Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

United Nations - Secretary General Kofi Annan announced today that he was appointing an international panel to look at every aspect of United Nations peacekeeping and make recommendations on how missions can be more effective.

"Partly it is a question of being clearer about what we are trying to do," Mr. Annan said at a news conference. "And partly it is a question of getting the nuts and bolts right."

One of the questions to be posed to the panel, he added, is "What do you do if the peace you are trying to keep breaks down and large numbers of civilians are in danger of being massacred?" The question is not hypothetical: the United Nations has come under severe criticism for the failure to stop the killing of Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995 and the massacre of ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda the year before.

Two tough reports last year on those incidents found considerable shortcomings in the organization, including some in the peacekeeping department, which at the time of those events was run by Mr. Annan. But the new panel is not being formed to conduct another post-mortem. Instead it will look more broadly at how the United Nations is often handed difficult assignments by member nations on the Security Council and then not given the means to carry them out.

The panel is to be led by Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister who has been a troubleshooter for the secretary general in a number of countries, among them Afghanistan and Haiti.

"I hope that in the next six months or a year we would have enough ideas on when and how we intervene," Mr. Annan said. "Under our charter, we are allowed to use force in the common interest. But there are questions that we will have to answer. What is the common interest? Who defines it? Who defends it? And under what authority and under what circumstances?"

The secretary general asked the panel to produce a report by July, before a summit meeting of heads of government in early fall. The report is to be written by William Durch, an arms control and Balkans expert at the Henry L. Stimson Center, an independent institute in Washington that studies issues of war and peace.

Panel members announced today were J. Brian Atwood, former administrator of the United States Agency for International Development; Dame Ann Hercus of New Zealand, a former representative of the secretary general in Cyprus; Richard Monk of Britain, a member of the police task force in Bosnia; Gen. Klaus Naumann, former chief of the German defense staff and chairman of the military committee of NATO; Hisako Shimura, president of Tsuda College in Japan and a former peace negotiator for the United Nations; Gen. Philip Sibanda of Zimbabwe, a former peacekeeping force commander in Angola; and Cornelius Sommaruga of Switzerland, who has just retired as president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.