*EPF210 02/15/00
Transcript: Holbrooke Wilson Center Speech on U.S.-U.N. Relations
(Despite flaws, U.N. indispensable to U.S. foreign policy) (6730)

The United Nations, despite its flaws, remains "indispensable as part of America's foreign policy and our national interests," U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, said in a February 7 speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

With the U.S. commitment to pay back $926 million of its arrears to the world body, contingent on the United Nations implementing certain reforms, "the administration and the Congress together have taken a major step in the right direction," Holbrooke said.

Resolving the arrears issue "was the crucial event in building a new bipartisan consensus for American engagement in the United Nations," he said.

"I hope that future historians, such as the scholars here at the Wilson Center, will be able to say that this period that we are now in has marked the beginning of a new era in U.S./U.N. relations, ending a painful five-year nightmare in this relationship that is so critical to the national interest to the United States. America is back at the U.N., and America's confidence in the U.N. seems to be growing again," Holbrooke said.

"There was perhaps no symbol of this more clear than the presence of Senator Jesse Helms (Republican Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee) and his colleagues from the Senate in the United Nations on January 20th and 21st," Holbrooke said. Senators from both parties, he noted, including the Chairman of the Senate Arms Services Committee, John Warner, came to New York to talk to the Security Council and over 100 other ambassadors to the United Nations.

The sight of Senator Joe Biden (ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee) and Chairman Helms "standing shoulder to shoulder and arguing with each other in front of the ambassadors, and then both agreeing, however, that the U.N. was important and had to be preserved, helped the U.N. ambassadors understand that the U.S. is trying to turn a new page in relations with the U.N.," Holbrooke said.

In addition, he said, over 30 members of the House of Representatives have visited the United Nations in the last six to eight weeks.

"Far and away the most critical issue," facing the United Nations is peacekeeping, Holbrooke said. "If the U.N. fails to meet the peacekeeping challenges it currently faces -- East Timor, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Congo, and elsewhere -- the hope and goodwill generated in the last few months could well be dissipated. And I am deeply concerned that, if we lose this opportunity -- one might call it our second post-Cold War opportunity -- the U.N. might not get a third chance," he said.

Following is the transcript of Holbrooke's remarks, as delivered:

(begin transcript)

February 11, 2000

AS DELIVERED
Statement by Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke
United States Permanent Representative
to the United Nations
Woodrow Wilson Center
Washington, DC

February 7, 2000

Thank you, Joe and Lee, for your nice and generous introductions. It's so wonderful to be back at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where I first came in the early 1970s just after it was formed and when its first director was our well-remembered friend Ben Reed, who Harry MacPherson will remember very well from the dramatic days of 1968 and the Johnson administration. And I watched this organization grow from its origins to the castle and now this magnificent new center. And to be introduced by Joe Cari, who's himself making such a contribution to international dialogue, and in the presence of so many wonderful ambassadors. I'm particularly glad to see Ambassador Sisulu here, whose former President, Nelson Mandela, has just graced the Security Council with a truly extraordinary visit and will be returning to New York in only a week as he commutes between South Africa, Burundi, and New York trying to prevent a terrible bloodbath in Burundi.

And to see Jack Valenti and Francis Howard and Hattie Babbitt and so many other friends here. And especially your two colleagues from the House, Ben Gilman and Howard Berman, both of whom I've worked with very closely on an almost daily basis. And especially, of course, Lee Hamilton, one of the great members of Congress, who has been an exemplar to me of what public service is all about. And we're all very lucky, Lee that you are now directing this center and that you are still in the center of the city and of the nation's public dialogue.

And I know, actually, that you and Nancy Kassebaum put forward the original reform plan that, in your words, called the U.N. indispensable -- an indispensable institution -- and called for its reform. Your plan was never passed, but it's very similar -- although people may be surprised at this -- it's very similar in its intent to the legislation that Senators Helms and Biden and Secretary Albright actually negotiated, and which we're now trying to implement. So Lee was a visionary as long as the early '90s in trying to combine reform with more American support for the United Nations.

I'm particularly struck at the historical resonance of speaking in a center named after Woodrow Wilson. Like most of you, I grew up on the historical vision of Woodrow Wilson as the noble and tragic victim of the isolationistic forces in the Senate, which defeated the League.

