I. The need for change
1. The United Nations was founded, in the words of its Charter, in order "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." Meeting this challenge is the most important function of the Organization, and, to a very significant degree, the yardstick by which it is judged by the peoples it exists to serve. Over the last decade, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge; and it can do no better today. Without significant institutional change, increased financial support, and renewed commitment on the part of Member States, the United Nations will not be capable of executing the critical peacekeeping and peace-building tasks that the Member States assign it in coming months and years. There are many tasks which the United Nations peacekeeping forces should not be asked to undertake, and many places they should not go. But when the United Nations does send its forces to uphold the peace, they must be prepared to confront the lingering forces of war and violence with the ability and determination to defeat them.
2. The Secretary-General has asked the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, composed of individuals experienced in various aspects of conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peace-building, to assess the shortcomings of the existing system and to make frank, specific and realistic recommendations for change. Our recommendations focus not only on politics and strategy but also on operational and organizational areas of need.
3. For preventive initiatives to reduce tension and avert conflict, the Secretary-General needs clear, strong and sustained political support from Member States. For peacekeeping to accomplish its mission, as the United Nations has discovered repeatedly over the last decade, no amount of good intentions can substitute for the fundamental ability to project credible force. However, force alone cannot create peace; it can only create a space in which peace can be built.
4. In other words, the key conditions for the success of future complex operations are political support, rapid deployment with a robust force posture and a sound peace-building strategy. Every recommendation in the present report is meant, in one way or another, to help ensure that these three conditions are met. The need for change has been rendered even more urgent by recent events in Sierra Leone and by the daunting prospect of expanded United Nations operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
5. These changes — while essential — will have no lasting impact unless the Member States of the Organization take seriously their responsibility to train and equip their own forces and to mandate and enable their collective instrument, so that together they may succeed in meeting threats to peace. They must summon the political will to support the United Nations politically, financially and operationally — once they have decided to act as the United Nations —if the Organization is to be credible as a force for peace.
6. The recommendations that the Panel presents balance principle and pragmatism, while honouring the spirit and letter of the Charter of the United Nations and the respective roles of the Organization’s legislative bodies. They are based on the following premises:
(a) The essential responsibility of Member States for the maintenance of international peace and security, and the need to strengthen both the quality and quantity of support provided to the United Nations system to carry out that responsibility;
(b) The pivotal importance of clear, credible and adequately resourced Security Council mandates;
(c) A focus by the United Nations system on conflict prevention and its early engagement, wherever possible;
(d) The need to have more effective collection and assessment of information at United Nations Headquarters, including an enhanced conflict early warning system that can detect and recognize the threat or risk of conflict or genocide;
(e) The essential importance of the United Nations system adhering to and promoting international human rights instruments and standards and international humanitarian law in all aspects of its peace and security activities;
(f) The need to build the United Nations capacity to contribute to peace-building, both preventive and post-conflict, in a genuinely integrated manner;
(g) The critical need to improve Headquarters planning (including contingency planning) for peace operations;
(h) The recognition that while the United Nations has acquired considerable expertise in planning, mounting and executing traditional peacekeeping operations, it has yet to acquire the capacity needed to deploy more complex operations rapidly and to sustain them effectively;
(i) The necessity to provide field missions with high-quality leaders and managers who are granted greater flexibility and autonomy by Headquarters, within clear mandate parameters and with clear standards of accountability for both spending and results;
(j) The imperative to set and adhere to a high standard of competence and integrity for both Headquarters and field personnel, who must be provided the training and support necessary to do their jobs and to progress in their careers, guided by modern management practices that reward meritorious performance and weed out incompetence;
(k) The importance of holding individual officials at Headquarters and in the field accountable for their performance, recognizing that they need to be given commensurate responsibility, authority and resources to fulfil their assigned tasks.
7. In the present report, the Panel has addressed itself to many compelling needs for change within the United Nations system. The Panel views its recommendations as the minimum threshold of change needed to give the United Nations system the opportunity to be an effective, operational, twenty-first century institution.
8. The blunt criticisms contained in the present report reflect the Panel’s collective experience as well as interviews conducted at every level of the system. More than 200 people were either interviewed or provided written input to the Panel. Sources included the Permanent Missions of Member States, including the Security Council members; the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations; and personnel in peace and security-related departments at United Nations Headquarters in New York, in the United Nations Office at Geneva, at the headquarters of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at the headquarters of other United Nations funds and programmes; at the World Bank and in every current United Nations peace operation.

II. Doctrine, strategy and decision-making for peace operations
9. The United Nations system — namely the Member States, Security Council, General Assembly and Secretariat — must commit to peace operations carefully, reflecting honestly on the record of its performance over the past decade. It must adjust accordingly the doctrine upon which peace operations are established; fine-tune its analytical and decision-making capacities to respond to existing realities and anticipate future requirements; and summon the creativity, imagination and will required to implement new and alternative solutions to those situations into which peacekeepers cannot or should not go.
A. Defining the elements of peace operations
10. United Nations peace operations entail three principal activities: conflict prevention and peacemaking; peacekeeping; and peace-building. Long-term conflict prevention addresses the structural sources of conflict in order to build a solid foundation for peace. Where those foundations are crumbling, conflict prevention attempts to reinforce them, usually in the form of a diplomatic initiative. Such preventive action is, by definition, a low-profile activity; when successful, it may even go unnoticed altogether.
11. Peacemaking addresses conflicts in progress, attempting to bring them to a halt, using the tools of diplomacy and mediation. Peacemakers may be envoys of Governments, groups of states, regional organizations or the United Nations, or they may be unofficial and non-governmental groups, as was the case, for example, in the negotiations leading up to a peace accord for Mozambique. Peacemaking may even be the work of a prominent personality, working independently.
12. Peacekeeping is a 50-year-old enterprise that has evolved rapidly in the past decade from a traditional, primarily military model of observing ceasefires and force separations after inter-State wars, to incorporate a complex model of many elements, military and civilian, working together to build peace in the dangerous aftermath of civil wars.
13. Peace-building is a term of more recent origin that, as used in the present report, defines activities undertaken on the far side of conflict to reassemble the foundations of peace and provide the tools for building on those foundations something that is more than just the absence of war. Thus, peace-building includes but is not limited to reintegrating former combatants into civilian society, strengthening the rule of law (for example, through training and restructuring of local police, and judicial and penal reform); improving respect for human rights through the monitoring, education and investigation of past and existing abuses; providing technical assistance for democratic development (including electoral assistance and support for free media); and promoting conflict resolution and reconciliation techniques.
14. Essential complements to effective peace-building include support for the fight against corruption, the implementation of humanitarian demining programmes, emphasis on human immunodeficieny virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) education and control, and action against other infectious diseases.
B. Experience of the past
15. The quiet successes of short-term conflict prevention and peacemaking are often, as noted, politically invisible. Personal envoys and representatives of the Secretary-General (RSGs) or special representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSGs) have at times complemented the diplomatic initiatives of Member States and, at other times, have taken initiatives that Member States could not readily duplicate. Examples of the latter initiatives (drawn from peacemaking as well as preventive diplomacy) include the achievement of a ceasefire in the Islamic Republic of Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the freeing of the last Western hostages in Lebanon in 1991, and avoidance of war between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Afghanistan in 1998.
16. Those who favour focusing on the underlying causes of conflicts argue that such crisis-related efforts often prove either too little or too late. Attempted earlier, however, diplomatic initiatives may be rebuffed by a government that does not see or will not acknowledge a looming problem, or that may itself be part of the problem. Thus, long-term preventive strategies are a necessary complement to short-term initiatives.
17. Until the end of the cold war, United Nations peacekeeping operations mostly had traditional ceasefire-monitoring mandates and no direct peace-building responsibilities. The "entry strategy" or sequence of events and decisions leading to United Nations deployment was straightforward: war, ceasefire, invitation to monitor ceasefire compliance and deployment of military observers or units to do so, while efforts continued for a political settlement. Intelligence requirements were also fairly straightforward and risks to troops were relatively low. But traditional peacekeeping, which treats the symptoms rather than sources of conflict, has no built-in exit strategy and associated peacemaking was often slow to make progress. As a result, traditional peacekeepers have remained in place for 10, 20, 30 or even 50 years (as in Cyprus, the Middle East and India/Pakistan). By the standards of more complex operations, they are relatively low cost and politically easier to maintain than to remove. However, they are also difficult to justify unless accompanied by serious and sustained peacemaking efforts that seek to transform a ceasefire accord into a durable and lasting peace settlement.
18. Since the end of the cold war, United Nations peacekeeping has often combined with peace-building in complex peace operations deployed into settings of intra-State conflict. Those conflict settings, however, both affect and are affected by outside actors: political patrons; arms vendors; buyers of illicit commodity exports; regional powers that send their own forces into the fray; and neighbouring States that host refugees who are sometimes systematically forced to flee their homes. With such significant cross-border effects by state and non-state actors alike, these conflicts are often decidedly "transnational" in character.
19. Risks and costs for operations that must function in such circumstances are much greater than for traditional peacekeeping. Moreover, the complexity of the tasks assigned to these missions and the volatility of the situation on the ground tend to increase together. Since the end of the cold war, such complex and risky mandates have been the rule rather than the exception: United Nations operations have been given relief-escort duties where the security situation was so dangerous that humanitarian operations could not continue without high risk for humanitarian personnel; they have been given mandates to protect civilian victims of conflict where potential victims were at greatest risk, and mandates to control heavy weapons in possession of local parties when those weapons were being used to threaten the mission and the local population alike. In two extreme situations, United Nations operations were given executive law enforcement and administrative authority where local authority did not exist or was not able to function.
20. It should have come as no surprise to anyone that these missions would be hard to accomplish. Initially, the 1990s offered more positive prospects: operations implementing peace accords were time-limited, rather than of indefinite duration, and successful conduct of national elections seemed to offer a ready exit strategy. However, United Nations operations since then have tended to deploy where conflict has not resulted in victory for any side: it may be that the conflict is stalemated militarily or that international pressure has brought fighting to a halt, but in any event the conflict is unfinished. United Nations operations thus do not deploy into post-conflict situations so much as they deploy to create such situations. That is, they work to divert the unfinished conflict, and the personal, political or other agendas that drove it, from the military to the political arena, and to make that diversion permanent.
21. As the United Nations soon discovered, local parties sign peace accords for a variety of reasons, not all of them favourable to peace. "Spoilers" — groups (including signatories) who renege on their commitments or otherwise seek to undermine a peace accord by violence — challenged peace implementation in Cambodia, threw Angola, Somalia and Sierra Leone back into civil war, and orchestrated the murder of no fewer than 800,000 people in Rwanda. The United Nations must be prepared to deal effectively with spoilers if it expects to achieve a consistent record of success in peacekeeping or peace-building in situations of intrastate/transnational conflict.
