'UN Peacekeepers Must Be Able To Carry Out Their Mandate'.

The Panel on United Nations Peace Operations

In March 2000, Secretary-General Kofi Annan set up an independent panel to make "a clear set of recommendations on how to do better in future in the whole range of United Nations activities in the area of peace and security". Chaired by former Algerian Foreign Minister Lakhdar Brahimi, the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations included members from all six continents, with wide experience in humanitarian, development and police work, as well as military peacekeeping.

In its report released on 23 August, the Panel stressed that "without renewed commitment on the part of Member States, significant institutional change and increased financial support", the United Nations would not be capable of executing the critical peacekeeping and peace-building tasks that are at the core of its mission: "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".

The Panel pointed Out that some of the peacekeeping missions of the past decade were particularly hard to accomplish. They tended to deploy where conflict had not resulted in victory for any side, or where a military stalemate or international pressure had brought fighting to a halt, but some of the parties to the conflict were not seriously committed to ending the confrontation. United Nations operations thus did not deploy into post-conflict situations but tried to create them, it said.

The United Nations and its members faced a pressing need to establish more effective strategies for conflict prevention, the Panel said. Furthermore, the Organization would continue to face the prospect of having to assist communities and nations in making the transition from war to peace, highlighting the key role of peace-building in complex peace operations. Therefore, the UN system needed to strengthen its permanent capacity to develop and implement peace-building strategies and support programmes.

The Panel concurred that consent of the local parties, impartiality and the use of force only in self-defence should remain the bedrock principles of peacekeeping. Experience showed, however, that in the context of intra-State or transnational conflicts, consent could be manipulated in many ways.

"Impartiality for United Nations operations", the Panel stressed, "must therefore mean adherence to the principles of the Charter." United Nations peacekeepers--troops or police--who witness violence against civilians should be presumed to be authorized to stop it, within their means, in support of basic UN principles. However, operations given a broad and explicit mandate for civilian protection must he given the specific resources needed to carry out that mandate, it said.

The first 6 to 12 weeks following a ceasefire or peace accord were often the most critical ones for establishing both a stable peace and the credibility of a new operation, the Panel said. Opportunities lost during that period were hard to regain. At the same time, when recommending force and other resource levels for a new mission, "the Secretariat must tell the Security Council what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear". Mission strengths must be set at levels according to realistic scenarios that take into account likely challenges to implementation. Security Council mandates, in turn, should reflect the clarity that peacekeeping operations...