UNITED NATIONS — Secretary-General Kofi Annan sounded a warning Monday to a frequently paralyzed Security Council, urging it to act faster and more effectively to meet the challenge of a world engulfed in civil wars that quickly descend into the slaughter of helpless civilian populations.
In an address to world leaders at the opening day of debate in the General Assembly, Annan also said that countries which have resisted international intervention will no longer be able to hide behind protestations of national sovereignty when they flagrantly violate the rights of citizens.
“Nothing in the charter precludes a recognition that there are rights beyond borders,” he said, on the day an Australian-led force landed in East Timor to help complete its separation from Indonesia. A Western diplomat called the speech “courageous and very important.”
Annan did not single out the United States, the Security Council’s most powerful member, or any other major nation, but his unusually strong criticism of the Security Council’s initial failures to deal with genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and to agree on responding to Serbian atrocities in Kosovo over the last year pointed obliquely at American policy decisions.
President Clinton, who would normally speak on the first day of the general debate in the assembly, postponed his appearance until Tuesday out of respect for Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism.
Annan spoke Monday as officials of the council’s five permanent members, who have veto power — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — were preparing to meet again to try to end another Security Council deadlock, this one over Iraq.
For nearly a year, since the American bombing of Baghdad in December, there have been no arms inspections in Iraq, which must be certified as disarmed before 9-year-old sanctions can be lifted. The council is sharply divided on how to devise a new monitoring system, while Iraq has used the time to harden its position against any kind of renewed inspection program.
In Rwanda, the United States blocked council action while tens of thousands of Tutsi and their moderate Hutu neighbors were massacred. Annan, who was then in charge of U.N. peacekeeping, has borne a lot of criticism for what was essentially a political decision made in Washington, where memories of American soldiers killed in Somalia in 1993 were still fresh. The secretary-general has called for an investigation in response to charges that the United Nations knew about the imminent genocide but did nothing.
In Kosovo, the Clinton administration, fearing a veto of military action from Russia or China, circumvented the United Nations and went directly to NATO.
“While the genocide in Rwanda will define for our generation the consequences of inaction in the face of mass murder,” Annan said, “the more recent conflict in Kosovo has prompted important questions about the consequences of action in the absence of complete unity on the part of the international community.”
To those who hailed the NATO bombing of Kosovo as a new era of quicker action outside the United Nations, Annan asked two questions that reflect the concerns of many nations uneasy with the prospect of unbridled American power.
“Is there not a danger of such interventions undermining the imperfect, yet resilient, security system created after the second World War, and of setting dangerous precedents for future interventions without a clear criterion to decide who might invoke these precedents and in what circumstances?”
But the secretary-general had no consolations for the countries, particularly in the Third World, that argue that the United Nations has no right to overstep national borders. That case was presented Monday by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria who said in his speech that “interference can only occur with the consent of the state concerned.”
Algeria, where violence by Islamic militants and government forces has left thousands dead in recent years, has refused to allow international human rights monitoring.
“We do not deny the right of northern hemisphere public opinion to denounce the breaches of human rights where they occur,” said Bouteflika, who is also chairman of the Organization of African Unity and spoke on its behalf.
“Furthermore, we do not deny that the United Nations has the right and the duty to help suffering humanity. But we remain extremely sensitive to any undermining of our sovereignty, not only because sovereignty is our last defense against the rules of an unequal world but because we are not taking part in the decision-making process of the Security Council.”
The United States has also been ambivalent about the trend toward intervention by international organizations into a country’s affairs. Although the Clinton administration proposed a series of international war crimes tribunals, it has stopped short of backing a permanent international criminal court because of Pentagon objections. It has also failed to ratify a number of international treaties including a convention banning land mines.
The composition of the council, with its five most powerful members unchanged since the end of World War II, rankles many nations.
Although the Security Council acted with relative speed in the case of East Timor last week, as the secretary-general pointed out Monday, the council did wait for an Indonesian invitation. The council had not been prepared to take preventive action, although there were numerous reports reaching the United Nations and government capitals about threats from the quasi-official militias opposed to independence for the territory, threats that turned to carnage after the East Timorese overwhelmingly rejected continued association with Indonesia.
Nevertheless several leaders mentioned that the action on East Timor by the council set an example of strong international support for people who have made an important choice in a free vote and paid a terrible price.
“Whoever saw the images of the Timorese on voting day,” said President Jorge Sampaio of Portugal, the former colonial power in East Timor, “clutching their registration cards, waiting in orderly lines for the long-awaited moment to express freely their will, must have reacted with strong emotion, and surely perceived in those faces and gestures, the universal appeal of democracy, freedom and justice.”
Half a century after the founding of the United Nations as a club of countries whose national interests often overrode those of their own populations or people in trouble in other nations, Annan said unambiguously that countries can no longer cite sovereign rights when it is clear to the world that they are committing abuses against their citizens.
“This developing international norm in favor of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter will no doubt continue to pose profound challenges to the international community,” he said. He told the audience of world leaders that the U.N. charter should not be misread.
“In response to this turbulent era of crises and interventions, there are those who have suggested that the charter itself — with its roots in the aftermath of global interstate war — is ill-suited to guide us in a world of ethnic wars and intrastate violence,” Annan said. “I believe they are wrong.”
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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