22. A growing number of reports on such conflicts have highlighted the fact that would-be spoilers have the greatest incentive to defect from peace accords when they have an independent source of income that pays soldiers, buys guns, enriches faction leaders and may even have been the motive for war. Recent history indicates that, where such income streams from the export of illicit narcotics, gemstones or other high-value commodities cannot be pinched off, peace is unsustainable.
23. Neighbouring States can contribute to the problem by allowing passage of conflict-supporting contraband, serving as middlemen for it or providing base areas for fighters. To counter such conflict-supporting neighbours, a peace operation will require the active political, logistical and/or military support of one or more great powers, or of major regional powers. The tougher the operation, the more important such backing becomes.
24. Other variables that affect the difficulty of peace implementation include, first, the sources of the conflict. These can range from economics (e.g., issues of poverty, distribution, discrimination or corruption), politics (an unalloyed contest for power) and resource and other environmental issues (such as competition for scarce water) to issues of ethnicity, religion or gross violations of human rights. Political and economic objectives may be more fluid and open to compromise than objectives related to resource needs, ethnicity or religion. Second, the complexity of negotiating and implementing peace will tend to rise with the number of local parties and the divergence of their goals (e.g., some may seek unity, others separation). Third, the level of casualties, population displacement and infrastructure damage will affect the level of war-generated grievance, and thus the difficulty of reconciliation, which requires that past human rights violations be addressed, as well as the cost and complexity of reconstruction.
25. A relatively less dangerous environment — just two parties, committed to peace, with competitive but congruent aims, lacking illicit sources of income, with neighbours and patrons committed to peace — is a fairly forgiving one. In less forgiving, more dangerous environments — three or more parties, of varying commitment to peace, with divergent aims, with independent sources of income and arms, and with neighbours who are willing to buy, sell and transit illicit goods — United Nations missions put not only their own people but peace itself at risk unless they perform their tasks with the competence and efficiency that the situation requires and have serious great power backing.
26. It is vitally important that negotiators, the Security Council, Secretariat mission planners, and mission participants alike understand which of these political-military environments they are entering, how the environment may change under their feet once they arrive, and what they realistically plan to do if and when it does change. Each of these must be factored into an operation’s entry strategy and, indeed, into the basic decision about whether an operation is feasible and should even be attempted.
27. It is equally important, in this context, to judge the extent to which local authorities are willing and able to take difficult but necessary political and economic decisions and to participate in the establishment of processes and mechanisms to manage internal disputes and pre-empt violence or the re-emergence of conflict. These are factors over which a field mission and the United Nations have little control, yet such a cooperative environment is critical in determining the successful outcome of a peace operation.
28. When complex peace operations do go into the field, it is the task of the operation’s peacekeepers to maintain a secure local environment for peace-building, and the peacebuilders’ task to support the political, social and economic changes that create a secure environment that is self-sustaining. Only such an environment offers a ready exit to peacekeeping forces, unless the international community is willing to tolerate recurrence of conflict when such forces depart. History has taught that peacekeepers and peace-builders are inseparable partners in complex operations: while the peacebuilders may not be able to function without the peacekeepers’ support, the peacekeepers have no exit without the peacebuilders’ work.
C. Implications for preventive action
29. United Nations peace operations addressed no more than one third of the conflict situations of the 1990s. Because even much-improved mechanisms for creation and support of United Nations peacekeeping operations will not enable the United Nations system to respond with such operations in the case of all conflict everywhere, there is a pressing need for the United Nations and its Member States to establish a more effective system for long-term conflict prevention. Prevention is clearly far more preferable for those who would otherwise suffer the consequences of war, and is a less costly option for the international community than military action, emergency humanitarian relief or reconstruction after a war has run its course. As the Secretary-General noted in his recent Millennium Report (A/54/2000), "every step taken towards reducing poverty and achieving broad-based economic growth is a step toward conflict prevention". In many cases of internal conflict, "poverty is coupled with sharp ethnic or religious cleavages", in which minority rights "are insufficiently respected [and] the institutions of government are insufficiently inclusive". Long-term preventive strategies in such instances must therefore work "to promote human rights, to protect minority rights and to institute political arrangements in which all groups are represented. … Every group needs to become convinced that the state belongs to all people".
30. The Panel wishes to commend the United Nations ongoing internal Task Force on Peace and Security for its work in the area of long-term prevention, in particular the notion that development entities in the United Nations system should view humanitarian and development work through a "conflict prevention lens" and make long-term prevention a key focus of their work, adapting current tools, such as the common country assessment and the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF), to that end.
31. To improve early United Nations focus on potential new complex emergencies and thus short-term conflict prevention, about two years ago the Headquarters Departments that sit on the Executive Committee on Peace and Security (ECPS) created the Inter-Agency/Interdepartmental Framework for Coordination, in which 10 departments, funds, programmes and agencies now participate. The active element, the Framework Team, meets at the Director level monthly to decide on areas at risk, schedule country (or situation) review meetings and identify preventive measures. The Framework mechanism has improved interdepartmental contacts but has not accumulated knowledge in a structured way, and does no strategic planning. This may have contributed to the Secretariat’s difficulty in persuading Member States of the advantages of backing their professed commitment to both long- and short-term conflict prevention measures with the requisite political and financial support. In the interim, the Secretary-General’s annual reports of 1997 and 1999 (A/52/1 and A/54/1) focused specifically on conflict prevention. The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and the United Nations Association of the United States of America, among others, also have contributed valuable studies on the subject. And more than 400 staff in the United Nations have undergone systematic training in "early warning" at the United Nations Staff College in Turin.
32. At the heart of the question of short-term prevention lies the use of fact-finding missions and other key initiatives by the Secretary-General. These have, however, usually met with two key impediments. First, there is the understandable and legitimate concern of Member States, especially the small and weak among them, about sovereignty. Such concerns are all the greater in the face of initiatives taken by another Member State, especially a stronger neighbour, or by a regional organization that is dominated by one of its members. A state facing internal difficulties would more readily accept overtures by the Secretary-General because of the recognized independence and moral high ground of his position and in view of the letter and spirit of the Charter, which requires that the Secretary-General offer his assistance and expects the Member States to give the United Nations "every assistance" as indicated, in particular, in Article 2 (5) of the Charter. Fact-finding missions are one tool by which the Secretary-General can facilitate the provision of his good offices.
33. The second impediment to effective crisis-preventive action is the gap between verbal postures and financial and political support for prevention. The Millennium Assembly offers all concerned the opportunity to reassess their commitment to this area and consider the prevention-related recommendations contained in the Secretary-General’s Millennium Report and in his recent remarks before the Security Council’s second open meeting on conflict prevention. There, the Secretary-General emphasized the need for closer collaboration between the Security Council and other principal organs of the United Nations on conflict prevention issues, and ways to interact more closely with non-state actors, including the corporate sector, in helping to defuse or avoid conflicts.
34. Summary of key recommendations on preventive action:
(a) The Panel endorses the recommendations of the Secretary-General with respect to conflict prevention contained in the Millennium Report and in his remarks before the Security Council’s second open meeting on conflict prevention in July 2000, in particular his appeal to "all who are engaged in conflict prevention and development — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, Governments and civil society organizations — [to] address these challenges in a more integrated fashion";
(b) The Panel supports the Secretary-General’s more frequent use of fact-finding missions to areas of tension, and stresses Member States’ obligations, under Article 2 (5) of the Charter, to give "every assistance" to such activities of the United Nations.
D. Implications for peacebuilding strategy
35. The Security Council and the General Assembly’s Special Committee on Peace-keeping Operations have each recognized and acknowledged the importance of peacebuilding as integral to the success of peacekeeping operations. In this regard, on 29 December 1998 the Security Council adopted a presidential statement that encouraged the Secretary-General to "explore the possibility of establishing post-conflict peace-building structures as part of efforts by the United Nations system to achieve a lasting peaceful solution to conflicts ...". The Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations, in its own report earlier in 2000, stressed the importance of defining and identifying elements of peacebuilding before they are incorporated into the mandates of complex peace operations, so as to facilitate later consideration by the General Assembly of continuing support for key elements of peacebuilding after a complex operation draws to a close.
36. Peacebuilding support offices or United Nations political offices may be established as follow-ons to other peace operations, as in Tajikistan or Haiti, or as independent initiatives, as in Guatemala or Guinea-Bissau. They help to support the consolidation of peace in post-conflict countries, working with both Governments and non-governmental parties and complementing what may be ongoing United Nations development activities, which strive to remain apart from politics while nonetheless targeting assistance at the sources of conflict.
37. Effective peacebuilding requires active engagement with the local parties, and that engagement should be multidimensional in nature. First, all peace operations should be given the capacity to make a demonstrable difference in the lives of the people in their mission area, relatively early in the life of the mission. The head of mission should have authority to apply a small percentage of mission funds to "quick impact projects" aimed at real improvements in quality of life, to help establish the credibility of a new mission. The resident coordinator/humanitarian coordinator of the pre-existing United Nations country team should serve as chief adviser for such projects in order to ensure efficient spending and to avoid conflict with other development or humanitarian assistance programmes.
38. Second, "free and fair" elections should be viewed as part of broader efforts to strengthen governance institutions. Elections will be successfully held only in an environment in which a population recovering from war comes to accept the ballot over the bullet as an appropriate and credible mechanism through which their views on government are represented. Elections need the support of a broader process of democratization and civil society building that includes effective civilian governance and a culture of respect for basic human rights, lest elections merely ratify a tyranny of the majority or be overturned by force after a peace operation leaves.
39. Third, United Nations civilian police monitors are not peacebuilders if they simply document or attempt to discourage by their presence abusive or other unacceptable behaviour of local police officers — a traditional and somewhat narrow perspective of civilian police capabilities. Today, missions may require civilian police to be tasked to reform, train and restructure local police forces according to international standards for democratic policing and human rights, as well as having the capacity to respond effectively to civil disorder and for self-defence. The courts, too, into which local police officers bring alleged criminals and the penal system to which the law commits prisoners also must be politically impartial and free from intimidation or duress. Where peacebuilding missions require it, international judicial experts, penal experts and human rights specialists, as well as civilian police, must be available in sufficient numbers to strengthen rule of law institutions. Where justice, reconciliation and the fight against impunity require it, the Security Council should authorize such experts, as well as relevant criminal investigators and forensic specialists, to further the work of apprehension and prosecution of persons indicted for war crimes in support of United Nations international criminal tribunals.
40. While this team approach may seem self-evident, the United Nations has faced situations in the past decade where the Security Council has authorized the deployment of several thousand police in a peacekeeping operation but has resisted the notion of providing the same operations with even 20 or 30 criminal justice experts. Further, the modern role of civilian police needs to be better understood and developed. In short, a doctrinal shift is required in how the Organization conceives of and utilizes civilian police in peace operations, as well as the need for an adequately resourced team approach to upholding the rule of law and respect for human rights, through judicial, penal, human rights and policing experts working together in a coordinated and collegial manner.
