Thank you for this interesting introduction.  It always surprises me when I hear my biography put forward in a way that sounds exciting and interesting.  In actual life it's far more complex and much more mundane. 

I'm very pleased that I have this opportunity to talk to you about the role of the U.N. in conflict intervention and management, particularly at this juncture when the United Nations' Security Council was unable to fulfill its role in preventing a conflict in Iraq, or, to put it another way, that the Security Councils was unable to reach a majority collective decision.  We all know that the United Nations was created 57 years ago on the ruins of the Second World War.  I'm sure that many of you who have read the U.N. [charter] are aware that the primary, or predominant, order request written into the charter by the allies was a wish that the United Nations will save the succeeding generations from the scourge of war.   

The states reasoned that they could only pursue their own prosperity and interests through common methods and international cooperation.  I would say that until very recently there was a fairly widely accepted view that no country, not even the most powerful, controlled global problems on its own.  They all believed that international cooperation was essential to safeguard the national security and economic interests of any state.  In recent weeks, we've witnessed a new approach to ensure collective security which some would argue goes contrary to the generally accepted notion.  I have to admit that the decision of the “Coalition of the Willing” to disarm Iraq militarily without a clear Security Council [approval] has deeply shaken the foundations of this premise and consequently is leading to discussions about the basic philosophy of the United Nations.

The inability of the Security Council to play a role in preventing the conflict in Iraq has led to speculation on the relevance of the United Nations in maintaining peace and security.  However, the words "powerless" or "irrelevant" are clearly not new to the United Nations vocabulary.  As the former Secretary of the U.N., Bhoutros Bhoutros-Ghali observed, 127 wars erupted in the first 50 years of the United Nations' existence.  During most of that time, I would argue that the Security Council was in fact paralyzed to act.  The frequent use of veto by the five permanent members, particularly by the Soviet Union, rendered the Security Council helpless to prevent or to contain armed conflicts.  The debate about the reform of the Security Council, reform both in terms of size and in composition — as you know the Security Council today still faithfully reflects the reality of 1945 but not of 2003 — it seems to me that what has just happened can give a new and urgent impetus to the debate on the reform of the Council, including the use of veto.

So, should we concede to the thinking that the United Nations has become irrelevant?  I would like to argue that the contrary is true.  I think we can derive certain encouragement from the fact that the United Nations, and specifically the Security Council, was the focus and forum of an intense and sustained debate over several months on how best to disarm Iraq.  Secretary General, Kofi Annan himself observed on one occasion that in his 40 years with the United Nations — and as you can see he's far more experienced than I am — he could not recall any single issue dealt with by the U.N. that led to so many Security Council meetings at the administrative level.  Furthermore, the probable breadth and depth of disappointment in so many countries at the failure of the Security Council to find a collective solution to prevent armed conflict in Iraq shows how much was and is expected of the United Nations.  I think that it reflects the conviction of people all over the world that the United Nations is the institution for decisions on matters of collective peace and security.  It is my belief that the United Nations family may come out of this difficult experience more relevant than ever. 

Let me spend a few minutes on what I think is one of the important tasks that the United Nations and, in particular, the General Assembly, has to deal with, and that's the issue of conflict prevention.  I do believe that conflict prevention is the cornerstone of the United Nations Charter.  I will not read Article I or any other article of the U.N. charter; otherwise you will get even more bored.  Let me just stress that in Chapter I, the U.N. Charter talks about the need for member states to take collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to peace and for the suppression of acts of aggression.  Generally, the U.N. charter makes clear that the United Nations enjoys unique legitimacy and a broad mandate for the prevention of armed conflict.  The problem is that the United Nations, despite all of its potential for conflict prevention and vocal support from many member states, has not been able to translate this into any substantive preventive action. 

The focus of the international community has tended to remain on short-term responses to emergencies in the face of immediate suffering.  The only preventive action that can be regarded as successful which comes to my mind is the deployment of the preventive deployment force in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. 