I no longer believe that. I think Wilson was noble in his goals, but I must tell you, quite frankly, I think his presidency must be judged at least a partial failure, if measured against the consequences of its actions. This view has been deeply affected by a re-reading of history and by my own experiences in the Balkans.

Self-determination is a wonderful concept, but the way it was applied in southeastern Europe between 1919 and 1920 in the Treaties of Versailles and Trianon and subsequent treaties, created lines on a map which led directly, with a couple of intermediate steps called fascism, nazism, and communism to the disasters that befell us in Bosnia and Kosovo and elsewhere. Creating a single country out of what was once Yugoslavia never made any sense. Taking a third of Hungary's land away and putting it into other countries as a punitive measure, no matter what pressures Wilson was under, cannot be justified as self- determination. And we can excuse this on a lot of reasons -- I would urge you to read the books on it, if you're interested -- but it didn't work well.

Even more relevant to tonight's discussion is the failure of the League of Nations, a defeat that led to one of the darkest eras of American foreign policy. Wilson's refusal to accept the provisions regarding American sovereignty, which were put forward by the moderate conservative senators, and his refusal to work with the Senate in any way made the defeat of the League almost inevitable in the Senate. And it undermined the idea of collective security. The famous amendments which he, through his wife's famous handwritten note, urged the Senate to vote against were the kind of amendments that would sail through the Congress today. And any of you in this room who either participated or remember the debate over the Panama Canal treaty, for example, will remember the kind of compromises that the Carter administration made in order to get the Canal treaty through. Otherwise we'd never have gotten it through. And that was the kind of battle that was waged in 1919 and 1920.

And with all due respect to both Woodrow Wilson and this great institution that is appropriately named after him because of his ideals, I think it has to be recognized that one has to work with the Congress to create bipartisan foreign policies. And we should look more carefully at the details before we create historical myths.

Despite, or perhaps more accurately, because of Woodrow Wilson's tragedy, the United States and the United Kingdom, confronting the end of World War II, worked together to create the U.N. The wisdom, the insight, the political skills of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt were critical here, and they were deeply influenced by what they've seen. And therefore, for over half a century, the U.N. has been an important part of American diplomacy.

But during the last decade, the role of the United States and the U.N., and the feasibility of international collective action in general, have been the subject of an intense and bitter debate, one that could be fairly compared with the Wilson era. Many Americans lost confidence in the United Nations. Some speculated as to whether the United States should even remain a part of it at all. During the 1995 Dayton peace negotiations on Bosnia, I personally ended up barring the United Nations from even sending a representative to Dayton because of their abysmal performance in Bosnia.

And only four years ago in the last presidential election, you all recall that the Republican candidate, a moderate and decent man, a man who has worked closely with me and many others in this room, drew his biggest applause lines throughout this country by his attacks on the U.N. and on the then-Secretary General. To borrow a phrase from my distinguished predecessor, Pat Moynihan, in the eyes of most Americans, the U.N. was becoming truly a dangerous place.

I think we have seen a change over the last four years, especially the last four or five months. I hope that future historians, such as the scholars here at the Wilson Center, will be able to say that this period that we are now in has marked the beginning of a new era in U.S./U.N. relations, ending a painful five-year nightmare in this relationship that is so critical to the national interest to the United States. America is back at the U.N., and America's confidence in the U.N. seems to be growing again.

To understand how we got to this point and why this transformation is, if it is sustained, so potentially significant, let me briefly review the decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall. When communism crumbled in the Soviet Union and Eastern Central Europe, there was a period of great hope for the United Nations. The Soviet veto, which had stymied the U.N. from reaching its full potential during the Cold War, was heading towards history's dustbin, and the organization had a great opportunity to fulfill the original vision of Roosevelt and Churchill. President Bush, at this time, reflecting the sense of hope and opportunity, went to New York and described a "new world order" and dramatically displayed American leadership by creating the U.N. coalition against Iraq's aggression in the Gulf -- the first time that the superpowers all stood side-by-side in the Security Council to condemn and fight a regional threat.

In the wake of that dramatic success in the Gulf, the number of United Nations peacekeeping operations went through the roof. In the organization's first 40 years, the Security Council had authorized only 13 missions. From 1988 to 1998, the Security Council authorized 36 missions. In 1988, less than 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers were deployed in a few places, primarily to patrol cease-fire lines. By 1994, the U.N. had 80,000 peacekeepers involved in 17 missions.