41. Fourth, the human rights component of a peace operation is indeed critical to effective peace-building. United Nations human rights personnel can play a leading role, for example, in helping to implement a comprehensive programme for national reconciliation. The human rights components within peace operations have not always received the political and administrative support that they require, however, nor are their functions always clearly understood by other components. Thus, the Panel stresses the importance of training military, police and other civilian personnel on human rights issues and on the relevant provisions of international humanitarian law. In this respect, the Panel commends the Secretary-General’s bulletin of 6 August 1999 entitled "Observance by United Nations forces of international humanitarian law" (ST/SGB/1999/13).
42. Fifth, the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants — key to immediate post-conflict stability and reduced likelihood of conflict recurrence — is an area in which peacebuilding makes a direct contribution to public security and law and order. But the basic objective of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration is not met unless all three elements of the programme are implemented. Demobilized fighters (who almost never fully disarm) will tend to return to a life of violence if they find no legitimate livelihood, that is, if they are not "reintegrated" into the local economy. The reintegration element of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration is voluntarily funded, however, and that funding has sometimes badly lagged behind requirements.
43. Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration has been a feature of at least 15 peacekeeping operations in the past 10 years. More than a dozen United Nations agencies and programmes as well as international and local NGOs, fund these programmes. Partly because so many actors are involved in planning or supporting disarmament, demobilization and reintegration, it lacks a designated focal point within the United Nations system.
44. Effective peacebuilding also requires a focal point to coordinate the many different activities that building peace entails. In the view of the Panel, the United Nations should be considered the focal point for peacebuilding activities by the donor community. To that end, there is great merit in creating a consolidated and permanent institutional capacity within the United Nations system. The Panel therefore believes that the Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, in his/her capacity as Convener of ECPS, should serve as the focal point for peacebuilding. The Panel also supports efforts under way by the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to jointly strengthen United Nations capacity in this area, because effective peacebuilding is, in effect, a hybrid of political and development activities targeted at the sources of conflict.
45. DPA, the Department of Political Affairs, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Department of Disarmament Affairs (DDA), the Office of Legal Affairs (OLA), UNDP, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), OHCHR, UNHCR, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, and the United Nations Security Coordinator are represented in ECPS; the World Bank Group has been invited to participate as well. ECPS thus provides the ideal forum for the formulation of peacebuilding strategies.
46. Nonetheless, a distinction should be made between strategy formulation and the implementation of such strategies, based upon a rational division of labour among ECPS members. In the Panel's view, UNDP has untapped potential in this area, and UNDP, in cooperation with other United Nations agencies, funds and programmes and the World Bank, are best placed to take the lead in implementing peacebuilding activities. The Panel therefore recommends that ECPS propose to the Secretary-General a plan to strengthen the capacity of the United Nations to develop peacebuilding strategies and to implement programmes in support of those strategies. That plan should also indicate the criteria for determining when the appointment of a senior political envoy or representative of the Secretary-General may be warranted to raise the profile and sharpen the political focus of peacebuilding activities in a particular region or country recovering from conflict.
47. Summary of key recommendations on peacebuilding:
(a) A small percentage of a mission’s first-year budget should be made available to the representative or special representative of the Secretary-General leading the mission to fund quick impact projects in its area of operations, with the advice of the United Nations country team’s resident coordinator;
(b) The Panel recommends a doctrinal shift in the use of civilian police, other rule of law elements and human rights experts in complex peace operations to reflect an increased focus on strengthening rule of law institutions and improving respect for human rights in post-conflict environments;
(c) The Panel recommends that the legislative bodies consider bringing demobilization and reintegration programmes into the assessed budgets of complex peace operations for the first phase of an operation in order to facilitate the rapid disassembly of fighting factions and reduce the likelihood of resumed conflict;
(d) The Panel recommends that the Executive Committee on Peace and Security discuss and recommend to the Secretary-General a plan to strengthen the permanent capacity of the United Nations to develop peacebuilding strategies and to implement programmes in support of those strategies.
E. Implications for peacekeeping doctrine and strategy
48. The Panel concurs that consent of the local parties, impartiality and use of force only in self-defence should remain the bedrock principles of peacekeeping. Experience shows, however, that in the context of modern peace operations dealing with intra-State/transnational conflicts, consent may be manipulated in many ways by the local parties. A party may give its consent to United Nations presence merely to gain time to retool its fighting forces and withdraw consent when the peacekeeping operation no longer serves its interests. A party may seek to limit an operation’s freedom of movement, adopt a policy of persistent non-compliance with the provisions of an agreement or withdraw its consent altogether. Moreover, regardless of faction leaders’ commitment to the peace, fighting forces may simply be under much looser control than the conventional armies with which traditional peacekeepers work, and such forces may split into factions whose existence and implications were not contemplated in the peace agreement under the colour of which the United Nations mission operates.
49. In the past, the United Nations has often found itself unable to respond effectively to such challenges. It is a fundamental premise of the present report, however, that it must be able to do so. Once deployed, United Nations peacekeepers must be able to carry out their mandate professionally and successfully. This means that United Nations military units must be capable of defending themselves, other mission components and the mission’s mandate. Rules of engagement should not limit contingents to stroke-for-stroke responses but should allow ripostes sufficient to silence a source of deadly fire that is directed at United Nations troops or at the people they are charged to protect and, in particularly dangerous situations, should not force United Nations contingents to cede the initiative to their attackers.
50. Impartiality for such operations must therefore mean adherence to the principles of the Charter and to the objectives of a mandate that is rooted in those Charter principles. Such impartiality is not the same as neutrality or equal treatment of all parties in all cases for all time, which can amount to a policy of appeasement. In some cases, local parties consist not of moral equals but of obvious aggressors and victims, and peacekeepers may not only be operationally justified in using force but morally compelled to do so. Genocide in Rwanda went as far as it did in part because the international community failed to use or to reinforce the operation then on the ground in that country to oppose obvious evil. The Security Council has since established, in its resolution 1296 (2000), that the targeting of civilians in armed conflict and the denial of humanitarian access to civilian populations afflicted by war may themselves constitute threats to international peace and security and thus be triggers for Security Council action. If a United Nations peace operation is already on the ground, carrying out those actions may become its responsibility, and it should be prepared.
51. This means, in turn, that the Secretariat must not apply best-case planning assumptions to situations where the local actors have historically exhibited worst-case behaviour. It means that mandates should specify an operation’s authority to use force. It means bigger forces, better equipped and more costly, but able to pose a credible deterrent threat, in contrast to the symbolic and non-threatening presence that characterizes traditional peacekeeping. United Nations forces for complex operations should be sized and configured so as to leave no doubt in the minds of would-be spoilers as to which of the two approaches the Organization has adopted. Such forces should be afforded the field intelligence and other capabilities needed to mount a defence against violent challengers.
52. Willingness of Member States to contribute troops to a credible operation of this sort also implies a willingness to accept the risk of casualties on behalf of the mandate. Reluctance to accept that risk has grown since the difficult missions of the mid-1990s, partly because Member States are not clear about how to define their national interests in taking such risks, and partly because they may be unclear about the risks themselves. In seeking contributions of forces, therefore, the Secretary-General must be able to make the case that troop contributors and indeed all Member States have a stake in the management and resolution of the conflict, if only as part of the larger enterprise of establishing peace that the United Nations represents. In so doing, the Secretary-General should be able to give would-be troop contributors an assessment of risk that describes what the conflict and the peace are about, evaluates the capabilities and objectives of the local parties, and assesses the independent financial resources at their disposal and the implications of those resources for the maintenance of peace. The Security Council and the Secretariat also must be able to win the confidence of troop contributors that the strategy and concept of operations for a new mission are sound and that they will be sending troops or police to serve under a competent mission with effective leadership.
53. The Panel recognizes that the United Nations does not wage war. Where enforcement action is required, it has consistently been entrusted to coalitions of willing States, with the authorization of the Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the Charter.
54. The Charter clearly encourages cooperation with regional and subregional organizations to resolve conflict and establish and maintain peace and security. The United Nations is actively and successfully engaged in many such cooperation programmes in the field of conflict prevention, peacemaking, elections and electoral assistance, human rights monitoring and humanitarian work and other peacebuilding activities in various parts of the world. Where peacekeeping operations are concerned, however, caution seems appropriate, because military resources and capability are unevenly distributed around the world, and troops in the most crisis-prone areas are often less prepared for the demands of modern peacekeeping than is the case elsewhere. Providing training, equipment, logistical support and other resources to regional and subregional organizations could enable peacekeepers from all regions to participate in a United Nations peacekeeping operation or to set up regional peacekeeping operations on the basis of a Security Council resolution.
55. Summary of key recommendation on peacekeeping doctrine and strategy: once deployed, United Nations peacekeepers must be able to carry out their mandates professionally and successfully and be capable of defending themselves, other mission components and the mission’s mandate, with robust rules of engagement, against those who renege on their commitments to a peace accord or otherwise seek to undermine it by violence.
F. Clear, credible and achievable mandates
56. As a political body, the Security Council focuses on consensus-building, even though it can take decisions with less than unanimity. But the compromises required to build consensus can be made at the expense of specificity, and the resulting ambiguity can have serious consequences in the field if the mandate is then subject to varying interpretation by different elements of a peace operation, or if local actors perceive a less than complete Council commitment to peace implementation that offers encouragement to spoilers. Ambiguity may also paper over differences that emerge later, under pressure of a crisis, to prevent urgent Council action. While it acknowledges the utility of political compromise in many cases, the Panel comes down in this case on the side of clarity, especially for operations that will deploy into dangerous circumstances. Rather than send an operation into danger with unclear instructions, the Panel urges that the Council refrain from mandating such a mission.
57. The outlines of a possible United Nations peace operation often first appear when negotiators working toward a peace agreement contemplate United Nations implementation of that agreement. Although peace negotiators (peacemakers) may be skilled professionals in their craft, they are much less likely to know in detail the operational requirements of soldiers, police, relief providers or electoral advisers in United Nations field missions. Non-United Nations peacemakers may have even less knowledge of those requirements. Yet the Secretariat has, in recent years, found itself required to execute mandates that were developed elsewhere and delivered to it via the Security Council with but minor changes.
58. The Panel believes that the Secretariat must be able to make a strong case to the Security Council that requests for United Nations implementation of ceasefires or peace agreements need to meet certain minimum conditions before the Council commits United Nations-led forces to implement such accords, including the opportunity to have adviser-observers present at the peace negotiations; that any agreement be consistent with prevailing international human rights standards and humanitarian law; and that tasks to be undertaken by the United Nations are operationally achievable — with local responsibility for supporting them specified — and either contribute to addressing the sources of conflict or provide the space required for others to do so. Since competent advice to negotiators may depend on detailed knowledge of the situation on the ground, the Secretary-General should be pre-authorized to commit funds from the Peacekeeping Reserve Fund sufficient to conduct a preliminary site survey in the prospective mission area.
