The Secretary-General's Role in Conflict Resolution: Past, Present and Pure Conjecture

VII. Recent Trends and the Future

As shown in the above discussion, the Secretary-General has had some remarkable successes in the exercise of his conflict-prevention-and-resolution function: both during, and since the end of, the cold war. Nevertheless, there is some reason to believe that his role's expansion may not continue, or that it may evolve into something qualitatively different, or that it may turn to quite a different set of issues, in response to a changing institutional and political context. As we have indicated, the Security Council now seems more ready and able to perform its Charter-envisaged political functions. That has ended the stasis which, paradoxically, gave the Secretary-General his first occasions - and the interstitial space - to manoeuvre as an `honest broker'. The Council, now more readily able to make decisions, tends to ask the Secretary-General to go to Tripoli and to Baghdad not to exercise an independent political role but more as a messenger to deliver its own plan of action.

This may not last. If the principal threat to peace, in the foreseeable future, comes from essentially civil strife in places like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Georgia, Honduras, Liberia, Rwanda, Tajikistan, the former Yugoslavia and Somalia, it is far from clear that the Security Council's new found consensus will prevail. Russia and the United States are already in fundamental disagreement over the rights of the parties in the former Yugoslavia. China will be increasingly concerned about spreading UN interventionism on behalf of what it perceives as `domestic' political or human rights disputes. Many States are concerned about UN involvement in wars of secession, seeing them as inherently internal affairs. They feel that all UN military operations in such instances, even if primarily humanitarian, have the effect of giving a degree of international recognition to secessionist forces. Finally, there is growing unrest on the part of States at the cost of burgeoning UN field operations, and at the dominant role played by militarily and fiscally powerful participants.

In the light of these considerations, it is significant that the least intrusive, least expensive and frequently most successful form of UN peace-making has proven to be the diplomatic role of the Secretary-General, especially when supported by the authority of the Security Council and its permanent members. His mediation is least threatening to States concerned about the prerogatives of their sovereignty. A certain continuity in the practice of the Secretary-General's good offices often avoids the missteps of ad hoc operations designed by political organs or by individual States.

The Council's failure to invoke Chapter VII to intervene on behalf of the Kurds in Iraq, to tame the clan-armies of Mogadishu, and its slowness to become embroiled in the political and security dimensions of the Yugoslav crisis all suggest that it may be precisely in these sorts of domestically-generated threats to international peace that the office of the Secretary-General, with its greater experience, flexibility and lower profile, might fill a growing void and fruitfully bring diplomacy back to centre stage. The Secretary-General's comprehensive, yet low key approach to the civil war in El Salvador - arranging a cease-fire, developing modalities for mutually disarming the combatants with their consent, reforming and integrating their armed forces, supervising human rights and negotiating constitutional guarantees - may be an augury of the future, when his good offices become the Organization's instrument not only of peace-making but primarily of peace-building.¹¹⁹

A. Determinants of Success and Failure

The extent to which peace-making and peace-keeping functions of the Secretary-General will adapt and grow is dependent largely on two variables: personal and institutional.

1. Independence, Influence, Outreach

The personal variable has to do with the Secretary-General's ability to project a persona unbeholden to, uninstructed by, and resistant to pressure of the parties to a dispute, or to their allies. This depends on vision, the ability to communicate personal probity, the respect accumulated from previous successes, and the support the Secretary-General receives from members of the Security Council and General Assembly. It also has to do with the quality of the Secretary-General's information and diplomatic creativity.

As a direct result of the creativity of past Secretaries-General and their designated subalterns, the present Secretary-General has available a repertory of practices that aid the perception of his power to pull disputants toward negotiated compromise. The invention of the `Peking formula' by Hammarskjöld is a prime example of this creativity. Other examples include the recent practice of issuing very detailed interim reports to the Security Council on progress in negotiations. These enable the Secretary-General, when progress is blocked, to allocate blame and bring additional pressures to bear.<sup>120</sup> Then there are the innovative `little steps' that make up his diplomatic minuet. Framework agreements, proximity talks, truth commissions, human rights and election monitoring, `confidence building' measures: these have all become established parts of the Secretary-General's diplomatic repertory.

Providing the newly-invigorated Security Council allows him to use these innovative tools, and to supplement them as the occasion demands, the Secretary-General's diplomatic role will continue to have potential for expansion. But much of the potential is still under-utilized. For example, no Secretary-General except Hammarskjöld has ever really used his `bully pulpit' effectively. None has ever succeeded in creating a directorate of public information that utilizes modern marketing skills. A dramatic example of this failure is the September/October 1994 issue of Foreign Affairs, where one article, by Giandomenico Picco argues passionately that the Secretary-General's office is unsuitable to any deployment of military force, which should be subcontracted to individual States, while the other, by Saadia Touval, argues that, for similar reasons, all mediating functions should no longer be performed by the UN, but, rather, by powerful States. Together, the two articles argue for the total dismantling of the new dimensions of the Secretary-General's office. In the same issue an article by the Secretary-General, instead of defending his functions, addresses the - admittedly important - need to remove landmines at the sites of former wars. The effect of this juxtaposition is to make the Secretary-General appear ineffective and preoccupied with peripheral matters.

If there is painful evidence of the unresolved communications problem, it is not a new dilemma. No Secretary-General has really succeeded in reaching the `peoples' invoked by the Charter's preamble. Perhaps the problem is inherent. The qualities which make for a good bureaucrat or diplomat may be incompatible with those of a charismatic political leader or statesman. Nevertheless, a Secretary-General has three potential sources of power to support him in his quests: the important Member States and blocs of States, the world's `invisible college' of opinion-shapers - the media, universities, churches and captains of industry - and `the peoples'. The latter two constituencies have barely been touched by any incumbent.

