Word: annans
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...authorized deployment of 5,500 troops two months ago to keep the peace in Rwanda, so why are only 550 there? Because the governments that promised to supply those troops haven't equipped them to go, the U.N.'s top peacekeeping official complained today. Undersecretary-General Kofi Annan said the troops should "be deployed at full strength rapidly" to help steer the Rwandan refugees back home. For now, the mostly Canadian U.N. force is mostly on its own until 4,000 or more U.S. troops arrive within days. BTW: Americans have contributed at least $39 million in aid to Rwandan...
Strapped for cash, short of manpower, criticized for its performance, the U.N. has reached the end of its capacity for settling global disputes. "We are at a critical stage," says Kofi Annan, Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, "because we have been asked to do too much with too little." In 1988, when U.N. peacekeepers won the Nobel Peace Prize, their numbers totaled just over 10,000. This year almost 80,000 blue helmets are deployed around a post-cold war world in which peace has only been achieved piecemeal. Troops still patrol truce lines, but now they also monitor...
...peacekeeping budget is more than $1 billion in arrears. Congress has just cut the U.S. share of new bills from nearly one-third to one-fourth. The shortage of funds results from a lack of political will. "Somalia was reality therapy for the international community," says the U.N.'s Annan. "Intellectually we were ready for it. Emotionally we were...
...Annan uses the word frantic to describe the effects of Washington's planned withdrawal from Somalia by the end of next March. The first U.S. soldiers depart in December, along with most of the French; the Belgians are leaving this month. The Germans have said they will withdraw in April; the Italians have suddenly decided to "reevaluate" their continued presence. "If all these people leave," says a U.N. official, "it will be total anarchy...
Given the frequency with which member states are turning to the U.N. to police world conflicts, Annan hopes they will start thinking seriously about how to do it better. Boutros-Ghali's call for the creation of a standby force has mostly been ignored. If some more effective mechanism is not created, he fears, the U.N. will go out of the peacekeeping business as quickly as it has gone into...