59. In advising the Council on mission requirements, the Secretariat must not set mission force and other resource levels according to what it presumes to be acceptable to the Council politically. By self-censoring in that manner, the Secretariat sets up itself and the mission not just to fail but to be the scapegoats for failure. Although presenting and justifying planning estimates according to high operational standards might reduce the likelihood of an operation going forward, Member States must not be led to believe that they are doing something useful for countries in trouble when — by under-resourcing missions — they are more likely agreeing to a waste of human resources, time and money.
60. Moreover, the Panel believes that until the Secretary-General is able to obtain solid commitments from Member States for the forces that he or she does believe necessary to carry out an operation, it should not go forward at all. To deploy a partial force incapable of solidifying a fragile peace would first raise and then dash the hopes of a population engulfed in conflict or recovering from war, and damage the credibility of the United Nations as a whole. In such circumstances, the Panel believes that the Security Council should leave in draft form a resolution that contemplated sizeable force levels for a new peacekeeping operation until such time as the Secretary-General could confirm that the necessary troop commitments had been received from Member States.
61. There are several ways to diminish the likelihood of such commitment gaps, including better coordination and consultation between potential troop contributors and the members of the Security Council during the mandate formulation process. Troop contributor advice to the Security Council might usefully be institutionalized via the establishment of ad hoc subsidiary organs of the Council, as provided for in Article 29 of the Charter. Member States contributing formed military units to an operation should as a matter of course be invited to attend Secretariat briefings of the Security Council pertaining to crises that affect the safety and security of the mission’s personnel or to a change or reinterpretation of a mission’s mandate with respect to the use of force.
62. Finally, the desire on the part of the Secretary-General to extend additional protection to civilians in armed conflicts and the actions of the Security Council to give United Nations peacekeepers explicit authority to protect civilians in conflict situations are positive developments. Indeed, peacekeepers — troops or police — who witness violence against civilians should be presumed to be authorized to stop it, within their means, in support of basic United Nations principles and, as stated in the report of the Independent Inquiry on Rwanda, consistent with "the perception and the expectation of protection created by [an operation’s] very presence" (see S/1999/1257, p. 51).
63. However, the Panel is concerned about the credibility and achievability of a blanket mandate in this area. There are hundreds of thousands of civilians in current United Nations mission areas who are exposed to potential risk of violence, and United Nations forces currently deployed could not protect more than a small fraction of them even if directed to do so. Promising to extend such protection establishes a very high threshold of expectation. The potentially large mismatch between desired objective and resources available to meet it raises the prospect of continuing disappointment with United Nations follow-through in this area. If an operation is given a mandate to protect civilians, therefore, it also must be given the specific resources needed to carry out that mandate.
64. Summary of key recommendations on clear, credible and achievable mandates:
(a) The Panel recommends that, before the Security Council agrees to implement a ceasefire or peace agreement with a United Nations-led peacekeeping operation, the Council assure itself that the agreement meets threshold conditions, such as consistency with international human rights standards and practicability of specified tasks and timelines;
(b) The Security Council should leave in draft form resolutions authorizing missions with sizeable troop levels until such time as the Secretary-General has firm commitments of troops and other critical mission support elements, including peacebuilding elements, from Member States;
(c) Security Council resolutions should meet the requirements of peacekeeping operations when they deploy into potentially dangerous situations, especially the need for a clear chain of command and unity of effort;
(d) The Secretariat must tell the Security Council what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear, when formulating or changing mission mandates, and countries that have committed military units to an operation should have access to Secretariat briefings to the Council on matters affecting the safety and security of their personnel, especially those meetings with implications for a mission’s use of force.
G. Information-gathering, analysis, and strategic planning capacities
65. A strategic approach by the United Nations to conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding will require that the Secretariat’s key implementing departments in peace and security work more closely together. To do so, they will need sharper tools to gather and analyse relevant information and to support ECPS, the nominal high-level decision-making forum for peace and security issues.
66. ECPS is one of four "sectoral" executive committees established in the Secretary-General’s initial reform package of early 1997 (see A/51/829, sect. A). The Committees for Economic and Social Affairs, Development Operations, and Humanitarian Affairs were also established. OHCHR is a member of all four. These committees were designed to "facilitate more concerted and coordinated management" across participating departments and were given "executive decision-making as well as coordinating powers." Chaired by the Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, ECPS has promoted greater exchange of information across and cooperation between departments, but it has not yet become the decision-making body that the 1997 reforms envisioned, which its participants acknowledge.
67. Current Secretariat staffing levels and job demands in the peace and security sector more or less preclude departmental policy planning. Although most ECPS members have policy or planning units, they tend to be drawn into day-to-day issues. Yet without significant knowledge generating and analytic capacity, the Secretariat will remain a reactive institution unable to get ahead of daily events, and ECPS will not be able to fulfil the role for which it was created.
68. The Secretary-General and the members of ECPS need a professional system in the Secretariat for accumulating knowledge about conflict situations, distributing that knowledge efficiently to a wide user base, generating policy analyses and formulating long-term strategies. That system does not exist at present. The Panel proposes that it be created as the ECPS Information and Strategic Analysis Secretariat, or EISAS.
69. The bulk of EISAS should be formed by consolidation of the various departmental units that are assigned policy and information analysis roles related to peace and security, including the Policy Analysis Unit and the Situation Centre of DPKO; the Policy Planning Unit of DPA; the Policy Development Unit (or elements thereof) of OCHA; and the Media Monitoring and Analysis Section of the Department of Public Information (DPI).
70. Additional staff would be required to give EISAS expertise that does not exist elsewhere in the system or that cannot be taken from existing structures. These additions would include a head of the staff (at Director level), a small team of military analysts, police experts and highly qualified information systems analysts who would be responsible for managing the design and maintenance of EISAS databases and their accessibility to both Headquarters and field offices and missions.
71. Close affiliates of EISAS should include the Strategic Planning Unit of the Office of the Secretary-General; the Emergency Response Division of UNDP; the Peace-building Unit (see paras. 239-243 below); the Information Analysis Unit of OCHA (which supports Relief Web); the New York liaison offices of OHCHR and UNHCR; the Office of the United Nations Security Coordinator; and the Monitoring, Database and Information Branch of DDA. The World Bank Group should be invited to maintain liaison, using appropriate elements, such as the Bank’s Post-Conflict Unit.
72. As a common service, EISAS would be of both short-term and long-term value to ECPS members. It would strengthen the daily reporting function of the DPKO Situation Centre, generating all-source updates on mission activity and relevant global events. It could bring a budding crisis to the attention of ECPS leadership and brief them on that crisis using modern presentation techniques. It could serve as a focal point for timely analysis of cross-cutting thematic issues and preparation of reports for the Secretary-General on such issues. Finally, based on the prevailing mix of missions, crises, interests of the legislative bodies and inputs from ECPS members, EISAS could propose and manage the agenda of ECPS itself, support its deliberations and help to transform it into the decision-making body anticipated in the Secretary-General’s initial reforms.
73. EISAS should be able to draw upon the best available expertise — inside and outside the United Nations system — to fine-tune its analyses with regard to particular places and circumstances. It should provide the Secretary-General and ECPS members with consolidated assessments of United Nations and other efforts to address the sources and symptoms of ongoing and looming conflicts, and should be able to assess the potential utility — and implications — of further United Nations involvement. It should provide the basic background information for the initial work of the Integrated Mission Task Forces (ITMFs) that the Panel recommends below (see paras. 198-217), be established to plan and support the set up of peace operations, and continue to provide analyses and manage the information flow between mission and Task Force once the mission has been established.
74. EISAS should create, maintain and draw upon shared, integrated, databases that would eventually replace the proliferated copies of code cables, daily situation reports, daily news feeds and informal connections with knowledgeable colleagues that desk officers and decision makers alike currently use to keep informed of events in their areas of responsibility. With appropriate safeguards, such databases could be made available to users of a peace operations Intranet (see paras. 255 and 256 below). Such databases, potentially available to Headquarters and field alike via increasingly cheap commercial broadband communications services, would help to revolutionize the manner in which the United Nations accumulates knowledge and analyses key peace and security issues. EISAS should also eventually supersede the Framework for Coordination mechanism.
75. Summary of key recommendation on information and strategic analysis: the Secretary-General should establish an entity, referred to here as the ECPS Information and Strategic Analysis Secretariat (EISAS), that would support the information and analysis needs of all members of ECPS; for management purposes, it should be administered by and report jointly to the heads of DPA and DPKO.
H. The challenge of transitional civil administration
76. Until mid-1999, the United Nations had conducted just a small handful of field operations with elements of civil administration conduct or oversight. In June 1999, however, the Secretariat found itself directed to develop a transitional civil administration for Kosovo, and three months later for East Timor. The struggles of the United Nations to set up and manage those operations are part of the backdrop to the narratives on rapid deployment and on Headquarters staffing and structure in the present report.
77. These operations face challenges and responsibilities that are unique among United Nations field operations. No other operations must set and enforce the law, establish customs services and regulations, set and collect business and personal taxes, attract foreign investment, adjudicate property disputes and liabilities for war damage, reconstruct and operate all public utilities, create a banking system, run schools and pay teachers and collect the garbage — in a war-damaged society, using voluntary contributions, because the assessed mission budget, even for such "transitional administration" missions, does not fund local administration itself. In addition to such tasks, these missions must also try to rebuild civil society and promote respect for human rights, in places where grievance is widespread and grudges run deep.
78. Beyond such challenges lies the larger question of whether the United Nations should be in this business at all, and if so whether it should be considered an element of peace operations or should be managed by some other structure. Although the Security Council may not again direct the United Nations to do transitional civil administration, no one expected it to do so with respect to Kosovo or East Timor either. Intra-State conflicts continue and future instability is hard to predict, so that despite evident ambivalence about civil administration among United Nations Member States and within the Secretariat, other such missions may indeed be established in the future and on an equally urgent basis. Thus, the Secretariat faces an unpleasant dilemma: to assume that transitional administration is a transitory responsibility, not prepare for additional missions and do badly if it is once again flung into the breach, or to prepare well and be asked to undertake them more often because it is well prepared. Certainly, if the Secretariat anticipates future transitional administrations as the rule rather than the exception, then a dedicated and distinct responsibility centre for those tasks must be created somewhere within the United Nations system. In the interim, DPKO has to continue to support this function.
79. Meanwhile, there is a pressing issue in transitional civil administration that must be addressed, and that is the issue of "applicable law." In the two locales where United Nations operations now have law enforcement responsibility, local judicial and legal capacity was found to be non-existent, out of practice or subject to intimidation by armed elements. Moreover, in both places, the law and legal systems prevailing prior to the conflict were questioned or rejected by key groups considered to be the victims of the conflicts.
