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The Lessons of History
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
It was the end of the cold war and due to a happy accident 31 days later, it being the 31st of January 1992 the Security Council met at the level f head of state and head of government - it means just one month after I begin to take this job and it was a very very important meeting with the presence of all the head of states, Great Britain, France, China, the United States, Russia and we have a meeting, they spend all the morning and all the afternoon and at the end they have adopted a resolution asking the secretary general to prepare a paper to offer basic change in the field of peace-keeping, in the field of preventative diplomacy, in the field of the different action of the United Nations.
And at the same time they were saying that the Secretary General have a very important role to play so this give me the illusion that the United Nations will be able to play a new role in the post cold war era.
And you saw a very activist role for the United Nations didn't you including possibly a United Nations army?
Exactly so in case we have a crisis we will be able at our disposal between 20 to 40 thousand soldiers.
And what was your interpretation of the American attitude to the UN in those very early days?
At this stage they was very much in favour. It meant it was Bush the father - he was in favour.
Everything changed after one years when we have the election of President Clinton and Clinton say publicly or his attitude was 'I am not interested in foreign affairs, I will be interested only in internal problems of the United States.'
So with the arrival of Clinton, at least during the first mandate of Clinton there was drastic change in the policy of the United States which was based on a kind of isolationism or neo isolationism, they are not interested to participate in those different operation.
Well let's talk about one of the things that went wrong during that first year, which was Somalia - those 18 American troops, rangers, got killed. Public perception in America was that the UN was to blame for everything going wrong. Do you think that's fair?)
Well this is a classic after all.
One of the reasons why the United Nations have been created is to have been a kind of scapegoat.
In the case of the problem is easy to be solved the country, any country will be interested to play the role of mediator so that it would be can say to its own public opinion 'I was able to solve the disputes between A and B somewhere in Africa and somewhere in Asia.
They will give the baby to the United Nations in the case that the problem is not easy to be solved.
This is another problem and again when in the case of a failure it is very easy to accuse the United Nations because the United Nations cannot respond. I cannot accuse one of my boss, a member state, to say 'You have not done this'.
So I don't want to say that the United Nations have not a responsibility in many of the failure which happen in Somalia, in Rwanda and in Yugoslavia, but to be quite objective I believe the responsibility ought to be shared by the member states and by the United Nations.
A lot of people have pinpointed Somalia as the moment when opinion in the United States really began to turn in a serious way against the UN generally. How important do you think it was?
I agree.
You have something very specific. Which was that one of the poor American soldiers was half necked, trained in the streets of Mogadishu and it was trained by black people . So I have friends which belong to the black caucus who say this have a very important impact on the American public opinion.
And again this have another very negative impact on Germany for example because I have a long discussion with the minister of defence of Germany who told me 'No more German troops outside Europe. We will participate only in European peace-keeping operations' and my theory was on the contrary - the participation of different party of the world, coming from Latin America, from Asia, to participate in peacekeeping operation in Yugoslavia or people coming from Latin America and Asia to participate in a peace-keeping operation in Africa, will reinforce the international solidarity and which is the real raison d'etre of the United Nations.
There is a depressing conclusion you could draw from Somalia, I don't know whether you have thought of this, but plainly the UN can't operate without the United States because it is the world's only superpower but the lesson of Somalia could be interpreted as the UN can't work with the United States - it all goes wrong when you try that.
I will tell you, I have a very long discussion with the America administration and when we were involved in the problem of Rwanda I say 'Why don't you allow us to do a peace-keeping operation without your presence?' and the answer was 'No. First of all we will have to share 30 per cent of the budget of this peace keeping operation even if we don't participate but what is more important is in a case you have a difficulty you will come and ask us to come to help you. And here we will be compelled to help you and we will be involved indirectly in this peace-keeping operation' - by the way this happened in Somalia when they withdrew the troops.
So they say 'As we will be involved directly or indirectly in any peacekeeping operation, thus we need, you need our agreement to any peace-keeping operation'.
And there is some logic behind this.
Do you think looking back - you talked about when you came to power or came into office - people saw the office of Secretary General as an important one, saw the role of the UN as very important in the post Cold War era. Do you think that you over-reached yourself, if you like, that you saw the possibilities as being too active for the UN, that perhaps if you had been a bit more modest for the UN it would have been a bit different?
Yes maybe I agree with you but I've tried to done something else which was to obtain the involvement, more involvement of the other great actors.
So I went every year in China, every year in Germany saying the participation in peace-keeping operation is not in contradiction with the constitution. I have done the same in Japan. So I was trying to obtain more involvement of the other great actors - not to counterbalance the power of the United States but to have a real international democracy.
But I was not successful and maybe this is another mistake.
Do you think anybody could have been successful. Do you think such a thing is possible when the United States is such a predominant power?
My answer is that ok today we are confronted by a very uniliteralistic policy but after all it was President Wilson in 1919 who created the League of Nations and it was President Roosevelt in 1944-45 who created the United Nations so there is no reason why in the future we may not have a change in the American public opinion and they will discover that it is in their own interest to use the multilateral approach to solve the problem.
The public opinion in the United States is not in favour to play the role of the policeman all over the world.
You have today, while we are speaking together, you have at least 12 different military confrontation going on in different part of the world. Who is ready to play the role of the international policeman? Who even have the financial possibility to play this role?
The public opinion of the United States will never accept this.
Thus we will be compelled sooner or later to have a strong United Nations or maybe another international organisation, but the multi-lateral approach is the only solution to manage the globalisation and the mondialisation of this world.
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