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208 If I were a doctor examining the health of the world today, I would be greatly alarmed at the state of my patient. The international community, vibrant in its resolve to achieve a strong, stable, and healthy political environment as the post– Cold War era began, has been drained and weakened by one bout after another of violent conflict during the last decade. In Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and elsewhere, it has had to weather the massive displacement of people, extensive loss of life, and irreparable damage, which are conflict’s concomitants. Clearly, this is a pattern that must be broken. Ideally, each of these bouts of conflict would either have been prevented completely or nipped in the bud. Prevention is—and would have been—by far the best medicine. But the practice of prevention, in both medicine and politics, is uneven. Some diseases resist early treatment. Some patients resist treatment until their conditions become critical—or even longer. Because of this, it becomes necessary to address conflict fully blown, to treat the bout of conflict at or near its height. Even at this stage, the efforts undertaken, while hopefully curative and sometime palliative, also have a preventive aspect to them. They can prevent the escalation of conflict or the resumption of it. As in the case in which a primary tumor is discovered, intervention of this kind can prevent metastasis and hopefully bring the disease into remission. Thus, when we speak here of the “peacekeeping prescription ” or the “treatment” it entails, we must always be clear that, while we have one eye on the crisis of the moment, we have the other on protecting the future and preventing the threat now posed against it from becoming a reality. Prevention is a great part of the goal of peacekeeping, and, in many instances, has constituted a large (and often overlooked) part of its success. Many of the conflicts of the last ten years have had to be treated using the peacekeeping prescription, for various reasons. And, as with any other ailment, the disease has manifested itself differently in each instance, and the treatment has had to be adapted to those variations. Peacekeeping has proved itself a flexible remThe Peacekeeping Prescription Kofi A. Annan CH16_2012_016_FUP_Cahill_p208-221.indd 208 CH16_2012_016_FUP_Cahill_p208-221.indd 208 2/13/13 10:14 PM 2/13/13 10:14 PM THE PEACEKEEPING PRESCRIPTION 209 edy. Since the first edition of Preventive Diplomacy, we have deployed new United Nations peacekeeping operations in Haiti, Guatemala, the Balkans, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While these have been adapted to differing circumstances, the main themes I enumerated in this volume in 1996 remain valid today. As Secretary-General, I remain committed to enhancing the Organization’s capacity to understand conflict and to respond in a meaningful and timely way. If we are to strengthen the international community, if we are effectively to confront the conflicts before us and those that await, if we are to prevent their spread or resumption, we need to understand three things as clearly as possible: the disease we are addressing, the treatment we are applying, and the changes to both of them that are occurring. It is to those points that I wish to turn here. Diagnosis In the context of peacekeeping, how do we define and diagnose the disease of conflict ? What are its symptoms? Technically, peacekeeping is prescribed for conflicts that constitute a threat to international peace and security. The civil strife in the former Yugoslavia was identified as constituting this kind of threat, as were the genocide that ravaged Rwanda and the interclan warfare that engulfed Somalia in the early 1990s. A quick cross section of these conflicts alone can highlight two of the most important characteristics of conflicts for which peacekeeping has been prescribed: most of them are intrastate wars, and many of them have been identified as ethnic conflicts. Peacekeeping through the first forty years of the more than fifty-five-year history of the United Nations was devoted primarily to the treatment of conflicts between clearly delimited armed forces on either side of a cease-fire line; missions were deployed to separate antagonists, verify cease-fires, and promote accord. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the bipolar system, however, a seminal change occurred. Increasingly, the conflicts for which peacekeeping was prescribed were internal in nature. More than two-thirds of the operations deployed since the...

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