Kofi Annan's statement on NATO intervention that freed Kosovo

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was separated from life today at the age of 80.

Nobel's winner for Peace of 2001, two years before honouring the award, in marking the centenarian of the International Peace Conference in The Hague, had addressed the Kosovo issue.

There he had brought his arguments in defense of NATO's intervention in Kosovo, after seeing Serb forces' crimes against Albanians, and the refusal of Yugoslav authorities (Serbian) by which he had realized that there are cases where the use of force could be legitimate in seeking peace”.

The translation carried out by Klan Kosova.

Here's Anna's full statement:

The Hague,

May 18, 1999

I am privileged to join you today in this historic coma. We meet at a time of war to ponder the price of peace. We meet to honor the visionary men and women who sought to make the twentieth century more peaceful than the last. We meet to honor the power of hope before human experience. However, it is not only hope but also fear that has brought us together today fears of repeating the horrors of war and genocide, horrors that no member of The Hague could imagine in 1899.

We know that their cause today, a hundred years later, is only more important, more necessary, more urgent. We know this because we are meeting in the shadow of a war that brings back the worst of our century crimes against humanity, mass killings, and mass expulsion of an entire people simply because of what they are. It's hard in the presence of such horrors not to lose full confidence in mankind. After all that this century has endured, if Europe in turn can see the crimes in Kosovo again, can we at all reason when talking about human progress? How can we say that conferences like The Hague have drawn us from the edge of destruction when the abyss appears in front of our TV screens every hour of every day?

Today, I want to offer an answer that some may give some hope for the future, but also to find out how far we are from demonstrating the vision of those whom we honor today. When they gathered in this city 100 years ago, their goal was not to end the war but to prevent one in the future. They were pioneers in preventing conflict. They sought the development of instruments for peaceful crisis resolution, war prevention, and the codification of the rules of war, intended to bring basic principles of humanity within the most unhuman aspect of existence. All their efforts were inspired, in the words of Preambula, by “the desire to reduce the evils of war, so much as allow military demands”. Those words can strongly show the limits and achievement of The Hague Conferences.

Despite the failure mainly in the field of arms restrictions, they were successful in peaceful agreements of international conflict. They resulted in many cases of successful international arbitration, in terms of definition of the nature of arbitrage and the encoding of its rules of procedures. The idea of an international permanent court was born that led to the founding of the Supreme Court of International Justice in 1922, a predecessor of the International Court of Justice. In a broader sense, the spirit and idea behind The Hague Conference paved the way for the creation of the United Nations itself. A legal regime of international peace and security was institutionalised through the United Nations Charter, forcing signatory states to a wide range of restrictions on the use of force.

What is clear not only from the form of international law but also from the reality of conflict today is a dynamic effort that requires continued determination by all those who seek peaceful co-existence among nations. Since 1996, we have seen the adoption of the Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Arms, the entry into force of the Convention on Chemical Weapons, the entry into force of the Convention on Land Mines, and, above all, the adoption of the Rome Status of the International Criminal Court.

The International Criminal Court, in my opinion, represents the largest single act of justice progress, human rights and rule of law. The capture of the Statout was a major step towards universalising the war against impunity, including each state, each leader, and each army guilty of crimes against our common humanity. However, the rule of law in the report between the United States cannot be limited to the law of respect for international legal obligations is a necessary nucleus of the system we seek. Therefore, the efficiency and importance of the Security Council should become the cornerstone of our efforts to promote international peace and security in the coming century.

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has seen significant cases in which the Council has reacted responsibly and legitimised peacekeeping operations and the use of force when they were right and necessary. Central America and the change in Iraq's aggression against Kuwait are key examples that the Security Council has played the role it preceded by its founders.

However, there has recently been a sad tendency for the Security Council not to get involved in international peace and security conservation efforts. The Kosovo case has made clear that the Member States and regional organisations sometimes take action without the Security Council's authorisation.

A parallel trend has been to ignore international sanctions imposed by the Security Council by individual member states, even regional organisations. In addition, the United States has failed to co-operate with the Security Council in a series of areas, from disarmament and Nonproliferation to co-operation with the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and with the UN investigative missions for human rights.

Of course, national interest plays a huge and permanent role in the decision in some cases of the United States to choose alternatives to collective security. Furthermore, the non-proliferation of regional and sub-regional agreements, preference for so-called “preparationary “, increased diplomatic views within the Council, and the emergence of a single superpower and new regional powers, all contributed to the current situation.

In my opinion, what has been most disturbing has been the inability of the United States to reconcile national interests when visionary and skillful diplomacy made unity possible. National interest is the permanent feature of international relations and the life and work of the Security Council. But as the world deeply unchanged since the end of the Cold War, I believe that our concepts of national interest have failed to follow, and that has to change.

A newer definition of the broader definition of national interest in a new century, I am convinced that it would stimulate the United States to find much greater unity in pursuing such a fundamental set of values as democracy, pluralism, human rights and rule of law.

I say this because I believe that we have been introduced just such a case in Kosovo.

As you can remember, my reaction to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's decision (NATO) to take action without asking for the Security Council's launch authorisation was twofold: I identified the Security Council as the key responsible for preserving international peace and security. With similar emphasis, I have also stated that it was the rejection of a political agreement by Yugoslav authorities that made this action necessary, and that, indeed, there is “raste when using force can be legitimate in seeking peace”.

My regret then is that the Council could not unify these two responsible interests and two responsible priorities of the international community. This is very clear: If the Security Council returns to its main position as the sole source of legitimacy in the use of force, then we are on a dangerous path to anarchy. Just as important, unless the Security Council can join the goal of confronting major human rights violations and crimes against humanity on scale like those in Kosovo, then we will betray the same ideals that inspired the establishment of the United Nations.

This is the fundamental challenge of the Security Council and the United Nations as a whole in the next century: to join the principle that major and systematic human rights violations committed against an entire people cannot be allowed to stand. Because in a world where globalisation has limited the ability of the United States to control their economies, regulate financial policies, and isolate themselves from environmental damage and human migration, the last right of the United States cannot be the right to enslave, persecute or torture its citizens.

In other words, the choice should not be between the unity and non-action of the Council in the face of a genocide like in Rwanda's case, on one hand; or the division of the Council, regional action, as in Kosovo's case, on the other. In both cases, the United Nations Member States has had to be able to find a reconciliation in supporting the principles of the Charter, and to find unity in the best interests of protecting our common humanity.

In the wake of a new billion, we ask for these United Nations responsible for a dynamic and changing world, with respect to the sovereignty of the United States, and restored to their determination to advance the rights and freedoms of people of the world.