80. Even if the choice of local legal code were clear, however, a mission’s justice team would face the prospect of learning that code and its associated procedures well enough to prosecute and adjudicate cases in court. Differences in language, culture, custom and experience mean that the learning process could easily take six months or longer. The United Nations currently has no answer to the question of what such an operation should do while its law and order team inches up such a learning curve. Powerful local political factions can and have taken advantage of the learning period to set up their own parallel administrations, and crime syndicates gladly exploit whatever legal or enforcement vacuums they can find.
81. These missions’ tasks would have been much easier if a common United Nations justice package had allowed them to apply an interim legal code to which mission personnel could have been pre-trained while the final answer to the "applicable law" question was being worked out. Although no work is currently under way within Secretariat legal offices on this issue, interviews with researchers indicate that some headway toward dealing with the problem has been made outside the United Nations system, emphasizing the principles, guidelines, codes and procedures contained in several dozen international conventions and declarations relating to human rights, humanitarian law, and guidelines for police, prosecutors and penal systems.
82. Such research aims at a code that contains the basics of both law and procedure to enable an operation to apply due process using international jurists and internationally agreed standards in the case of such crimes as murder, rape, arson, kidnapping and aggravated assault. Property law would probably remain beyond reach of such a "model code", but at least an operation would be able to prosecute effectively those who burned their neighbours’ homes while the property law issue was being addressed.
83. Summary of key recommendation on transitional civil administration: the Panel recommends that the Secretary-General invite a panel of international legal experts, including individuals with experience in United Nations operations that have transitional administration mandates, to evaluate the feasibility and utility of developing an interim criminal code, including any regional adaptations potentially required, for use by such operations pending the re-establishment of local rule of law and local law enforcement capacity.
III. United Nations capacities to deploy operations rapidly and effectively
84. Many observers have questioned why it takes so long for the United Nations to fully deploy operations following the adoption of a Security Council resolution. The reasons are several. The United Nations does not have a standing army, and it does not have a standing police force designed for field operations. There is no reserve corps of mission leadership: special representatives of the Secretary-General and heads of mission, force commanders, police commissioners, directors of administration and other leadership components are not sought until urgently needed. The Standby Arrangements System (UNSAS) currently in place for potential government-provided military, police and civilian expertise has yet to become a dependable supply of resources. The stockpile of essential equipment recycled from the large missions of the mid-1990s to the United Nations Logistics Base (UNLB) at Brindisi, Italy, has been depleted by the current surge in missions and there is as yet no budgetary vehicle for rebuilding it quickly. The peacekeeping procurement process may not adequately balance its responsibilities for cost-effectiveness and financial responsibility against overriding operational needs for timely response and mission credibility. The need for standby arrangements for the recruitment of civilian personnel in substantive and support areas has long been recognized but not yet implemented. And finally, the Secretary-General lacks most of the authority to acquire, hire and preposition the goods and people needed to deploy an operation rapidly before the Security Council adopts the resolution to establish it, however likely such an operation may seem.
85. In short, few of the basic building blocks are in place for the United Nations to rapidly acquire and deploy the human and material resources required to mount any complex peace operation in the future.
A. Defining what "rapid and effective deployment" entails
86. The proceedings of the Security Council, the reports of the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations and input provided to the Panel by the field missions, the Secretariat and the Member States all agree on the need for the United Nations to significantly strengthen capacity to deploy new field operations rapidly and effectively. In order to strengthen these capacities, the United Nations must first agree on basic parameters for defining what "rapidity" and "effectiveness" entail.
87. The first six to 12 weeks following a ceasefire or peace accord is often the most critical period for establishing both a stable peace and the credibility of the peacekeepers. Credibility and political momentum lost during this period can often be difficult to regain. Deployment timelines should thus be tailored accordingly. However, the speedy deployment of military, civilian police and civilian expertise will not help to solidify a fragile peace and establish the credibility of an operation if these personnel are not equipped to do their job. To be effective, the missions’ personnel need materiel (equipment and logistics support), finance (cash in hand to procure goods and services) information assets (training and briefing), an operational strategy and, for operations deploying into uncertain circumstances, a military and political "centre of gravity" sufficient to enable it to anticipate and overcome one or more of the parties’ second thoughts about taking a peace process forward.
88. Timelines for rapid and effective deployment will naturally vary in accordance with the politico-military situations that are unique to each post-conflict environment. Nevertheless, the first step in enhancing the United Nations capacity for rapid deployment must begin with agreeing upon a standard towards which the Organization should strive. No such standard yet exists. The Panel thus proposes that the United Nations develop the operational capabilities to fully deploy "traditional" peacekeeping operations within 30 days of the adoption of a Security Council resolution, and complex peacekeeping operations within 90 days. In the case of the latter, the mission headquarters should be fully installed and functioning within 15 days.
89. In order to meet these timelines, the Secretariat would need one or a combination of the following: (a) standing reserves of military, civilian police and civilian expertise, materiel and financing; (b) extremely reliable standby capacities to be called upon on short notice; or (c) sufficient lead-time to acquire these resources, which would require the ability to foresee, plan for and initiate spending for potential new missions several months ahead of time. A number of the Panel’s recommendations are directed at strengthening the Secretariat’s analytical capacities and aligning them with the mission planning process in order to help the United Nations be better prepared for potential new operations. However, neither the outbreak of war nor the conclusion of peace can always be predicted well in advance. In fact, experience has shown that this is often not the case. Thus, the Secretariat must be able to maintain a certain generic level of preparedness, through the establishment of new standing capacities and enhancement of existing standby capacities, so as to be prepared for unforeseen demands.
90. Many Member States have argued against the establishment of a standing United Nations army or police force, resisted entering into reliable standby arrangements, cautioned against the incursion of financial expenses for building a reserve of equipment or discouraged the Secretariat from undertaking planning for potential operations prior to the Secretary-General having been granted specific, crisis-driven legislative authority to do so. Under these circumstances, the United Nations cannot deploy operations "rapidly and effectively" within the timelines suggested. The analysis that follows argues that at least some of these circumstances must change to make rapid and effective deployment possible.
91. Summary of key recommendation on determining deployment timelines: the United Nations should define "rapid and effective deployment capacities" as the ability, from an operational perspective, to fully deploy traditional peacekeeping operations within 30 days after the adoption of a Security Council resolution, and within 90 days in the case of complex peacekeeping operations.
B. Effective mission leadership
92. Effective, dynamic leadership can make the difference between a cohesive mission with high morale and effectiveness despite adverse circumstances, and one that struggles to maintain any of those attributes. That is, the tenor of an entire mission can be heavily influenced by the character and ability of those who lead it.
93. Given this critical role, the current United Nations approach to recruiting, selecting, training and supporting its mission leaders leaves major room for improvement. Lists of potential candidates are informally maintained. RSGs and SRSGs, heads of mission, force commanders, civilian police commissioners and their respective deputies may not be selected until close to or even after adoption of a Security Council resolution establishing a new mission. They and other heads of substantive and administrative components may not meet one another until they reach the mission area, following a few days of introductory meetings with Headquarters officials. They will be given generic terms of reference that spell out their overall roles and responsibilities, but rarely will they leave Headquarters with mission-specific policy or operational guidance in hand. Initially, at least, they will determine on their own how to implement the Security Council’s mandate and how to deal with potential challenges to implementation. They must develop a strategy for implementing the mandate while trying to establish the mission’s political/military centre of gravity and sustain a potentially fragile peace process.
94. Factoring in the politics of selection makes the process somewhat more understandable. Political sensitivities about a new mission may preclude the Secretary-General’s canvassing potential candidates much before a mission has been established. In selecting SRSGs, RSGs or other heads of mission, the Secretary-General must consider the views of Security Council members, the States within the region and the local parties, the confidence of each of whom an RSG/SRSG needs in order to be effective. The choice of one or more deputy SRSGs may be influenced by the need to achieve geographic distribution within the mission’s leadership. The nationality of the force commander, the police commissioner and their deputies will need to reflect the composition of the military and police components, and will also need to consider the political sensitivities of the local parties.
95. Although political and geographic considerations are legitimate, in the Panel’s view managerial talent and experience must be accorded at least equal priority in choosing mission leadership. Based on the personal experiences of several of its members in leading field operations, the Panel endorses the need to assemble the leadership of a mission as early as possible, so that they can jointly help to shape a mission’s concept of operations, its support plan, its budget and its staffing arrangements.
96. To facilitate early selection, the Panel recommends that the Secretary-General compile, in a systematic fashion, and with input from Member States, a comprehensive list of potential SRSGs, force commanders, police commissioners and potential deputies, as well as candidates to head other substantive components of a mission, representing a broad geographic and equitable gender distribution. Such a database would facilitate early identification and selection of the leadership group.
97. The Secretariat should, as a matter of standard practice, provide mission leadership with strategic guidance and plans for anticipating and overcoming challenges to mandate implementation and, whenever possible, formulate such guidance and plans together with the mission leadership. The leadership should also consult widely with the United Nations resident country team and with NGOs working in the mission area to broaden and deepen its local knowledge, which is critical to implementing a comprehensive strategy for transition from war to peace. The country team’s resident coordinator should be included more frequently in the formal mission planning process.
98. The Panel believes that there should always be at least one member of the senior management team of a mission with relevant United Nations experience, preferably both in a field mission and at Headquarters. Such an individual would facilitate the work of those members of the management team from outside the United Nations system, shortening the time they would otherwise need to become familiar with the Organization’s rules, regulations, policies and working methods, answering the sorts of questions that pre-deployment training cannot anticipate.
99. The Panel notes the precedent of appointing the resident coordinator/humanitarian coordinator of the team of United Nations agencies, funds and programmes engaged in development work and humanitarian assistance in a particular country as one of the deputies to the SRSG of a complex peace operation. In our view, this practice should be emulated wherever possible.
100. Conversely, it is critical that field representatives of United Nations agencies, funds and programmes facilitate the work of an SRSG or RSG in his or her role as the coordinator of all United Nations activities in the country concerned. On a number of occasions, attempts to perform this role have been hampered by overly bureaucratic resistance to coordination. Such tendencies do not do justice to the concept of the United Nations family that the Secretary-General has tried hard to encourage.
101. Summary of key recommendations on mission leadership:
(a) The Secretary-General should systematize the method of selecting mission leaders, beginning with the compilation of a comprehensive list of potential representatives or special representatives of the Secretary-General, force commanders, civilian police commissioners and their deputies and other heads of substantive and administrative components, within a fair geographic and gender distribution and with input from Member States;
(b) The entire leadership of a mission should be selected and assembled at Headquarters as early as possible in order to enable their participation in key aspects of the mission planning process, for briefings on the situation in the mission area and to meet and work with their colleagues in mission leadership;
(c) The Secretariat should routinely provide the mission leadership with strategic guidance and plans for anticipating and overcoming challenges to mandate implementation and, whenever possible, should formulate such guidance and plans together with the mission leadership.
