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UN Prepared to Take 21st Century Challenge
By putting greater emphasis on accelerating development and starting in earnest to overhaul and strengthen peacekeeping, the United Nations is seen prepared to meet with the challenges of 21st century.
Safeguarding world peace and promoting the common development of mankind constitute the two cardinal tasks endowed the United Nations by the U.N. Charter. Nevertheless, development has not been given due priority in the work of the United Nations owing to various kinds of limitations, for a long time in the past.
The gap between the North and South in development, further widened by the process of globalization in recent years, has plunged developing countries into a worse plight in international competition, posing a threat to their economic sovereignty and security. More and more developing countries have joined a cry for a fair and equitable new international economic order and urged the United Nations to give greater priority to development.
It was against such a background that the Millennium Summit was held at the UN headquarters in September. The summit, the largest of its kind in the history of the UN, was devoted to issues related to world peace and development, and to development in particular.
A declaration adopted by acclamation by more than 150 heads of state or government at the summit committed the world leaders to turn the 21st century into an epoch free of war, poverty, disease and ignorance.
In the nine-point declaration, the leaders resolve to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of poor people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. They also resolve to spare no efforts to free peoples all over the world from the scourge of war, whether within or between states, which has claimed more than 5 million lives in the past decade.
It is no easy task to attain these goals. Nevertheless, the commitments made by the leaders represent a determination of the international community to take the challenge.
As part of the follow-up actions to the summit, UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan has recently convened a meeting of various UN institutions to coordinate the implementation of the declaration. The 55th Session of the UN General Assembly has called on the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization to strengthen cooperation and coordination with various UN agencies in implementing the declaration. Moreover, the implementation of the declaration will be on the top agenda of several UN conferences scheduled for next year.
The past decade has seen a greater role played by the United Nations in preventing and resolving conflicts and creating essential conditions for delivering humanitarian aid to war victims.
However, U.N. peacekeeping also suffered setbacks and failures, due partly to insufficient mandate and capacity. The crisis of more than 500 U.N. peacekeepers taken hostage by anti-government forces in Sierra Leone in May put the standing and credibility of UN peacekeeping to a severe test.
To deal with the 21st century conflicts, the United Nations has started in earnest to overhaul peacekeeping. A top international panel, set up in this connection in March, has suggested, among other things, that the United Nations must ensure that peacekeepers take action in clear cases of aggression, and must also establish the equivalent of a ministry of defense to modernize and professionalize U.N. peacekeeping operations so that troops can be deployed rapidly to world crises.
The panel also proposed that impartiality and the use of force only for self-defense must remain bedrock principles of UN peacekeeping, but stressed that impartiality does not mean neutrality.
During the general debate at the 55th General Assembly session, most countries believe that while UN peacekeeping should be overhauled and strengthened to deal with the 21st century conflicts, it should not be viewed as a panacea, and conflicts, especially those within a particular state, are to be resolved, ultimately, by the people in the state.
Safeguarding world peace constitutes a prerequisite for promoting common development which, in turn, provides an important guarantee for world peace.
Some specialists on conflicts believe that poverty constitutes one of the underlying causes for many conflicts, especially those in Africa. Thus, an early establishment of a fair and equitable new international economic order would ensure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world's poor and conforms to the needs of promoting common development and safeguarding world peace as well.
And in this regard, the United Nations has much to do in the new century.
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