This precipitous expansion of U.N. peacekeeping capability and size led almost immediately to three of the greatest international disasters that have befallen the world in recent times. And they poisoned the U.S./U.N. relationship; indeed, almost destroyed it. They were, of course, Somalia 1993; Rwanda 1994; and Bosnia between 1992 and the Dayton peace accords. These three peacekeeping failures led to terrible human tragedies, and were a stunning setback to the post-Cold War international system. They were the direct consequence of an unprepared and overstretched and badly led U.N., and very odd command and control arrangements, with such odious phrases as "dual-key" to govern the use of force in Bosnia. They were the result of a U.N. that undertook missions that exceeded the political will or financial support of its member states.

The blowback from these three tragedies was crystallized by two other events in the United States: the 1994 midterm congressional elections and the battle over the U.S. debt to the United Nations. A new post-Cold War generation of politicians came to this city, many of whom were skeptical, some utterly hostile to the United Nations and perhaps to international affairs and foreign policy in and of themselves. Many of them wanted to downgrade the U.N. or downgrade American international interests, and wanted to downgrade America's foreign policy. And this series of events -- Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia and the 1994 mid-term elections -- led to the fifth and final issue in this dreadful interaction. And that was, of course, the battle over our arrears, when the U.S., for reasons we don't need to revisit tonight, refused or was unable to pay its dues to the U.N., which amounted to well over $1 billion in back bills by some calculations.

The combined effect of these five events, again, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, the '94 election, and the arrearage issue -- nearly brought the U.N. down. And without the United State's active engagement and support, the U.N. was on its way too becoming little more than a larger version of the League of Nations, albeit with very important specialized agencies. And, of course, I need to stress that I'm talking here about the U.N.'s most famous function, peacekeeping, but not about its vitally important specialized agency efforts such as: the UNHCR and refugees, the WHO, the World Food Program, the U.N. family planning effort, the drug efforts, and many other specialized agencies. But its core function, the reason that people had set it up in 1945, was deeply threatened by this situation.

The slide had to be stopped. If we had allowed the U.N. to go the way of the League, or something more than the League but less than what it should be, the consequences would have been bad, indeed negative and deleterious to the U.S. national interest. Therefore, the Clinton administration, led by President Clinton and Secretary Albright, and our team has been working determinedly, doggedly with Congress to rebuild America's position in the United Nations and American trust in the U.N. to revitalize our commitment and make it more effective.

We need to restore faith to the idea that, despite the U.N.'s many flaws it remains indispensable as President Clinton said in his speech to the General Assembly last September -- indispensable as part of America's foreign policy and our national interests.

Why am I hopeful that historians will look back on the last few months as the end of this five-year period I've described? Most important, of course, the Clinton administration and Congress forged an agreement on the arrears issue. With the commitment to pay back $926 million of the arrears, contingent on the U.N. implementing reforms outlined in the Helms-Biden legislation and negotiated between Secretary Albright, Senator Helms, and Senator Biden early last year, the administration and the Congress together have taken a major step in the right direction.

Resolving the arrears issue was the crucial event in building a new bipartisan consensus for American engagement in the United Nations. There was perhaps no symbol of this more clear than the presence of Senator Jesse Helms and his colleagues from the Senate in the United Nations on January 20th and 21st. Senators from both parties, including the chairman of the Senate Arms Services Committee, John Warner, came to New York to talk to the Security Council and over 100 other ambassadors to the United Nations.

Much of what Senator Helms said in his public statement, which was widely reported, we had heard before, and most of what he said on the attitudes towards U.N., the administration does not agree with. As Secretary Albright made clear when she came to New York a few days later; as Senator Biden made clear, standing next to Senator Helms; and as I made clear, introducing Senator Helms. But the important thing was that the chairmen of the two important committees, Foreign Relations and Armed Services, had come to New York with their colleagues from both parties, to attend sessions in the U.N. with ambassadors from all over the world.

After Senator Helms' speech, all 14 members of the Security Council responded. One by one, they said how important it was that he had come, how important it was to have an active United States in the United Nations; and how much they disagreed with everything he'd said. This was something that, I must tell you in all frankness, rarely happens in the Security Council, and those of you who watched it on C-SPAN in its entirety -- not just Senator Helms' speech, but the 14 responses -- were treated to an electrifying performance, climaxed by Ambassador Andjaba of Namibia taking Senator Helms on frontally over the Reagan doctrine, at the end of which, when the session was over, Ambassador Andjaba and Senator Helms had a very good, private chat.