C. Military personnel
102. The United Nations launched UNSAS in the mid-1990s in order to enhance its rapid deployment capabilities and to enable it to respond to the unpredictable and exponential growth in the establishment of the new generation of complex peacekeeping operations. UNSAS is a database of military, civilian police and civilian assets and expertise indicated by Governments to be available, in theory, for deployment to United Nations peacekeeping operations at seven, 15, 30, 60 or 90 days’ notice. The database currently includes 147,900 personnel from 87 Member States: 85,000 in military combat units; 56,700 in military support elements; 1,600 military observers; 2,150 civilian police; and 2,450 other civilian specialists. Of the 87 participating States, 31 have concluded memoranda of understanding with the United Nations enumerating their responsibilities for preparedness of the personnel concerned, but the same memoranda also codify the conditional nature of their commitment. In essence, the memorandum of understanding confirms that States maintain their sovereign right to "just say no" to a request from the Secretary-General to contribute those assets to an operation.
103. The absence of detailed statistics on responses notwithstanding, many Member States are saying "no" to deploying formed military units to United Nations-led peacekeeping operations, far more often than they are saying "yes". In contrast to the long tradition of developed countries providing the bulk of the troops for United Nations peacekeeping operations during the Organization’s first 50 years, in the last few years 77 per cent of the troops in formed military units deployed in United Nations peacekeeping operations, as of end-June 2000, were contributed by developing countries.
104. The five Permanent Members of the Security Council are currently contributing far fewer troops to United Nations-led operations, but four of the five have contributed sizeable forces to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo that provide a secure environment in which the United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH) and the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) can function. The United Kingdom also deployed troops to Sierra Leone at a critical point in the crisis (outside United Nations operational control), providing a valuable stabilizing influence, but no developed country currently contributes troops to the most difficult United Nations-led peacekeeping operations from a security perspective, namely the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) and the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC).
105. Memories of peacekeepers murdered in Mogadishu and Kigali and taken hostage in Sierra Leone help to explain the difficulties Member States are having in convincing their national legislatures and public that they should support the deployment of their troops to United Nations-led operations, particularly in Africa. Moreover, developed States tend not to see strategic national interests at stake. The downsizing of national military forces and the growth in European regional peacekeeping initiatives further depletes the pool of well-trained and well-equipped military contingents from developed countries to serve in United Nations-led operations.
106. Thus, the United Nations is facing a very serious dilemma. A mission such as UNAMSIL would probably not have faced the difficulties that it did in spring 2000 had it been provided with forces as strong as those currently keeping the peace as part of KFOR in Kosovo. The Panel is convinced that NATO military planners would not have agreed to deploy to Sierra Leone with only the 6,000 troops initially authorized. Yet, the likelihood of a KFOR-type operation being deployed in Africa in the near future seems remote given current trends. Even if the United Nations were to attempt to deploy a KFOR-type force, it is not clear, given current standby arrangements, where the troops and equipment would come from.
107. A number of developing countries do respond to requests for peacekeeping forces with troops who serve with distinction and dedication according to very high professional standards, and in accord with new contingent-owned equipment (COE) procedures ("wet lease" agreements) adopted by the General Assembly, which provide that national troop contingents are to bring with them almost all the equipment and supplies required to sustain their troops. The United Nations commits to reimburse troop contributors for use of their equipment and to provide those services and support not covered under the new COE procedures. In return, the troop contributing nations undertake to honour the memoranda of understanding on COE procedures that they sign.
108. Yet, the Secretary-General finds himself in an untenable position. He is given a Security Council resolution specifying troop levels on paper, but without knowing whether he will be given the troops to put on the ground. The troops that eventually arrive in theatre may still be underequipped: Some countries have provided soldiers without rifles, or with rifles but no helmets, or with helmets but no flak jackets, or with no organic transport capability (trucks or troops carriers). Troops may be untrained in peacekeeping operations, and in any case the various contingents in an operation are unlikely to have trained or worked together before. Some units may have no personnel who can speak the mission language. Even if language is not a problem, they may lack common operating procedures and have differing interpretations of key elements of command and control and of the mission’s rules of engagement, and may have differing expectations about mission requirements for the use of force.
109. This must stop. Troop-contributing countries that cannot meet the terms of their memoranda of understanding should so indicate to the United Nations, and must not deploy. To that end, the Secretary-General should be given the resources and support needed to assess potential troop contributors’ preparedness prior to deployment, and to confirm that the provisions of the memoranda will be met.
110. A further step towards improving the current situation would be to give the Secretary-General a capability for assembling, on short notice, military planners, staff officers and other military technical experts, preferably with prior United Nations mission experience, to liaise with mission planners at Headquarters and to then deploy to the field with a core element from DPKO to help establish a mission’s military headquarters, as authorized by the Security Council. Using the current Standby Arrangements System, an "on-call list" of such personnel, nominated by Member States within a fair geographic distribution and carefully vetted and accepted by DPKO, could be formed for this purpose and for strengthening ongoing missions in times of crisis. Personnel assigned to this on-call list of about 100 officers would be at the rank of Major to Colonel and would be treated, upon their short-notice call-up, as United Nations military observers, with appropriate modifications.
111. Personnel selected for inclusion in the on-call list would be pre-qualified medically and administratively for deployment worldwide, would participate in advance training and would incur a commitment of up to two years for immediate deployment within 7-days notification. Every three months, the on-call list would be updated with some 10 to 15 new personnel, as nominated by Member States, to be trained during an initial three-month period. With continuous updating every three months, the on-call list would contain about five to seven teams ready for short-notice deployment. Initial team training would include at the outset a pre-qualification and education phase (brief one-week classroom and apprentice instruction in United Nations systems), followed by a hands-on professional development phase (deployment to an ongoing United Nations peacekeeping operation as a military observer team for about 10 weeks). After this initial three-month team training period, individual officers would then return to their countries and assume an on-call status.
112. Upon Security Council authorization, one or more of these teams could be called up for immediate duty. They would travel to United Nations Headquarters for refresher orientation and specific mission guidance, as necessary, and interaction with the planners of the Integrated Mission Task Force (see paras. 198-217 below) for that operation, before deploying to the field. The teams’ mission would be to translate the broad strategic-level concepts of the mission developed by IMTF into concrete operational and tactical plans, and to undertake immediate coordination and liaison tasks in advance of the deployment of troop contingents. Once deployed, an advance team would remain operational until replaced by deploying contingents (usually about 2 to 3 months, but longer if necessary, up to a six-month term).
113. Funding for a team's initial training would come from the budget of the ongoing mission in which the team is deployed for initial training, and funding for an on-call deployment would come from the prospective peacekeeping mission budget. The United Nations would incur no costs for such personnel while they were on on-call status in their home country as they would be performing normal duties in their national armed forces. The Panel recommends that the Secretary-General outline this proposal with implementing details to the Member States for immediate implementation within the parameters of the existing Standby Arrangements System.
114. Such an emergency military field planning and liaison staff capacity would not be enough, however, to ensure force coherence. In our view, in order to function as a coherent force the troop contingents themselves should at least have been trained and equipped according to a common standard, supplemented by joint planning at the contingents’ command level. Ideally, they will have had the opportunity to conduct joint training field exercises.
115. If United Nations military planners assess that a brigade (approximately 5,000 troops) is what is required to effectively deter or deal with violent challenges to the implementation of an operation’s mandate, then the military component of that United Nations operation ought to deploy as a brigade formation, not as a collection of battalions that are unfamiliar with one another’s doctrine, leadership and operational practices. That brigade would have to come from a group of countries that have been working together as suggested above to develop common training and equipment standards, common doctrine, and common arrangements for the operational control of the force. Ideally, UNSAS should contain several coherent such brigade-size forces, with the necessary enabling forces, available for full deployment to an operation within 30 days in the case of traditional peacekeeping operations and within 90 days in the case of complex operations.
116. To that end, the United Nations should establish the minimum training, equipment and other standards required for forces to participate in United Nations peacekeeping operations. Member States with the means to do so could form partnerships, within the context of UNSAS, to provide financial, equipment, training and other assistance to troop contributors from less developed countries to enable them to reach and maintain that minimum standard, with the goal that each of the brigades so established should be of comparably high quality and be able to call upon effective levels of operational support. Such a formation has been the objective of the Standing High-Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG) group of States, who have also established a command-level planning element that works together routinely. However, the proposed arrangement is not intended as a mechanism for relieving some States from their responsibilities to participate actively in United Nations peacekeeping operations or for precluding the participation of smaller States in such operations.
117. Summary of key recommendations on military personnel:
(a) Member States should be encouraged, where appropriate, to enter into partnerships with one another, within the context of the United Nations Standby Arrangements System (UNSAS), to form several coherent brigade-size forces, with necessary enabling forces, ready for effective deployment within 30 days of the adoption of a Security Council resolution establishing a traditional peacekeeping operation and within 90 days for complex peacekeeping operations;
(b) The Secretary-General should be given the authority to formally canvass Member States participating in UNSAS regarding their willingness to contribute troops to a potential operation once it appeared likely that a ceasefire accord or agreement envisaging an implementing role for the United Nations might be reached;
(c) The Secretariat should, as a standard practice, send a team to confirm the preparedness of each potential troop contributor to meet the provisions of the memoranda of understanding on the requisite training and equipment requirements, prior to deployment; those that do not meet the requirements must not deploy;
(d) The Panel recommends that a revolving "on-call list" of about 100 military officers be created in UNSAS to be available on seven days’ notice to augment nuclei of DPKO planners with teams trained to create a mission headquarters for a new peacekeeping operation.
D. Civilian police
118. Civilian police are second only to military forces in numbers of international personnel involved in United Nations peacekeeping operations. Demand for civilian police operations dealing with intra-State conflict is likely to remain high on any list of requirements for helping a war-torn society restore conditions for social, economic and political stability. The fairness and impartiality of the local police force, which civilian police monitor and train, is crucial to maintaining a safe and secure environment, and its effectiveness is vital where intimidation and criminal networks continue to obstruct progress on the political and economic fronts.
119. The Panel has accordingly argued (see paras. 39, 40 and 47 (b) above) for a doctrinal shift in the use of civilian police in United Nations peace operations, to focus primarily on the reform and restructuring of local police forces in addition to traditional advisory, training and monitoring tasks. This shift will require Member States to provide the United Nations with even more well-trained and specialized police experts, at a time when they face difficulties meeting current requirements. As of 1 August 2000, 25 per cent of the 8,641 police positions authorized for United Nations operations remained vacant.
120. Whereas Member States may face domestic political difficulties in sending military units to United Nations peace operations, Governments tend to face fewer political constraints in contributing their civilian police to peace operations. However, Member States still have practical difficulties doing so, because the size and configuration of their police forces tend to be tailored to domestic needs alone.