Even in his dealings with the representatives of States, it would be of immeasurable help if the Secretary-General could occasionally take his case, over the heads of the foreign offices, directly to `the peoples'. Of course, no Secretary-General has real power, in the sense in which the major Member States have it. He has few means to affect outcomes except to the extent he makes himself indispensable to governments. Yet successive Secretaries-General have proven themselves quite adept at parlaying the perception of their indispensability into genuine influence: quietly, but adamantly pressing for, or opposing, a course of action, the means to an end, or the wording of a draft resolution.

In these interactions, the representatives of governments would be far more vulnerable to the Secretary-General's influence if he were known to speak not only for himself but for a credible global constituency sharing his perspective. Paradoxically, his independence, which is his weakness, is also his strength: his indispensability vanishes if he is seen to be `in the pocket' of one State, or a group of nations. Towards the ends of their careers, Trygve Lie was perceived as a captive of NATO and U Thant of the non-aligned. Article 100 of the Charter insists that the Secretary-General be independent of `any government or ... any authority external to the Organization'. But to be independent of States does not require the Secretary-General to be unconnected to `the peoples'. In maintaining both the essence and perception of total independence, every Secretary-General needs to build a constituency that is, in a significant sense, transnational and non-governmental.

2. Staffing and Control

The institutional variable has to do with the Secretary-General's ability to use the full potential of the UN and its related family of organizations and agencies to carry out his mission of conflict resolution. For this he needs, above all, a staff recruited on the basis of competence and answerable exclusively to him and his principal advisors. This the Charter has recognized. Article 101 manifestly seeks to give him a staff selected and retained with a view to `securing the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity' while allowing for `recruiting the staff on as wide a geographical basis as possible'.

In practice, however, staffing rules imposed by the General Assembly and the practice of Member States have not permitted the Secretary-General to choose the key members even of his own inner core of Secretariat advisers but, rather, made their appointments subject to claims by the major powers and even some influential middling States. Inevitably, top advisers who owe their posts to the lobbying of home governments look there first in discharging their ostensibly independent functions under the aegis of the Secretary-General.

Even at mid-levels, staff promotion and tenure still tends to reflect pressure by States and regions rather than expert qualifications and experience. This affects both the reality and, more important, the perception of UN diplomacy. If the Secretary-General's staff is skilful and shares a global vision as enunciated by its chief executive, the prospects are good; when they are not, failure of a mission or operation, not infrequently, is at least in part attributable to such deficiencies. Realizing this, Secretary-General Boutros Ghali has made more strenuous efforts than his predecessors to wrest his inner bureaucracy from the control of individual Member States and the whim of the principal political organs.

He has, however, been less successful in getting the large and diffuse UN `family' to march in lock step with his efforts. This is no small task, yet no Secretary-General can optimize his chances at peace-making without being able to deploy all the UN's resources. The Organization can be described as having three parts: the UN proper, the quasi-autonomous subsidiaries (QASs) and the specialized and related agencies which are fully independent global intergovernmental organizations (IGOs).¹²¹ As to the IGOs, the Secretary-General controls neither their policies nor their personnel although, in trying to perform his conflict-resolving tasks, these bodies - the fiscal institutions, World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization, World Health Organization, etc. - often hold the key to those inducements actually capable of moving disputants towards accommodation.

The same is true of the QASs - the UN Development Programme, High Commissioner for Refugees, etc. - which, although theoretically under the control of a principal political organ of the UN, are structured to give them wide autonomy. The Secretary-General does not control even their top appointments, nor are they funded significantly by the central budget of the Organization, as opposed to direct governmental contributions. Thus, he has little influence over their programmatic decisions. It has been suggested to the author by one Assistant Secretary-General that the divergent and mutually contradictory prescriptions of the World Bank and the UN in seeking to resolve the crisis in El Salvador reminded him of two doctors operating on different sides of a single patient with a curtain separating their efforts.

B. Prescriptions

What is needed? The prescription follows from the diagnosis, but its outlines can only be sketched, here. The Secretary-General is at the beck and call of the Security Council and that is as it should be, but he needs a longer leash. For example, he should have at his disposal a trust fund sufficient to embark on credible mediating missions at his own initiative, subject to a requirement that, after six months, authority would have to be extended by the Security Council and renewed funding voted by the General Assembly. He needs a small, all-volunteer multinational force under his command that could similarly be deployed - but only with the full consent of the parties concerned - for a six-month period. Its mandate should be subject to renewal by subsequent action of the Council or, perhaps, the Assembly. He should be able to put together larger military and civilian operations in short order, after they are authorized by the appropriate political organ, by drawing on a global inventory of stand-by contingents and logistical support earmarked for such contingencies by Member States. He should be able to draw on a pool of trained conflict managers of his own choosing, owing their posts exclusively to him. He should be able to mobilize QASs and IGOs, by exercising his influence on the treasuries of Member States at the time they earmark their contributions to these agencies.

There is every reason to believe that the Secretary-General's role will continue to expand because it is invaluable and there are no evident alternatives. This makes it essential that the role should be performed in an institutional and political context which maximizes its disposition for success.

119 This shift of emphasis to `peace building' was recently explicated by the Secretary-General in the 1992 David Abshire Lecture. UN Press Release SG/SM/4748, 13 May 1992.

120 See, e.g., Reports SG S/21183 of 8 March 1990, at 12 (Cyprus); S/23693 of 11 March 1992, at 17 (Somalia); S/23900 of 12 May 1992, at 2 (Yugoslavia); see also the detailed reports on the missions to Central America, Namibia and Western Sahara, above.

121 See Szasz, `The Role of the Secretary-General: Some Legal Aspects', 24 J. Int'l L. and Pol. (1991) 161.

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