This wasn't just some lecture by a senator to the members of the Security Council. It was the beginning of a conversation which had been put off far too long, and which will continue. And the ambassadors present -- and not just the 14 members of the Security Council, but many ambassadors from all countries -- came to us afterwards and said that they had a much better understanding of American democracy and how it worked than they had ever had before. Because the sight of Senator Biden and Senator Helms standing shoulder to shoulder and arguing with each other in front of the ambassadors, and then both agreeing, however, that the U.N. was important and had to be preserved, helped the U.N. ambassadors understand that the U.S. is trying to turn a new page in relations with the United Nations.

Most of all, what was important was that this committee and Senator Warner came to New York, came to the U.N., and that they then invited the members of the Security Council to come to Washington and visit Washington and call on their committee. Chairman Gilman and I have already discussed whether or not the House Committee intends to follow suit, and then I will leave it to you to take the next step, but we are looking forward -- I should add that Chairman Gilman was also in New York last week, and we had very detailed discussions on the same issue.

It was critically important that these senators -- Joe Biden, Rod Grams, Chuck Hagel, Russ Feingold, John Warner, and Jesse Helms, along with many other members of the Senate and over 30 members of the House, have all been to New York and all visited the United Nations in the last six to eight weeks. This fact that they've all come, in this, an election year, speaks volumes about what's happening to the U.N. As The New York Times wrote after this visit, it's safe for politicians to be seen at the U.N. again, and that matters. We want to work together, and I'm particularly pleased that my friend Ben Gilman is here, who not only visits the U.N., but is the only member of the Congress who just shows up unannounced in my office when he has a free hour, and asks if he can use the phone. You can use anything you want in that office Ben.

Both Senator Helms and Senator Biden said that a new chapter has opened in U.N./U.S. relations.

I hope they're right. And I hope that everyone here understands that this is something that all of us in the administration have worked on and will continue to work on, because trying to get the U.N. out of the election campaign is a very important priority. We don't want a repetition of what happened in 1996.

But, if this is to be a real turning point, if it's truly the beginning of some degree of consensus, as it should, the U.N. must meet the twin challenges of reform and peacekeeping.

The coming months will be critical on both fronts. The United States has made it clear that we will be there to help. But genuine change requires the political will of everyone in the U.N. system. We have already begun to work with our U.N. partners, especially with Secretary-General Kofi Annan, on meeting the Helms-Biden benchmarks. This includes reforming the scale of assessment, which has not been substantially changed since 1972, and since 1972, there have been 57 new members to the United Nations.

We have been tasked by the legislation, which Secretary Albright and I pledged to implement, to reduce America's scale of assessment from 25 percent to 22 percent of the budget. It sounds like a lot, but in dollar terms it's $38 million a year for the general budget, and over 100 of the 195 countries in the U.N. aren't going to change the amount they pay anyway because they pay so little. But some countries have gotten a lot wealthier since 1972. Some have gotten poorer. It is time to make a reassessment, and we are working very closely with the magnificent Secretary-General of the U.N., and with the member states, the Europeans, G-77, China and others, to see if we can reach this goal.

If we can't, I need to be clear: under the law, most of the $926 million will not be turned over to the U.N. Some countries think that is an American dictate. Others understand it. All I can say is, it's the law. The money is there for a revision amounting to redistribution of some $38 million. There's about $800 million waiting. It doesn't matter whether I think it's a good or a bad idea. It is the law, and we've got to make it work. And I believe that, if we make this work, the Congress will be more generous in supporting the U.N., providing it also does some internal reforms, and providing, most of all, that peacekeeping is successful.

We're going to continue to press for reform of the Secretariat and the specialized U.N. agencies, and we will suggest changes to assure that today's Security Council reflects today's realities. We're also going to continue to insist on sensible personnel reform. Some of the facts in the U.N. are really quite sad, but I need to be honest with you. The peacekeeping office, the office with the most important responsibilities in the U.N., has only about 300 people in it. The Public Affairs office has almost 700 people. That is not a rational distribution. It's not the Secretary-General's fault. It requires approval of the Fifth Committee, a very difficult committee to work with, to change it.

I'm not denigrating the importance of information, least of all in this town, in this audience, but it has to be acknowledged that the Office of Peacekeeping has the most urgent task. They have less than one case officer per peacekeeping mission and are seriously understaffed, and the public information area is ridiculously overstaffed. We're just going to have to keep working on it.