121. Under the circumstances, the process of identifying, securing the release of and training police and related justice experts for mission service is often time-consuming, and prevents the United Nations from deploying a mission’s civilian police component rapidly and effectively. Moreover, the police component of a mission may comprise officers drawn from up to 40 countries who have never met one another before, have little or no United Nations experience, and have received little relevant training or mission-specific briefings, and whose policing practices and doctrines may vary widely. Moreover, civilian police generally rotate out of operations after six months to one year. All of those factors make it extremely difficult for missions’ civilian police commissioners to transform a disparate group of officers into a cohesive and effective force.
122. The Panel therefore calls upon Member States to establish national pools of serving police officers (augmented, if necessary, by recently retired police officers who meet the professional and physical requirements) who are administratively and medically ready for deployment to United Nations peace operations, within the context of the United Nations Standby Arrangements System. The size of the pool will naturally vary with each country’s size and capacity. The Civilian Police Unit of DPKO should assist Member States in determining the selection criteria and training requirements for police officers within these pools, by identifying the specialities and expertise required and issuing common guidelines on the professional standards to be met. Once deployed in a United Nations mission, civilian police officers should serve for at least one year to ensure a minimum level of continuity.
123. The Panel believes that the cohesion of police components would be further enhanced if police-contributing States were to develop joint training exercises, and therefore recommends that Member States, where appropriate, enter into new regional training partnerships and strengthen existing ones. The Panel also calls upon Member States in a position to do so to offer assistance (e.g., training and equipment) to smaller police-contributing States to maintain the requisite level of preparedness, according to guidelines, standard operating procedures and performance standards promulgated by the United Nations.
124. The Panel also recommends that Member States designate a single point of contact within their governmental structures to be responsible for coordinating and managing the provision of police personnel to United Nations peace operations.
125. The Panel believes that the Secretary-General should be given a capability for assembling, on short notice, senior civilian police planners and technical experts, preferably with prior United Nations mission experience, to liaise with mission planners at Headquarters and to then deploy to the field to help establish a mission’s civilian police headquarters, as authorized by the Security Council, in a standby arrangement that parallels the military headquarters on-call list and its procedures. Upon call-up, members of the on-call list would have the same contractual and legal status as other civilian police in United Nations operations. The training and deployment arrangements for members of the on-call list also could be the same as those of its military counterpart. Furthermore, joint training and planning between the military and civilian police officers on the respective lists would further enhance mission cohesion and cooperation across components at the start-up of a new operation.
126. Summary of key recommendations on civilian police personnel:
(a) Member States are encouraged to each establish a national pool of civilian police officers that would be ready for deployment to United Nations peace operations on short notice, within the context of the United Nations standby arrangements system;
(b) Member States are encouraged to enter into regional training partnerships for civilian police in the respective national pools in order to promote a common level of preparedness in accordance with guidelines, standard operating procedures and performance standards to be promulgated by the United Nations;
(c) Members States are encouraged to designate a single point of contact within their governmental structures for the provision of civilian police to United Nations peace operations;
(d) The Panel recommends that a revolving on-call list of about 100 police officers and related experts be created in UNSAS to be available on seven days’ notice with teams trained to create the civilian police component of a new peacekeeping operation, train incoming personnel and give the component greater coherence at an early date;
(e) The Panel recommends that parallel arrangements to recommendations (a), (b) and (c) above be established for judicial, penal, human rights and other relevant specialists, who with specialist civilian police will make up collegial "rule of law" teams.
E. Civilian specialists
127. To date, the Secretariat has been unable to identify, recruit and deploy suitably qualified civilian personnel in substantive and support functions either at the right time or in the numbers required. Currently, about 50 per cent of field positions in substantive areas and up to 40 per cent of the positions in administrative and logistics areas are vacant, in missions that were established six months to one year ago and remain in desperate need of the requisite specialists. Some of those who have been deployed have found themselves in positions that do not match their previous experience, such as in the civil administration components of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) and UNMIK. Furthermore, the rate of recruitment is nearly matched by the rate of departure by mission personnel fed up with the working conditions that they face, including the short-staffing itself. High vacancy and turnover rates foreshadow a disturbing scenario for the start-up and maintenance of the next complex peacekeeping operation, and hamper the full deployment of current missions. Those problems are compounded by several factors.
1. Lack of standby systems to respond to unexpected or high-volume surge demands
128. Each new complex task assigned to the new generation of peacekeeping operations creates demands that the United Nations system is not able to meet on short notice. This phenomenon first emerged in the early 1990s, with the establishment of the following operations to implement peace accords: the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL), the United Nations Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM) and the United Nations Operation in Mozambique (ONUMOZ). The system struggled to recruit experts on short notice in electoral assistance, economic reconstruction and rehabilitation, human rights monitoring, radio and television production, judicial affairs and institution-building. By mid-decade, the system had created a cadre of individuals, which had acquired on-the-job expertise in these areas, hitherto not present in the system. However, for reasons explained below, many of those individuals have since left the system.
129. The Secretariat was again taken by surprise in 1999, when it had to staff missions with responsibilities for governance in East Timor and Kosovo. Few staff within the Secretariat, or within United Nations agencies, funds or programmes possess the technical expertise and experience required to run a municipality or national ministry. Neither could Member States themselves fill the gap immediately, because they, too, had done no advance planning to identify qualified and available candidates within their national structures. Moreover, the understaffed transitional administration missions themselves took some time to even specify precisely what they required. Eventually, a few Member States offered to provide candidates (some at no cost to the United Nations) to satisfy substantial elements of the demand. However, the Secretariat did not fully avail itself of those offers, partly to avoid the resulting lopsided geographic distribution in the missions’ staffing. The idea of individual Member States taking over entire sectors of administration (sectoral responsibility) was also floated, apparently too late in the process to iron out the details. This idea is worth revisiting, at least for the provision of small teams of civil administrators with specialized expertise.
130. In order to respond quickly, ensure quality control and satisfy the volume of even foreseeable demands, the Secretariat would require the existence and maintenance of a roster of civilian candidates. The roster (which would be distinct from UNSAS) should include the names of individuals in a variety of fields, who have been actively sought out (on an individual basis or through partnerships with and/or the assistance of the members of the United Nations family, governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations), pre-vetted, interviewed, pre-selected, medically cleared and provided with the basic orientation material applicable to field mission service in general, and who have indicated their availability on short notice.
131. No such roster currently exists. As a result, urgent phone calls have to be made to Member States, United Nations departments and agencies and the field missions themselves to identify suitable candidates at the last minute, and to then expect those candidates to be in a position to drop everything overnight. Through this method, the Secretariat has managed to recruit and deploy at least 1,500 new staff over the last year, not including the managed reassignments of existing staff within the United Nations system, but quality control has suffered.
132. A central Intranet-based roster should be created, along the lines proposed above, that is accessible to and maintained by the relevant members of ECPS. The roster should include the names of their own staff whom ECPS members would agree to release for mission service. Some additional resources would be required to maintain these rosters, but accepted external candidates could be reminded automatically to update their own records via the Internet, particularly as regards availability, and they should be able to access on-line briefing and training materials via the Internet, as well. Field missions should be granted access and delegated the authority to recruit candidates from the roster, in accordance with guidelines to be promulgated by the Secretariat for ensuring fair geographic and gender distribution.
2. Difficulties in attracting and retaining the best external recruits
133. As ad hoc as the recruitment system has been, the United Nations has managed to recruit some very qualified and dedicated individuals for field assignments throughout the 1990s. They have managed ballots in Cambodia, dodged bullets in Somalia, evacuated just in time from Liberia and came to accept artillery fire in former Yugoslavia as a feature of their daily life. Yet, the United Nations system has not yet found a contractual mechanism to appropriately recognize and reward their service by offering them some job security. While it is true that mission recruits are explicitly told not to harbour false expectations about future employment because external recruits are brought in to fill a "temporary" demand, such conditions of service do not attract and retain the best performers for long. In general, there is a need to rethink the historically prevailing view of peacekeeping as a temporary aberration rather than a core function of the United Nations.
134. Thus, at least a percentage of the best external recruits should be offered longer-term career prospects beyond the limited-duration contracts that they are currently offered, and some of them should be actively recruited for positions in the Secretariat’s complex emergency departments in order to increase the number of Headquarters staff with field experience. A limited number of mission recruits have managed to secure positions at Headquarters, but apparently on an ad hoc and individual basis rather than according to a concerted and transparent strategy.
135. Proposals are currently being formulated to address this situation by enabling mission recruits who have served for four years in the field to be offered "continuing appointments", whenever possible; unlike current contracts, these would not be restricted to the duration of a specific mission mandate. Such initiatives, if adopted, would help to address the problem for those who joined the field in mid-decade and remain in the system. They might not, however, go far enough to attract new recruits, who would generally have to take up six-month to one-year assignments at a time, without necessarily knowing if there would be a position for them once the assignment had been completed. The thought of having to live in limbo for four years might be inhibiting for some of the best candidates, particularly for those with families, who have ample alternative employment opportunities (often with more competitive conditions of service). Consideration should therefore be given to offering continuing appointments to those external recruits who have served with particular distinction for at least two years in a peace operation.
3. Shortages in administrative and support functions at the mid- to senior-levels
136. Critical shortfalls in key administrative areas (procurement, finance, budget, personnel) and in logistics support areas (contracts managers, engineers, information systems analysts, logistics planners) plagued United Nations peace operations throughout the 1990s. The unique and specific nature of the Organization’s administrative rules, regulations and internal procedures preclude new recruits from taking on these administrative and logistics functions in the dynamic conditions of mission start-up, without a substantial amount of training. While ad hoc training programmes for such personnel were initiated in 1995, they have yet to be institutionalized because the most experienced individuals, the would-be trainers, could not be spared from their full-time line responsibilities. In general, training and the production of user-friendly guidance documents are the first projects to be set aside when new missions have to be staffed on an urgent basis. Accordingly, the updated version of the 1992 field administration handbook still remains in draft form.
4. Penalizing field deployment
137. Headquarters staff who are familiar with the rules, regulations and procedures do not readily deploy to the field. Staff in both administrative and substantive areas must volunteer for field duty and their managers must agree to release them. Heads of departments often discourage, dissuade and/or refuse to release their best performers for field assignments because of shortages of competent staff in their own offices, which they fear temporary replacements cannot resolve. Potential volunteers are further discouraged because they know colleagues who were passed over for promotion because they were "out of sight, out of mind." Most field operations are "non-family assignments" given security considerations, another factor which reduces the numbers of volunteers. A number of the field-oriented United Nations agencies, funds and programmes (UNHCR, the World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), UNDP) do have a number of potentially well qualified candidates for peacekeeping service, but also face resource constraints, and the staffing needs of their own field operations generally take first priority.
