This was a truly veritable comeback for a peacekeeping organization which, for many years, had come under a barrage of attack by politicians and journalists alike by virtue of its ostensibly slow methods in dealing with international conflicts. The last time a UN Secretary-General personally went out to engage in tête-à-tête negotiations with a de facto belligerent, was in 1961 when Dag Hammarskjöld made an abortive trip to Congo which precipitated his untimely death in a plane crash.

As Morican and Gibbons maintain in their book The League of Nations and UNO, “Hammarskjöld’s death was a blow to the UN”. They contend that despite “the controversy over his actions in the Congo, many people had recognized his sincerity as an international civil servant”. Consequently, he “appeared to have made the office of Secretary-General the most important organ of the UN”.

Thirty-seven years later, the United Nation’s endeavour to bring some relative peace to the “anarchic world of foreign affairs” , has culminated in a chequered cascade of success and failure. However, it has prompted one major question: is the Security Council alone enough to engender peace or should the Secretary-General play a much more actively concomitant role with the latter to actually bring peace?

When the victorious founding fathers of the United Nations met in San Francisco in 1945, they were hell-bent on eschewing the constitutional mistakes of its predecessor, the ill-fated League of Nations. Their prime concern was to preserve as much as possible the abrupt peace which had ensued as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. This was especially important in the wake of the end of the Second World War. The peacemakers - Russia’s Stalin; Britain’s Churchill and America’s Roosevelt - consequently decided to use a similar idea based on the Covenant of the League. Consequently, the organ they decided to use as a model for peacekeeping was to be based on the League’s Council - thus giving birth to the Security Council.

The Security Council - then in 1945 as today - consists of fifteen members - five of whom are permanent members : France, Great Britain; Japan; Russia and the United States. Their main goal is to maintain peace and security through “prevention and conciliation” . Most books about the United Nations seem to echo this very idea.

However, in a complex, changing world where political balancing of power seems to be superlative to a sincere pursuit of global peace, this goal is a much more difficult one - made even more so by virtue of the Security Council’s apparent inability to maintain a relative peace.

According to Kay Lawson, the Security Council “has the right to discuss any situation that threatens international peace, to make recommendations for the resolution of disputes” and to “require members to apply sanctions against other states… to make recommendations regarding the regulation of national armaments”(idem). However, Gibbons and Morican take it a step further describing the Council’s role in four main steps:

It contends, however, that the power of the veto acts as a double-edged sword in that it has the potential to stymie any vote from going through thus precipitating a “deadlock…in the Security Council” . This type of situation was exemplified by Russia’s absence at the first Security Council meeting on the Korean War of 1950-53, where Russia was absent by virtue of the USA’s veto to “allow entry of Communist China to the UN” .

In any event, in 1950, a “Uniting For Peace” resolution was created by the General Assembly with the purpose of transferring “responsibility to the General Assembly” in the event of the Security Council being dead-locked by a veto.

Today, the Security Council has emerged from its dogged days of in-fighting - which it was accustomed to in its formative years of the fifties and sixties - to play an instrumental role in the pursuit of global peace. However, inasmuch as the Council attempts to preserve a relative peace through writing resolutions and thus providing the platform for debate, it cannot always act alone. Sometimes, it needs to apply a personal touch in this endeavour and, as a consequence, remove to some extent, the abstraction which the rhetoric of peace often seems to bring. This is where, I believe, the role of the Secretary-General to be paramount.

The official role of the Secretary-General , according to Article 97 of the United Nations Charter, is “the chief administrative officer of the Organization” whose prime objective apart from other duties - assigning staff to various organs; reporting annually to the General Assembly - is, according to Article 99 of the Charter “bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security”.

“Integrity, independence and impartiality” are the key phrases incorporated in the Charter as qualities characteristic of and befitting a Secretary-General. In addition, a move away from national bias is also obligatory as the role of Secretary-General necessitates a strong belief in the principles of the United Nations. Any inconsistency by a prospective with respect to the latter would automatically disqualify him/her from the candidacy of the post.