I would say that this kind of limited view of conflict prevention is changing.  One of the reasons is that the value of preventive policies over reactive ones, which seek to address conflicts only after they have had already broken out, is not much more fully recognized.  The culture of prevention over culture of reaction I quote General Secretary Kofi Annan from his speech when he accepted the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize is, I think, now one of the main focuses of the United Nations' assets.  Kofi Annan outlined the operation of prevention, which should consist of diplomatic activities and good offices, especially when the risk of conflict is imminent.  He also argued for structured prevention through accessing the vast array of social, economic, and environmental factors that constitute root causes of armed conflicts.  The change for the United Nations is, therefore, to mobilize the collective potential of the United Nations’ system with far greater coherence and with focus on conflict prevention.  I think that the key obstacle in the adoption of an integrated, timely approach to armed conflict prevention is the need to mobilize member states to provide adequate resources for prevention.  I would like to stress that the United Nations is an inter-governmental organization and is therefore clearly dependent on the political will of member states, both for its resources and operational mandate.  Therefore, the United Nations must always find a kind of a difficult path between what circumstances demand and what actors and interests allow.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me also, as I am currently President of the General Assembly, mention its role in conflict prevention and management.  Conflict prevention is one of my priorities for the current session, and I pledge to work intensively on a draft of the very first resolution that the United Nations will hopefully adopt devoted to ways and means of preventing armed conflict.  This draft was begun several months ago, but is not yet completed.  The negotiations are very tough, very challenging, and very time consuming as they reflect a multitude of different priorities, perspectives and, of course, different national interests.  But I do believe that before the end of my term of office, a pragmatic resolution will be achieved — and hopefully by consensus.  At this moment, we're not there yet.  I hope that the resolution, once agreed, would not only reaffirm the primary responsibilities of member states for conflict prevention, but will recognize the role of democratization, the role of social and economic development or compliance with international law as having a preventive value. 

I will very briefly also mention conflict management that, by nature, is supposed to be implemented in those cases where we were not successful with conflict prevention.  The basic challenge of conflict management lies not simply in containing conflict, but in working through it constructively. The underlying premise being that conflict management should help to convert violent confrontation into a nonviolent acceptable political solution through very carefully crafted democratic promotion and democratization initiatives.

I think that in the past, if you look at the role which the U.N. played in actually managing conflict and promoting democracy, if you look at places like Cyprus, Kashmir, the Middle East or even the many years of conflict in the former Yugoslavia, it's clear that at that time the peacekeeping role of the U.N. was limited separation of warring parties — as opposed to today, when the peace operations are much more complex and the U.N. has taken on many more responsibilities.  In most missions, and I would mention particularly Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, the United Nations had scores of human rights observers and judicial experts to carry out very detailed mandates that, in effect, helped to transform those societies.  So I would argue that generally these missions should be seen as successes.  After all, in each country there has been no return to violence, elections have been carried out, and reconstruction efforts have proceeded. 

On the other hand, as for any list of successes, I can offer a similarly long list of failures.  I would agree that the peacekeeping mission in Africa was the least successful.  The reason being that there was a lack of political will on the part of both the international and regional superpowers and the very narrow mandate enjoyed by the Security Council.  The most serious case is 1994 — Rwanda — when despite the presence of modest U.N. peacekeeping forces, the Security Council and the Western world in general ignored that nightmare and refused to attempt to stop the violence.  So, I can just underline that it is important to understand that without significant political will, particularly on the part of the developed countries, the United Nations often, as was the case in Africa, can do little more than observe.

Let me come to a conclusion so that will give us time to ask questions.  I would stress that the United Nations has been, and is, involved in numerous conflicts around the globe.  You may recall virtually any conflict and you then find the United Nations somehow engaged in helping towards reaching settlement and resolution. 

Therefore, in conclusion, I repeat that the United Nations does have the legitimacy and the expertise to prevent disputes from escalating into armed conflict, to bring parties to the negotiating table, to help negotiate cease fires when the fighting actually breaks out and, more recently, it is involved in post-conflict reconstruction.  Post-conflict reconstruction is, of course, now an extremely topical item, and I refer to the U.N. experience in Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan.  So I would argue that the United Nations may not be a perfect model for resolution of disputes; on the other hand, it clearly provides a forum for mediation, negotiations, discussions, deployment of peacekeeping activities and development of international law.  What I consider important when thinking about the role of the United Nations in conflict resolution is that it's inexhaustible efforts can be translated into a successful outcome only by the willingness of the parties to the dispute.  The United Nations can, and does, help the parties to find a common ground and to seek a compromise, but it is, after all, the member states that can make them work.  The United Nations is not an artificial body with lots of divisions and powers that could act outside the will of member states.  It does nothing else but reflect that will or, as frequently happens, the lack of it.

When I was Minister of Foreign Affairs [of the Czech Republic] I was confronted with constant reminders of what is rare in politics, and was told not to have any illusions about the way the world actually operates.  Whenever I, in fact, began to succumb to optimism and illusion my deputy at the time, currently our Ambassador to the United Nations here present, Mr. Kmonicek, was always ready to remind me that the world is a far less nice place than I would like it to be.  Therefore I recall from a British director, Stanley Kubrick, [an observation] that great states frequently behave as gangsters and small nations frequently behave like prostitutes.  That sounded like rare political observation.  My sincere hope, now that I'm in the United Nations, is that multi-national organizations such as the United Nations can by their work make this rare political observation, in time, less and less true and less and less applicable, hopefully, with the help of people like yourselves. 

Thank you.