M65

26 June 1995

THE UNITED NATIONS AT FIFTY

Today, 26 June, marks the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter at the San Francisco Conference.

The Anniversary is an opportunity for us not only to celebrate the UN's achievements, but to review its role, critically evaluate its performance and to weigh that performance in the perspective of the organisation's wider role and its impact on Australia.

The UN's credibility and effectiveness had been questioned as a result of recent setbacks to its efforts to promote peace, particularly in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda. Some have even queried why we should bother with the UN for another fifty years.

But the concentration on a few extraordinarily difficult situations, where the UN Security Council or for that matter regional organisations like NATO or the Organisation of African Unity have not been able to broker a restoration of peace, has tended to distort the image of the UN. The seeming impotence of UN peace keepers in Sarajevo or Mogadishu should be set against the UN's wider record in peace keeping. UN operations in recent years in countries like Namibia, Cambodia, Mozambique and Haiti had been successful.

Even in operations such as UNPROFOR in Bosnia, UNOSOM in Somalia and UNAMIR in Rwanda, there have been significant humanitarian benefits as a result of the UN's efforts - for example the efforts of our contingent in Rwanda to restore desperately needed public health facilities in Kigali and the airlift of humanitarian supplies into Sarajevo, which had exceeded the Berlin airlift of the 1950s.

The UN's peace keeping operations are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of its international role. Its work in promoting cooperation to alleviate poverty, assist the social and economic development of less developed countries, and to protect human rights and basic individual freedoms, receives much less attention, largely because this work had required quiet persistence over many years rather than noisy, reportable flourishes.

This broader role for the UN had its origins in debate at San Francisco in 1946, when the Australian delegation in fact led the way in pressing for a mandate for the UN to promote economic and social cooperation. The undertaking in Article 56 by UN Member States to "pledge themselves to take joint and separate action" to achieve such goals as higher standards of living, solutions to international economic, social, health and related problems and universal respect for human rights came to be described as "the Australian pledge". We are as a nation inclined to undervalue some of our achievements: this is one that should not be.

On the basis of these provisions of the Charter, the UN and its specialised agencies - UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO, WFP and the rest - have been in the frontline confronting the world's silent emergencies of hunger, ill-health, repression, dispossession and exile. The sad fact is that this task, which has improved the lives of millions of people around the world, rarely meets television's compulsive need for a 30 second grab. I believe that this work has the strong support of Australians, and should continue to receive it in the decades ahead.

For all its inevitable flaws, the UN is the only fully empowered body with effectively universal membership that we have, and the only international body capable of addressing world wide the great inter-linked problem of peace and security, economic and social development, and the rights of individuals and groups to dignity and liberty.

Looking ahead to the UN's next 50 years, we cannot listen to the counselling of despair that is always so easily voiced. Our efforts should be fixed on creating a more effective world organisation, building on everything the international community has learned - about what has gone right as well as what has gone wrong - in the UN's first fifty years.

CANBERRA