There have been, to date, six Secretary-Generals - excluding the incumbent Kofi Annan - since the United Nation’s establishment in 1945. Inasmuch as each of the six - Trygvie Lie of Norway; Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden; U Thant of Burma; Kurt Waldheim of Austria; Perez de Cuellar of Brazil; Boutros-Gha li of Egypt - contributed to peace to some extent, the Secretary-General who stands out most for his actions in the history of the post, is Dag Hammarskjöld who, apparently, “set out to create the image of the international civil servant without loyalties except to the UN” . This sentiment is echoed by Bailey: “he was, in a sense, a guardian of the Charter and its principles; governments could abstain from voting, but he could not abstain from acting” . He maintains that this was not out of a desire to “usurp the functions of the Security Council or General Assembly”, but rather, it was out of an entrenched belief in the fact that sometimes, if policy-making organs did not work as efficiently as they ought to, personal mediation was necessary outside the scope of Articles 97 to 99.

It was, therefore, no surprise when in 1958, Cambodia and Thailand asked the Secretary-General, Hammarskjold, to send a representative to help them to find a solution to their political deadlock. Although some people may have dubbed it an abdication of responsibility, the Secretary-General believed that the parameters of Article 99 could, in theory and practice, be stretched slightly - if it could help mollify potential conflict. In fact, he believed that his capacity as Secretary-General, provided fertile ground for him to act as “a one-man executive, with explicit authority…not over-lapping the authority of either the {Security} Council or the Assembly”.

Although he was succeeded by a well-qualified permanent representative of the United Nations, U Thant, Hammarskjöld’s dreams to act beyond the scope of Article 99 of the UN Charter for the maintenance of international peace, were made abortive that fateful September morning in 1961 when his plane, Albertina, crashed in Ndola, Congo.

Nevertheless, Hammarskjöld’s untimely death was not in vain, for his assiduous efforts as Secretary-General in keeping the peace and resolving conflict, set a diplomatic precedent. His relentless efforts to maintain relative peace and act beyond the scope of his constitutional allegiance proved to the world that despite the United Nations’ ostensibly interminable drawbacks vis-à-vis the resolution and prevention of conflict, the organization was able to achieve, after all, a degree of success in the international field through its actively concomitant role with the Security Council and the Secretary-General.

Conclusion
The world has come a long way since 1945 when the Axis Powers involved Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin all trying to vie for power on the world stage. Fifty-three years later, the world has witnessed unprecedented change in technology, communications and…arms. Arms bring conflict and almost inevitably, conflict culminates in war.

Therefore, with war comes the necessity to maintain global stability and the ever-elusive concept of peace. Unfortunately, peace is not an idea which comes to fruition easily; it is rather, a long-term goal which demands patience and courage - the quintessential characteristics of the Secretary-General.

The role of Secretary-General even half a century later, is relatively shrouded in uncertainty : hardly does one see him on the news when there is a crisis; he seems to be confined to the background of international diplomacy. Yet, his capacity as Secretary-General seems to be one of the most demanding and responsibility-ridden in the world of diplomacy.

However, the Secretary-General’s association with the Security Council is, in my opinion, undefined: does the Council confer with the Secretary-General in any way apart from providing a seat with “Secretary -General” written on it. If so, when and what results - apart from occasionally voluminous resolutions - come out of it? Bosnia and Rwanda are all sad reminders how an abdication of responsibility can occur when the platform for debate and action, become subordinated by pussy-footing and stymieing of important decisions.

Nevertheless, if February 1998 is anything to go by in terms of progress in preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping by the United Nations, I suppose one can breathe a reluctant sigh of relief that finally, the two most important organs of peacekeeping in the field of diplomacy, are capable of acting together after all. Although the organization still has some way to go, it can rest secure in the belief that as Dag Hammarskjöld contended in a speech at John Hopkins University in 1955, “…results are determined not by the consistency of the actors in their efforts but by the validity of their ideals” .

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