But let me turn now to peacekeeping, which is far and away the most critical issue. If the U.N. fails to meet the peacekeeping challenges it currently faces -- East Timor, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Congo, and elsewhere -- the hope and goodwill generated in the last few months could well be dissipated. And I am deeply concerned that, if we lose this opportunity -- one might call it our second post-Cold War opportunity -- the U.N. might not get a third chance.

In East Timor, the United Nations is the mid-wife, though it will probably be the first new state of the 21st Century. This will not be easy, but under the brilliant leadership of the U.N. administrator Sergio Vieira de Mello, they are moving forward. Nonetheless, West Timor has a serious refugee crisis. The Indonesian military is still sheltering militia, which is simply a technical word for thugs, in the camps in West Timor. I visited them in November, and found it appalling. De Mello himself was almost lynched in one of the camps last week. Kofi Annan is going himself next week to these camps.

There's an appalling an unacceptable situation, and it's paralleled by a dangerous threat to the democracy in Jakarta, which we're all aware of. And we hope that President Piper will be successful in this truly epic struggle between democracy and the forces of recidivism and self-protection and anti-democratic actions, which is going on now in this tremendous, historically significant battle in Indonesia.

Sierra Leone presents us with a similarly pressing problem. Today, the Security Council voted to reaffirm its commitment and strengthen its peacekeeping force. But as some of you may have read in this morning's Washington Post (February 7), there are problems on the ground in Sierra Leone, and they won't go away. To walk away from them would only make them worse.

In Kosovo, the effort has a way to go. It is hampered by a complicated bureaucratic structure in which some of the most important elements of the mission in Kosovo report to its U.N-designated leader, Bernard Kouchner, only in theory. In fact, the four pillars under Kouchner -- who I should add parenthetically is one of the world's greatest public servants, the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last year -- do not really report to him, and it is a very awkward structure, and one that needs to be strengthened.

The United States remains committed to support the creation of a fully-functioning civilian police, and to pay our share of the budget. We expect our partners, especially in Europe, to do the same. After all, Kosovo is not just the U.N.'s responsibility. Regional organizations, European-based organizations -- the EU, which we are not a member of and the OSCE, which we are -- and other organizations have a critical role to play. Thus far, the EU has not fully fulfilled its commitment to provide reconstruction funding. We urge the EU to meet these commitments on time and in full.

And in the Congo, the United Nations faces what may be its most complicated and difficult peacekeeping challenge. Although the United Nations cannot be expected to impose peace in the Congo from outside, it is imperative that the U.N. do whatever it can to support the peace process put into play by the Africans themselves last summer, in the Lusaka peace agreement.

The stakes are high. Congo is a contagion of crisis; a country as large as Western Europe, or larger than the U.S. east of the Mississippi, bordering nine other African states. If the conflicts there -- and there's more than one -- spiral out of control, they could destabilize a broad swath of central and southern Africa, endangering interests for the United States and other countries throughout the continent. Secretary Albright, in New York two weeks ago today, correctly referred to it as potentially the first world war in Africa, and we seek to work with the Africans to avoid it.

Because of this risk, last month we devoted the entire month, when the United States was the president of the Security Council, to African issues and made the Congo the centerpiece of the last week of that month. Presidents of Congo, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Angola, plus the former president of Botswana, Masire all came to New York, as well as the Secretary-General of the Organization of African Unity, for a week of intense discussions -- a few of them public, most of them private -- designed to revitalize the flagging peace process that had been established under Zambian President Chiluba's leadership in Lusaka last July. The Lusaka Peace Agreement had been signed. It was a good agreement. It was just not being implemented.

Secretary Albright came to New York two weeks ago today, as I said, and led our delegation in the opening session in the Security Council. Throughout the week, we worked behind the scenes to get the parties to talk to each other. Your former colleague, Howard Wolpe, was with us -- the president's special emissary for the Great Lakes.

The special summit culminated in a clear recognition that the time has come for additional steps for United Nations support for the Lusaka peace process. The parties themselves recommitted to the Lusaka agreements, and next week, they will follow up with more talks in Africa, in which Ambassador Wolpe will be supporting them for the United States.

