Speech by Sir Brian Urquhart at the UNCA launch of
"A United Nations Emergency Peace Service: to Prevent Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity."

Sir Brian Urquhart: Thank you very much Bill. I haven't been in this room for some 25 years. It's a great pleasure to be back here in UN Correspondents Association, and to see all the memorabilia that is hung here on the walls.

First of all I want to say that I think it is very important, and I hope you will read the book, that Civil Society has taken on this task about talking about the rapid reaction capability of the United Nations. In the past, the NGOs and civil society have taken the ball many times and run with it once the UN has agreed on a general principle. In human rights for example, in the environment, the International Criminal Court more recently and on many many other subjects, and the growth of civil society in the years since World War II is an extremely important dimension of international affairs and indeed to the UN itself and I am delighted that they have taken this on.

This is of course not a new idea. As Bill said, in my own life I wrote a paper on this when I was still in the British army in 1944, on how they should use their armed forces not for war but to maintain the peace. In 1948 the first Secretary General Trygve Lie made a speech at the Harvard commencement advocating, unfortunately, for what he called a UN Legion--which I think was a mistake--to take charge in Jerusalem which at that point was an extremely violent and chaotic city. That went over like a lead balloon with the five permanent members of the Security Council and was immediately forgotten. And the violence in Jerusalem continued. I put down a few other dates which I think are worth looking into when considering this, in my view, absolutely essential development in the work of the United Nations. I mentioned Lie in 1948. Of course the Suez crisis in 1956: a major international crisis--and very dangerous particularly for the great powers for the day--produced the UN's version of a peacekeeping force for the first time. That, in 1958, caused John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State of the U.S. Eisenhower administration to write a letter to the Secretary General advocating very strongly the creation of a standing peacekeeping force. I would also recommend that you might want get a hold of a 1993 speech by former U.S. president Ronald Reagan at Oxford , which is one of the most eloquent advocacies for some kind of standing peacekeeping arrangement at the UN that anyone has ever given. I mention this because this isn't an entirely outlandish idea by people like me who have all sorts of ideas of how to improve the world; it also has come from people who are characterized by hard, common sense.

Now you might say it's a long shot for NGOs to propose some kind of rapid reaction machinery. And of course it is a long shot until the next disaster comes along, when everybody will be weeping and wailing and saying ‘oh if only we had a rapid reaction capability.' And of course it is particularly awful for the victims of the next disaster, wherever it may occur, who may be millions of innocent men, women and children. I think it is important that this idea is kept alive and at least remains something to be discussed until the time when, God forbid, there will be a major emergency again which will require something like this and we won't have it. As Kofi Annan said once, the UN is the only fire brigade in the world which waits for the fire to start before it acquires a fire engine. And that basically I think doesn't very much apply to the rapid reaction capability.

I also wanted to mention something which was acclaimed by the Summit meeting that happened last September. Tony Blair said that the acceptance of the principle of Responsibility to Protect peoples who are under inhumane treatment or even genocide was the most important principle accepted at the UN since the universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Well that's all very nice but it's not much good having a principle of the Responsibility to Protect people in trouble when you don't have any means of doing it quickly. And in my experience, which I'm sorry to say being very old is quite considerable, is that there are about 3 or 4 or 5 days at the beginning of a major disaster where it is possible to bring it under control before it catastrophizes into something much bigger and much bloodier, and if you miss this early period you are in for a protracted and terrible time for the people in that region. I suppose the Great Lakes region of Africa is a very good case in point, and there are others. And that is what rapid reaction means, and it is something that we don't have at the UN. You must have a practical base if you are going to assert principles like accepting the principle of the Responsibility to Protect.

There is a lot of opposition at the present moment to this idea, but that hasn't always been the case, as I have mentioned earlier. I do think that it is extremely important--no matter who is opposed to it and who is for it--to keep this work going. And that is the point of the work that has been done, this book, which I hope you will read with interest: so that we don't, the next time there is an emergency--and there will be a humanitarian emergency--see the members of the Security Council wringing their hands and wishing that the UN had the capacity to do something about it.