Kofi Annan Interview: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Dealing with the Issues

As Secretary-General you navigate in the twilight between national sovereignty and international cooperation. Often the political conditions or the political will do not exist to move as far as you would like toward the UN ideal in a particular area. What can the Secretary-General do to ensure that next time the conditions will exist for appropriate, effective action?

I think what you have to do is to draw lessons from past operations and past experiences and find a way of sharing them with the governments and the member states. And in fact we've done that, and we've tried to get them to understand that what is most important is the will to act. Without the will you can have all the early warning systems, all the information that you need, [but] you cannot do much. I think it is also important to get the public involved, to engage the public. Intervention should not be something that we should leave to governments. Each of us individually, you, myself, the students, have a role to play. We've seen situations where revolutions or changes have been started by a handful of individuals, just people who are saying, "this is enough!" "this is outrageous!" "we can't take it anymore!" And governments have been forced to act because of public outrage. They've been shamed to act. And I think that the public would also become engaged and realize that when the rights of the other person is attacked, our rights are attacked too. It may be them today and us tomorrow. So I think one should also try to engage the society at large and get them to be able to stand up for what is right. And when they do, the politicians find the courage to act.

What, personally, did you learn from the tragedies of Bosnia and Rwanda and what do you think the UN should have learned?

I think that both Bosnia and Rwanda were our collective failure, a collective failure of the international community. But perhaps I should take them one after the other. In the case of Bosnia, I think we should have anticipated how the crisis was likely to develop and gone in with the right force structure, and the right mandate, and right resources to be able to do what was right. There should also have been much more effective intelligence sharing and information sharing. And I know the peacekeepers are often blamed, but given their mandate they did a remarkable job. I think we have learned a lot about how we should approach situations like this and I hope the lessons from Bosnia will guide us as we tackle similar problems today.

In Rwanda, again it was a question of lack of will. In fact, General Romeo Dallaire, the UN force commander from Canada, said at the time (I was head of peacekeeping), "If I had one real force battalion, 5,000 well equipped, I would have saved lots of lives." He didn't get that. Lots of governments had that capability but none would offer. And in the end, when troops were put in it was too late, the killing had been done and hundreds of thousands were dead. So again, you come back to the question of early action. And when I talk about early action I'm not talking about early action of just the Rwandese but of the entire international community. After World War II we said never again. We sat back and saw it happen in Cambodia under Pol Pot; we saw it again in Rwanda. And I of course told The New York Times in an interview, if genocide cannot move us, what would?

Next page: Looking Ahead

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