Lusaka is a good agreement, and it's a lot better than anything that Balkan leaders ever did on their own before we started bombing them. But it needs to be implemented. In New York, President Laurent Kabila of the Congo made commitments on access and security guarantees for the U.N. peacekeeping observer forces, which are critically important if we're to move forward. And he publicly stated his willingness to start an internal Congolese national dialogue under former President Masire to work on a more democratic system in the Congo.

But the words of New York are only words until they are put to the test in Africa. And that test, I tell you honestly, is still to come.

The Security Council affirmed the international community's commitment to support these efforts. We are now beginning preparations to move to the next stage of peacekeeping. A negotiation is underway in New York, led by my colleagues, Ambassador Nancy Soderberg and Ambassador Jim Cunningham, with other members of the Security Council in close consultation with our colleagues here in Washington -- the NSC, the State Department and the Pentagon -- to discuss the phrasing of the Security Council resolution, which we will formally notify to Congress in the next few days.

This peacekeeping resolution will authorize the United Nations to send 500 military observers, backed up by 5,000 support and security personnel, to the Congo to observe whether or not the Lusaka parties are living up to their agreement.

There is no time tonight to outline what the sides are in this complicated mess, but if you're really interested in it, I cannot recommend any document better than yesterday's New York Times' long story on the front page and inside it. It is a superb piece of journalism, and when you read it, you'll actually think for a few minutes that you understand the situation.

The United States resisted these moves for about four months. Chairman Gilman came to New York, in fact, and asked us in October not to move while Congress was in recess. And in response to his specific request, and those of other people, we held off and continually pushed the U.N. Secretariat to come up with a peacekeeping plan that made sense -- and I can tell you, they did not make sense for a long time -- and the Lusaka signatories to come to New York and recommit. For the first time in many years, the Pentagon got directly involved with the U.N. secretariat. Secretary Cohen came to New York on January 20 and talked with the Secretary General and with other members of the peacekeeping office. Walt Slocombe, his undersecretary, has come to New York twice, for his first two meetings with this U.N. counterpart, and that counterpart, Bernard Miyet, the head of peacekeeping, is in Washington tonight for the first time to have talks at the Pentagon, and if I'm not mistaken, at the NSC, as well.

Right? I see Jim hiding there. We introduced everyone else in the room except our Deputy National Security Advisor, but Jim Steinberg has been working hand-in-glove with us on this.

And this is very important. The Pentagon is working with the U.N. to fashion a credible structure for a very difficult operation. Meanwhile, we have the recommitment of the Lusaka peace agreement.

I remember last December in Harare, President Mugabe really tore into the United States for dragging its feet on the peacekeeping resolution. And I was there with Senator Feingold, the ranking Democrat on the Senate African Subcommittee, and when Mugabe had finished, I said, "Mr. President, it wasn't the United States alone. It was me specifically that was dragging my feet, because your countries were not really making this plan work."

We pled guilty, and we told Mugabe and the other presidents in the region that the United States would not and could not support a U.N. deployment until we believed that the mission was structured right. That goes back to the Pentagon's new, evolving relationship with the peacekeeping office in New York, and that the parties -- the Lusaka signatories -- would adhere to their own commitments. The world can't just plant the U.N. flag first, and then worry about logistics, support, and mandate later.

After months of rejecting unrealistic proposals for a U.N. peacekeeping force in the Congo, we have finally reached the point where the U.N. planners are now adopting a rational, phased approach to peacekeeping -- one that tailors U.N. deployments to concrete actions by the parties to implement the peace agreement. We're prepared to agree, if the wording of the resolution is satisfactory, to begin the second phase of peacekeeping, which means the deployment of around 5,500 peacekeepers -- as I said earlier, a 500-person observer mission, not a peace enforcement effort.

And the Pentagon planners have pronounced themselves comfortable with the structure, and they are also working closely with British and French and other international peacekeeping efforts. In the course of this, the Pentagon has sent teams to Africa to consult with many countries. As you know, ambassador, we had a Pentagon/NSC team in Pretoria last month, twice having very important talks with your military before they ever came back to the U.N., and I was glad to see that the South African thinking was so close to our own.

