Bloodshed in Timor drives UN to action

NEW YORK - Slaughter on a distant patch of soil, not for the first time, has trampled on the best-laid plans of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Annan had not meant to open the Millennium Summit with talk of tragedy.

But just hours after the murder of three UN staff workers in West Timor, a rosy evocation of peace and light for mankind would have been tasteless.

It is hard for any Secretary-General not to take loss of life in the UN family personally.

The emotion felt by Annan was visible in his face as he stood at the podium of the General Assembly and asked a solemn favour of a hall filled with the world's most powerful people - to rise with him and to observe a minute of silence.

Those 60 seconds of quiet among so querulous a group was an exceptional tribute. The prime ministers and the presidents and other sundry leaders all bowed their heads together.

The deaths did more than just puncture the mood. Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was one of those to make explicit what many in the corridors were already observing - that what happened on Indonesian territory was one more vivid reminder of the inadequacy of the current arrangements for UN peacekeeping.

Yesterday, world leaders on the Security Council voted to overhaul peacekeeping operations to provide better trained troops that would respond faster to crises.

The resolution endorsed by presidents and prime ministers from the 15 council members included realistic mandates, proper training and equipment for the troops, a restructuring of the UN peacekeeping department and a possible new way of financing troops.

But the leaders of Russia and China came down sharply against intervention in other countries' affairs.

Russia sees such intervention as a potential precedent for interference in its own domestic troublespots such as Chechnya, while China regards it as threatening its policies toward Taiwan and Tibet, which it regards as internal matters.

Neither Blair nor any of the other leaders needed the latest atrocity to drive home the need for peacekeeping improvements.

Peacekeeping activities in the past weeks, months and years have supplied Annan and his organisation with enough humiliation and catastrophe already.

The worst has been in Sierra Leone, where 500 UN blue helmets were taken hostage in July and where even now six British soldiers are being held in captivity. In May two UN soldiers were killed in Sierra Leone.

One of the blackest days came in Rwanda in 1994, when seven Belgian soldiers serving with the UN died trying to protect the country's Prime Minister.

Reform is always a sluggish business at the UN but the will to make peacekeeping work better has gradually grown.

Last month, Annan published a report by a panel of experts calling for more money, more troops and coherent planning as part of an overhaul of UN peacekeeping missions around the world for the 21st century.

More controversially, the panel also stressed that the world body has to drop its neutrality and distinguish between aggressor and victim.

It failed to do this before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica a year later.

The lesson seems clear: if people are being abused inside a state's borders, then sensitivities about sovereignty should be ignored. The UN must hesitate less to interfere. .

Blair told this week's summit: "It is no longer good enough to organise blue-helmet operations as if they were still largely geared to marking an agreed ceasefire line between two states that have conceded to a UN presence. "The typical case now is fast-moving and volatile. The appalling attack on UN staff in West Timor is demonstrating this vividly."

US President Bill Clinton was similarly candid, saying it was time for the UN to "take a side, not merely to stand between the sides or on the sidelines."

It was also time, the President said, to give peacekeeping operations new methods and new muscle.

"Increasingly, the United Nations has been called into situations where brave people seek reconciliation but where the enemies seek to undermine it," Clinton said, citing UN peacekeeping operations in East Timor and Sierra Leone.

"But in both cases, the UN did not have the tools to finish the job. We must provide those tools, with peacekeepers who can be rapidly deployed with the right training and equipment, missions well-defined and well-led, with the necessary civilian police."

Blair went further. In a burst of enthusiasm, he urged fellow leaders to implement the findings of the August report within 12 months.

"This means a new contract between the UN and its members. The UN must alter radically its planning, intelligence and analysis, and develop a far more substantial professional military staff.

"When the moment comes, a field headquarters must be ready to move, with an operational communications system up and running immediately."

Britain has already offered to establish a training school.

Clinton, however, has always found it easier to offer encouragement to the UN - and there is no reason to doubt his personal commitment to the UN ideal - than to deliver any material help, thanks to hostility to the body among Republicans on Capitol Hill.

No delegates at the United Nations can listen to a US President without recalling the $US1.7 billion ($3.9 billion) that Washington owes in back payments.

- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS
Herald Online feature: the Timor mission

UN Transitional Administration in E Timor