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Annan discusses future challenges with UN representatives

Annan discusses future challenges with UN representatives

Kofi Annan
Terrorism and its reinforcement are the great threats to peace and security for some countries, but developing countries assess civil wars, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and human rights violations as greater destabilizing factors, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today.

"Our central challenge is to ensure we have the rules, instruments and institutions to deal with all these threats and issues. After all, they are linked," he told a conference of senior UN Development Programme (UNDP) directors, the resident coordinators in developing countries, in suburban New York. "A world not advancing towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be at peace. And a world awash in violence will have little chance of advancing the goals."

For those reasons, "I am appointing a high-level panel to examine current challenges to peace and security and to recommend ways of strengthening the United Nations," he said. Mr. Annan first announced the creation of such a board last month in his annual address to the General Assembly.

The Millennium Development Goals, approved at a landmark summit of world leaders in September 2000, together form a pledge that extreme global poverty will be halved by 2015.

The search for a more general UN reform programme, started when the Secretary-General first took office in 1996, would continue. "But the new panel, whose chairman and members I will announce shortly, will look much more broadly at the intergovernmental machinery and will do so in the context of the major challenges the world faces in the 21st century," he said.

"Some countries see terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, transnational criminal networks and the ways in which these may be coming together to reinforce each other as self-evidently the dominant threats to peace and security. These countries worry that the international architecture is not up to meeting them.

"But if one were to do a poll in the regions where you work, other threats would surely register higher: civil wars and other armed conflicts fought with conventional, even low-tech weapons, AIDS and other diseases, poverty and environmental degradation, oppression and violations of human rights. For many people, even most people, these are the everyday issues that really destabilize their lives."

As the development coordinators went about their work as "the face of our organization to the global public," Mr. Annan said, security had to be of overarching importance, especially after the 19 August terrorist bombing of UN offices in Baghdad that killed 22 UN staff members and injured many others, international and local.

"While the United Nations cannot be a fortress, neither can we be reckless," Mr. Annan said. "And while we have a profound responsibility to help those in need, we have a paramount responsibility to our helpers, our staff. That conundrum has always been with us, but it has been raised to new levels by the tragedy in Baghdad."