Annan Delivers Strong Message: Speech Outlines World Conflict Challenges

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– April 30, 1998Posted in: Current News

Annan Delivers Strong Message:

Speech Outlines World Conflict Challenges

BY DANA DURBIN
Rice News Staff
April 30, 1998

During his April 23 speech at Rice, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan addressed the challenge of preventing conflict the world over–a strategy that includes the use of preventive disarmament such as has been employed in Iraq.

Annan spoke to members of the Rice community as well as students and faculty from local high schools and universities at Autry Court as part of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Shell Lecture Series.

The process of preventive disarmament came to the forefront in February when Iraqi President Sadam Hussein refused to allow U.N. weapons inspectors access to certain sites. Annan negotiated a key agreement with Hussein, resolving the Iraqi crisis and the threat of military action.

As head of the world peacekeeping organization, Annan called conflict prevention “the heart of the United Nations’ mission for the next century.”

“For the United Nations, there is no higher goal, no deeper commitment and no greater ambition than preventing armed conflict,” Annan said.

Genuine and lasting conflict prevention is the means to achieving the cardinal mission of the United Nations–ensuring human security, he added.

In every diplomatic mission and development project pursued by the United Nations, the U.N. is doing the work of prevention, he said. The U.N.’s operational prevention strategy involves four fundamental activities–early warning, preventive diplomacy, preventive deployment and early humanitarian action. Preventive disarmament, development and peace-building are activities of the organization’s structural prevention strategy.

“Guiding and infusing all these efforts is the promotion of human rights, democratization and good governance as the foundations of peace,” Annan said.

Preventive deployment has had a remarkable effect in the explosive region of the Balkans, he explained, where its role in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia suggests that adequately maintained and supported preventive deployment of military troops can make the difference between war and peace.

The importance of preventive disarmament also needs to be recognized, Annan said.

“The United Nations has disarmed combatants in the context of peacekeeping operations from Nicaragua to Mozambique,” Annan said. “Urgent action is needed to curtail the flow of conventional weapons. In particular, we must do more to halt the proliferation of small arms with which most wars are fought today.”

As part of his agenda of reforming the U.N., Annan said he has established the Department of Disarmament Affairs, which will have high on its agenda the task of “micro-disarmament” by focusing on the illegal trade of small arms.

In other cases, Annan and the U.N. have concentrated on destroying yesterday’s weapons to prevent them from being used today. Such is the case with Iraq, where the inspections of the U.N. Special Commission has succeeded in destroying more weapons of mass destruction than the entire Gulf War.

It was in support of the Special Commission’s mission to destroy these weapons that Annan negotiated an agreement with Hussein that restored and expanded U.N. access to Iraqi sites.

“The agreement reached in Baghdad was neither a victory nor a defeat for any one person, nation or group of nations,” Annan said. “Certainly the United Nations and the world community lost nothing, gave away nothing and conceded nothing of substance. But by halting, at least for now, the renewal of military hostilities in the Gulf, it was a victory for peace, for reason, for the resolution of conflict by diplomacy.”

The agreement also served as a reminder to the entire world why the U.N. was established in the first place: to prevent the outbreak of unnecessary conflict when the will of the world community can be achieved through diplomacy; to seek and find international solutions to international problems; to obtain respect for international law and agreements from a recalcitrant party without destroying that party’s dignity and willingness to cooperate; and to assure the destruction of weapons of mass destruction through methods that aerial bombardment can never achieve.

However, Annan added that the policies of prevention will succeed only if the root causes of conflict are addressed as well, causes which are often economical and social.

“Poverty, endemic under-development and weak or nonexistent institutions inhibit dialogue and invite the resort to violence,” he said.

Following his speech, Annan answered questions from the audience, many of which focused on the negotiations with Hussein and the lack of payment by member countries, including the United States, to the United Nations.

President Malcolm Gillis presented Annan with the President’s Award of Distinguished Achievement. Gillis said that he and Annan have crossed paths before, as Gillis spent several months in Ghana, the African country where Annan is from, as a member of the Ghana Tax Commission.

Though they never met while Gillis was in Ghana, Gillis said he came to know a lot about Annan as they have mutual friends.

Gillis called Annan a “leader of global significance” and said that because of Annan the world today is a better and safer place.

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