Peace-keeping: a whole new range of responsibilities.

• Position: United Nations' proposals to meet future demands to mitigate international conflicts - The Road to Reform - Cover Story

Peace-keeping, observed Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in his annual report on the work of the Organization, "now stretches across a heretofore unimagined range of United Nations activities and responsibilities".

Traditional assumptions, he continued, relating to the "upholding of agreements, the consent and cooperation of the parties and the minimum use of force, have all been under challenge from recent developments in certain peace-keeping operations".

In South Africa, for example, civilian UN observers have for the first time been sent to a country with the consent of the Government to assist in what is purely a domestic matter: containing the level of violence. And in The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, for the first time ever in UN history, military units have been deployed as a measure, of preventive diplomacy.

~Agenda' proposals

In his "An Agenda for Peace", Mr. Boutros-Ghali set out proposals for the future of peace operations undertaken by the UN, including: fostering preventive diplomacy through establishment of an early warning system for assessing possible threats to peace; pursuing greater roles in peacemaking by establishing a permanent standing UN force to serve as a "guarantor of international security"; responding to increasing demands for peace-keeping by creation of a $50-million revolving peace-keeping reserve fund; and promoting post-conflict peace-building by undertaking such tasks as demining combat zones, monitoring elections and repatriating refugees - as the UN has recently done in Cambodia.

Another increasingly important aspect of UN activities is humanitarian assistance. "Frequently, situations of humanitarian need provide indications of impending conflict even before they develop into more serious threats to international peace and security", the Secretary-General reported. "Early awareness of the root causes of conflict can allow appropriate preventive action to be taken."

To that end, the new Department of Humanitarian Affairs manages an inter-agency early-warning mechanism for examining Possible situations of mass population displacement.

"Food, water, land-mines, disease and death, and democratization, human rights and development are inextricably intertwined", he stated. "Efforts to deal with particular issues cannot succeed in the...