Global Policy Forum

By Brian Knowlton

Washington - President Bill Clinton, praising UN peace efforts in Kosovo and East Timor, called on the United Nations on Tuesday to undertake greater moves to halt mass killings around the world but cautioned, ''We cannot do everything everywhere.'' In his annual address to the General Assembly in New York, Mr. Clinton said it was time to ''strengthen the capacity of the international community to prevent and whenever possible to stop outbreaks of mass killings.''

''We must do more,'' he said.

Mr. Clinton also urged the United Nations to maintain sanctions against Iraq, which were imposed after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The U.S. stance, shared by Britain, is opposed by many other UN members. ''We cannot allow the government of Iraq to flout 40 - and I say 40 - successive UN Security Council resolutions and to rebuild its arsenal,'' Mr. Clinton said while also calling for steps to ease the suffering of the Iraqi people. The president, in his seventh speech to the world organization, urged it to work vigorously in the next century against the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

He also called for an all-out effort to fight communicable diseases in developing countries and urged an ''unrelenting battle against poverty'' among those being left behind by the fast-changing global economy. Noting that 40 million people a year still die of hunger, he said, ''We must refuse to accept a future in which one part of humanity lives on the cutting edge of a new economy while the other lives at the knife edge of survival.'' Mr. Clinton said freer trade would narrow, not widen, the large gap between rich and poor countries. For that reason, he said, the United States supported holding a new round of talks in Seattle this year in an effort to liberalize trade.

In calling for greater efforts to halt mass killings in places like Kosovo and East Timor, Mr. Clinton also recognized limits of the international community to intervene in such crises. ''It is easy to say, 'Never again,' but much harder to make it so,'' Mr. Clinton said. ''Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little. But difficulties, dangers and costs are not an argument for doing nothing.'' But when there are ''deliberate, organized campaigns to murder whole peoples or expel them from their land,'' the president said, ''we should work to end the violence.''

Mr. Clinton alluded to criticism that the United Nations had done too little in the face of human catastrophes in Africa, and had been slower to offer help to East Timor than it had been to Kosovo. ''Simply because we have different interests in different parts of the world,'' he said, ''does not mean we can be indifferent to the destruction of innocents in any part of the world.'' He called for ''shared responsibility,'' evoking the joint force created by West African countries to restore peace in Sierra Leone, the NATO campaign in Kosovo, and the Australian-led UN force for East Timor. Mr. Clinton said the United States supported efforts by African countries to ensure peace and stability on the continent.

''What is the role in the UN of preventing mass slaughter and dislocation?'' he asked. ''Very large.''

Even as he looked to the next millennium, he summarized the advances of the past century, ranging from progress in agriculture that had made it possible ''to produce enough food for a growing world'' to the deciphering of ''the mysteries of the human gene.'' ''We have learned that open markets create more wealth, that open societies are more just,'' Mr. Clinton said. But scientific advance has also brought a greater capacity to kill, he said. ''For all our intellectual and material advances,'' Mr. Clinton said, ''the 20th century has been deeply scarred by enduring human failures, by greed and lust for power, by hot-blooded hatreds and stone-cold hearts. ''Primitive claims of racial, ethnic or religious superiority, when married to advanced weaponry and terrorism, threaten to destroy the greatest potential for development in human history.''

While the worst-case scenario has been avoided in the years since the Soviet-bloc breakup - ''the nightmare scenario of deadly weapons flowing unchecked across borders, of scientists selling their services to the highest bidder'' - it was necessary to press harder to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Clinton said.