The UN Millennium Summit resumes on Thursday with a special session on peacekeeping, made suddenly all the more acute by the savage killings of three relief workers in West Timor.
The session, a formal meeting of the United Nations Security Council at the level of heads of state and government, is due to last an hour and a half, between the morning and afternoon plenary debates.
One of those due to take part, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, condemned the murders in West Timor, and pointed out that UN troops nowadays faced different threats from those posed by traditional peacekeeping operations.
"It is no longer good enough to organize blue helmet operations as if they were still largely geared to marking an agreed ceasefire line between two states that have consented to a UN presence," he said in a speech to the opening plenary on Tuesday.
"The typical case is now fast-moving and volatile," Blair said, and "locally brokered agreements can be discarded overnight and militias may be more than ready to pick a fight."
The three staff who were hacked to death by a mob of militiamen in Atambua, West Timor, worked for the office of Sadako Ogata, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and were not peacekeeping soldiers.
But UN Secretary General Kofi Annan reminded the summit that humanitarian workers faced similar dangers to those encountered by troops.
Asking delegates to stand for a minute's silence in tribute to the dead men, he said:
"This tragedy underlines once again the dangers faced by unarmed humanitarian workers serving the United Nations in conflict or post-conflict situations."
He added that "the Security Council and I, myself, have repeatedly expressed concern about the safety of United Nations personnel in the field, both military and civilian."
And he urged world leaders to consider "very seriously" a report calling for far-reaching organizational and policy reforms to strengthen peacekeeping missions.
Annan sent the report, by a panel of experts chaired by Algerian former foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, to the Security Council on August 23rd, and council members then decided to make it the agenda for their summit.
It recommends "a substantial increase in resources for headquarters support of peacekeeping operations" as well as changes to streamline military procurement and spending.
It also calls for more fact-finding missions and the creation of an information and analysis unit to help the Security Council draw up more realistic mandates for peacekeeping forces.
Blair said Tuesday that "the Brahimi report is right," and added: "We should implement it and do so within a 12-month timescale."
Earlier this week, Britain called for the creation of UN rapid reaction force that could be deployed on peacekeeping operations at short notice as part of a series of recommendations to improve the way the UN intervenes.
They included expanding the UN Security Council to give it greater legitimacy, setting up a permanent headquarters of peacekeeping forces and creating a UN staff college to train soldiers for peacekeeping assignments.
US President Bill Clinton also expressed support for stronger peacekeeping missions.
He cited Sierra Leone and East Timor as cases where "the United Nations did not have the tools to finish the job," because troops were under-funded, ill-equipped and poorly trained.
"We must provide those tools: with peacekeepers that can be rapidly deployed with the right training and equipment, missions well-defined and well-led," he said - UNITED NATIONS (AFP)
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