138. The Office of Human Resources Management, supported by a number of interdepartmental task forces, has proposed a series of progressive reforms that address some of these problems. They require mobility within the Secretariat, and aim to encourage rotation between Headquarters and the field by rewarding mission service during promotion considerations. They seek to reduce recruitment delays and grant full recruitment authority to heads of departments. The Panel feels it is essential that these initiatives be approved expeditiously.
5. Obsolescence in the Field Service category
139. The Field Service is the only category of staff within the United Nations designed specifically for service in peacekeeping operations (and whose conditions of service and contracts are designed accordingly and whose salaries and benefits are paid for entirely from mission budgets). It has lost much of its value, however, because the Organization has not dedicated enough resources to career development for the Field Service Officers. This category was developed in the 1950s to provide a highly mobile cadre of technical specialists to support in particular the military contingents of peacekeeping operations. As the nature of the operations changed, so too did the functions the Field Service Officers were asked to perform. Eventually, some ascended through the ranks by the late 1980s and early 1990s to assume managerial functions in the administrative and logistics components of peacekeeping operations.
140. The most experienced and seasoned of the group are now in limited supply, deployed in current missions, and many are at or near retirement. Many of those who remain lack the managerial skills or training required to effectively run the key administrative components of complex peace operations. Others’ technical knowledge is dated. Thus, the Field Service’s composition no longer matches all or many of the administrative and logistics support needs of the newer generation of peacekeeping operations. The Panel therefore encourages the urgent revision of the Field Service’s composition and raison d’etre, to better match the present and future demands of field operations, with particular emphasis on mid- to senior-level managers in key administrative and logistics areas. Staff development and training for this category of personnel, on a continual basis, should also be treated as a high priority, and the conditions of service should be revised to attract and retain the best candidates.
6. Lack of a comprehensive staffing strategy for peace operations
141. There is no comprehensive staffing strategy to ensure the right mix of civilian personnel in any operation. There are talents within the United Nations system that must be tapped, gaps to be filled through external recruitment and a range of other options that fall in between, such as the use of United Nations Volunteers, subcontracted personnel, commercial services, and nationally-recruited staff. The United Nations has turned to all of these sources of personnel throughout the past decade, but on a case-by-case basis rather than according to a global strategy. Such a strategy is required to ensure cost-effectiveness and efficiency, as well as to promote mission cohesion and staff morale.
142. This staffing strategy should address the use of United Nations Volunteers in peacekeeping operations, on a priority basis. Since 1992, more than 4,000 United Nations Volunteers have served in 19 different peacekeeping operations. Approximately 1,500 United Nations Volunteers have been assigned to new missions in East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone in the last 18 months alone, in civil administration, electoral affairs, human rights, administrative and logistics support roles. United Nations Volunteers have historically proven to be dedicated and competent in their fields of work. The legislative bodies have encouraged greater use of United Nations Volunteers in peacekeeping operations based on their exemplary past performance, but using United Nations Volunteers as a form of cheap labour risks corrupting the programme and can be damaging to mission morale. Many United Nations Volunteers work alongside colleagues who are making three or four times their salary for similar functions. DPKO is currently in discussion with the United Nations Volunteers Programme on the conclusion of a global memorandum of understanding for the use of United Nations Volunteers in peacekeeping operations. It is essential that such a memorandum be part of a broader comprehensive staffing strategy for peace operations.
143. This strategy should also include, in particular, detailed proposals for the establishment of a Civilian Standby Arrangements System (CSAS). CSAS should contain a list of personnel within the United Nations system who have been pre-selected, medically cleared and committed by their parent offices to join a mission start-up team on 72 hours’ notice. The relevant members of the United Nations family should be delegated authority and responsibility, for occupational groups within their respective expertise, to initiate partnerships and memoranda of understanding with intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, for the provision of personnel to supplement mission start-up teams drawn from within the United Nations system.
144. The fact that responsibility for developing a global staffing strategy and civilian standby arrangements has rested solely within the Field Administration and Logistics Division (FALD), acting on its own initiative whenever there are a few moments to spare, is itself an indication that the Secretariat has not dedicated enough attention to this critical issue. The staffing of a mission, from the top down, is perhaps one of the most important building blocks for successful mission execution. This subject should therefore be accorded the highest priority by the Secretariat’s senior management.
145. Summary of key recommendations on civilian specialists:
(a) The Secretariat should establish a central Internet/Intranet-based roster of pre-selected civilian candidates available to deploy to peace operations on short notice. The field missions should be granted access to and delegated authority to recruit candidates from it, in accordance with guidelines on fair geographic and gender distribution to be promulgated by the Secretariat;
(b) The Field Service category of personnel should be reformed to mirror the recurrent demands faced by all peace operations, especially at the mid- to senior-levels in the administrative and logistics areas;
(c) Conditions of service for externally recruited civilian staff should be revised to enable the United Nations to attract the most highly qualified candidates, and to then offer those who have served with distinction greater career prospects;
(d) DPKO should formulate a comprehensive staffing strategy for peace operations, outlining, among other issues, the use of United Nations Volunteers, standby arrangements for the provision of civilian personnel on 72 hours’ notice to facilitate mission start-up, and the divisions of responsibility among the members of the Executive Committee on Peace and Security for implementing that strategy.
F. Public information capacity
146. An effective public information and communications capacity in mission areas is an operational necessity for virtually all United Nations peace operations. Effective communication helps to dispel rumour, to counter disinformation and to secure the cooperation of local populations. It can provide leverage in dealing with leaders of rival groups, enhance security of United Nations personnel and serve as a force multiplier. It is thus essential that every peace operation formulate public information campaign strategies, particularly for key aspects of a mission’s mandate, and that such strategies and the personnel required to implement them be included in the very first elements deployed to help start up a new mission.
147. Field missions need competent spokespeople who are integrated into the senior management team and project its daily face to the world. To be effective, the spokesperson must have journalistic experience and instincts, and knowledge of how both the mission and United Nations Headquarters work. He or she must also enjoy the confidence of the SRSG and establish good relationship with other members of the mission leadership. The Secretariat must therefore increase its efforts to develop and retain a pool of such personnel.
148. United Nations field operations also need to be able to speak effectively to their own people, to keep staff informed of mission policy and developments and to build links between components and both up and down the chain of command. New information technology provides effective tools for such communications, and should be included in the start-up kits and equipment reserves at UNLB in Brindisi.
149. Resources devoted to public information and the associated personnel and information technology required to get an operation’s message out and build effective internal communications links, which now infrequently exceed one per cent of a mission’s operating budget, should be increased in accordance with a mission’s mandate, size and needs.
150. Summary of key recommendation on rapidly deployable capacity for public information: additional resources should be devoted in mission budgets to public information and the associated personnel and information technology required to get an operation’s message out and build effective internal communications links.
G. Logistics support, the procurement process and expenditure management
151. The depletion of the United Nations reserve of equipment, long lead-times even for systems contracts, bottlenecks in the procurement process and delays in obtaining cash in hand to conduct procurement in the field further constrain the rapid deployment and effective functioning of missions that do actually manage to reach authorized staffing levels. Without effective logistics support, missions cannot function effectively.
152. The lead-times required for the United Nations to provide field missions with basic equipment and commercial services required for mission start-up and full deployment are dictated by the United Nations procurement process. That process is governed by the Financial Regulations and Rules promulgated by the General Assembly and the Secretariat’s interpretations of those regulations and rules (known as "policies and procedures" in United Nations parlance). The regulations, rules, policies and procedures have been translated into a roughly eight-step process that Headquarters must follow to provide field missions with the equipment and services it requires, as follows:
1. Identify the requirements and raise a requisition.
2. Certify that finances are available to procure the item.
3. Initiate an invitation to bid (ITB) or request for proposal (RFP).
4. Evaluate tenders.
5. Present cases to the Headquarters Committee on Contracts (HCC).
6. Award a contract and place an order for production.
7. Await production of the item.
8. Deliver the item to the mission.
153. Most governmental organizations and commercial companies follow similar processes, though not all of them take as long as that of the United Nations. For example, this entire process in the United Nations can take 20 weeks in the case of office furniture, 17 to 21 weeks for generators, 23 to 27 weeks for prefabricated buildings, 27 weeks for heavy vehicles and 17 to 21 weeks for communications equipment. Naturally, none of these lead-times enable full mission deployment within the timelines suggested if the majority of the processes are commencing only after an operation has been established.
154. The United Nations launched the "start-up kit" concept during the boom in peacekeeping operations in the mid-1990s to partially address this problem. The start-up kits contain the basic equipment required to establish and sustain a 100-person mission headquarters for the first 100 days of deployment, pre-purchased, packaged and waiting and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice at Brindisi. Assessed contributions from the mission to which the kits are deployed are then used to reconstitute new start-up kits, and once liquidated a mission’s non-disposable and durable equipment is returned to Brindisi and held in reserve, in addition to the start-up kits.
155. However, the wear and tear on light vehicles and other items in post-war environments may sometimes render the shipping and servicing costs more expensive than selling off the item or cannibalizing it for parts and then purchasing a new item altogether. Thus, the United Nations has moved towards auctioning such items in situ more frequently, although the Secretariat is not authorized to use the funds acquired through this process to purchase new equipment but must return it to Member States. Consideration should be given to enabling the Secretariat to use the funds acquired through these means to purchase new equipment to be held in reserve at Brindisi. Furthermore, consideration should also be given to a general authorization for field missions to donate, in consultation with the United Nations resident coordinator, at least a percentage of such equipment to reputable local non-governmental organizations as a means of assisting the development of nascent civil society.
156. Nonetheless, the existence of these start-up kits and reserves of equipment appears to have greatly facilitated the rapid deployment of the smaller operations mounted in the mid-to-late 1990s. However, the establishment and expansion of new missions has now outpaced the closure of existing operations, so that UNLB has been virtually depleted of the long lead-time items required for full mission deployment. Unless one of the large operations currently in place closes down today and its equipment is all shipped to UNLB in good condition, the United Nations will not have in hand the equipment required to support the start-up and rapid full deployment of a large mission in the near future.
157. There are, of course, limits to how much equipment the United Nations can and should keep in reserve at UNLB or elsewhere. Mechanical equipment in storage needs to be maintained, which can be an expensive proposition, and if not addressed properly can result in missions receiving long awaited items that are inoperable. Furthermore, the commercial and public sectors at the national level have moved increasingly towards "just-in-time" inventory and/or "just-in-time delivery" because of the high opportunity costs of keeping funds tied up in equipment that may not be deployed for some time. Furthermore, the current pace of technological advancements renders certain items, such as communications equipment and information systems hardware, obsolete within a matter of months, let alone years.
158. The United Nations has accordingly also moved in that direction over the past few years, and has concluded some 20 standing commercial systems contracts for the provision of common equipment for peace operations, particularly those required for mission start-up and expansion. Under the systems contracts, the United Nations has been able to cut down lead-times considerably by selecting the vendors ahead of time, and keeping them on standby for production requests. Nevertheless, the production of light vehicles under the current systems contract takes 14 wee