Secretary Albright, Sandy Berger, Susan Rice, myself, others, have started discussions with the Congress on future deployments of U.N. peacekeepers. I'm glad to say that the initial discussions have been very constructive. As long as the parties to the conflict show that they want to live up to their commitments, the international community has a responsibility to support them. For our part, we've already provided $1 million to support the joint military commission, which under the Lusaka agreements, has the lead in enforcing the peace. Canada and Japan followed our lead, and we're asking for symbolic commitments of funds, even small amounts, $10,000 or $15,000, from every member of the Security Council, so that we hope that, for the first time in history, any country that votes for a peacekeeping mission in the U.N. Security Council will show that they will put up a small amount of money.

But I need to be honest with you. This will be an extremely difficult operation. The Congo is a huge, underdeveloped country. There are few paved roads and a nonexistent or pathetic infrastructure. The jungles have riddled and destroyed outsiders since Leopold's gargantuan and obscene dreams. Because of Congo's sheer size and complexity, the outside world never has and never will be able to impose peace there, and it's been a graveyard of the U.N. over the last 40 years. In the early '60s, it cost the lives of nearly 250 U.N. troops, far more than died in Bosnia in the early '90s, and tragically, the life of Dag Hammarskjold.

To understand how difficult it will be, consider the comparison between Congo and the Balkans. Congo is so large; Kosovo, Bosnia and East Timor are not much larger than Connecticut, or in the case of East Timor, even smaller. We can't expect the U.N. to somehow deliver peace in the Congo. The U.N. is not, as Adlai Stevenson, another great predecessor of ours at the U.N., once explained, "a magic lamp."

That being said, it is self-evident that, if the U.N. does not do what it can to assist those who want peace in the Congo, the result will be a certain humanitarian and security disaster.

Even if the odds are only 50/50 that the peacekeeping effort in Congo which we're now discussing will succeed, we cannot throw up our arms in disgust or hopelessness, because if we do, it is virtually certain that the region will plummet into greater chaos and bloodshed. That's why it's incumbent on us to work through the U.N. to help the Africans implement Lusaka. It is absolutely critical that, if the U.N. is there, the U.S. play an active supporting role, but without American troops.

If there's one thing that last month's focus in the Security Council on Africa showed it is that -- when the United States decides to lead -- when we use our example, our prestige, our international leadership to galvanize action -- American influence is enormous. And the widespread predictions of anti-American backlash and resentment against American leadership were not very much in evidence in the last month. And when we're criticized, I'd rather be criticized for too much leadership than too little leadership, in any case.

I think it is safe to say that last month's emphasis in the Security Council on Africa was a very positive event. The month began, I wish to remind you, with a dramatic breakthrough in the definition of what national security means in the post-Cold War era, when on January 10th, four weeks ago today, Vice President Gore chaired the United States delegation to the Security Council in the very first meeting in the history of the Security Council on a health issue. It was, to be precise, the 4,089th meeting of the Security Council since 1945, and the first on a health issue.

How many times has the Wilson Center or Brookings or Rand or the Council on Foreign Relations sat around saying, "We need to redefine national security in the post-Cold War era?" Well, the Security Council had never let a health issue in. And Vice President Gore, leading the American delegation, Jim Wolfensohn talking, the first time ever a World Bank president had addressed the Security Council, bringing the issue to a new focus and attention, which continued over the last mouth, is something I think all Americans can be proud of.

The month also showed the Security Council's great potential as the world's premier multilateral forum to address security threats. The U.N. proved again last mouth to be, as President Clinton said last year, "an indispensable institution." And it is indispensable only if we are an important part of it.

It is this prevailing idea, the imperative of American leadership, that is at the core of the new consensus that I hope is in the process of forming. It was the same idea that brought together the original consensus that created the United Nations half a century ago, when its name was given to it by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It was the insight and vision and tenacity of that generation and its leaders, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Sumner Wells, and Edward Stertinius, Senators Vandenberg and Connelly, which made the United Nations real. Sobered by the experience of two terrible wars and Wilson's stunning defeat, they sought a way to assure that the future generations would be saved from the horrors that they had lived through. As Harry Truman once explained, the United Nations comes from the reality of experience in a world where one generation has failed twice to keep the peace. If events of the past few months in fact signal a new consensus, then we will not be the fast generation to ignore this reality.

Too much is at stake in East Timor and Kosovo and Sierra Leone, to the victims of AIDS and refugees throughout the world, and in the Congo. Despite the many shortcomings of Woodrow Wilson, he was right about one thing: Absent U.S. leadership, any effort to promote and coordinate international action to support a world of truly united nations is doomed to fail.

Thank you very much.

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(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State)
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