "not yet complete", the Secretary-General stated on I April, at a dinner hosted by Salvadoran President Calderon Sol in the capital city of San Salvador.

A small team would remain in El Salvador "to continue its observation of the areas of the peace agreement that remain outstanding", he added.

ONUSAL would be remembered by Salvadorans, Mr. Boutros-Ghali said, not only for its peace-keeping work, but also for monitoring human rights and national elections, observing the disarmament process, demobilization and land resettlement programmes, training of judges and police officers, as well as its development projects to "bring clean water to distant villages, to train health workers or to improve crops".

But the essence was "greater than the sum of these parts", the Secretary-General stressed. The UN mission was to bring "peace . .. through justice, human rights, democracy and development", allowing people to "realize their own potential in freedom".

Established under Security Council resolution 693 11991) of 20 May 1991 as a human rights monitoring mission, ONUSAL was the "first international mission to undertake verification within a sovereign United Nations Member State, prior to a cease-fire agreement", Mr. Boutros-Ghali said. It later became multidimensional and "pioneered the second generation" of UN peace keeping operations.

The Council on 23 November 1994 decided, by its resolution 961 (1994), that ONUSAL's withdrawal was to be completed by 30 April 1995.

The Council, in a 17 February letter (S/1995/144) welcomed the Secretary-General's proposal to put in place, following the disbandment of ONUSAL, a mechanism...