Liaison Newsletter > LIAISON Vol. 3, No. 5, September 1999

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Kosovo: But What About the Other Countries?
By Geneviève Talbot, Project Officer, Peace and Security

The role of the Security Council may sometimes seem nebulous. It is well-known that the Council’s main concerns revolve around international peace and security issues. In other words, it has to juggle mainly with conflict resolution, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, not to mention international sanctions against countries that wage war. The public is well aware of both the intitiatives and lack of action of the Council in such cases as Kosovo, Bosnia, India and Pakistan, as well as Sierra Leone. They are well known because each individual case has been extensively covered by the international media. However, as Ambassador Michel Duval said at the UNA-Canada Annual General Meeting last June, while the media deal with one crisis at a time, the Security Council has to grapple with all the crises at once. The Security Council has, in fact, dealt with over 23 international crises since last January.

Unfortunately, barely a handful of people are aware of the Council’s resolutions on Angola, Afghanistan, Georgia, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, Tajikistan, to name but a few. As Michel Duval puts it so well: “It goes without saying - Africa has the global share of the conflicts, but who notices that more than 70 percent of the Council’s time is devoted to Africa?” It is easy enough to criticize the Council for its lack of visibility, but should we not be asking ourselves instead why these actions go unnoticed?

The Council’s tendency to opt for informal and private meetings, the media’s lack of interest in certain conflicts and the Council’s tendency to select the conflicts it handles surely explain part of the lack of knowledge about the Council’s actions. However, as individuals, we also have a role to play and responsibility to assume. By engaging in discussions with friends, or more formally in meetings, by writing letters expressing our opinions, and by joining chat groups on the Internet, we might highlight the Council’s actions and thereby increase its international role and credibility.

Here are some useful addresses for anyone interested in following up on the Council’s actions. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the Association by phone at (613) 232-5751,ext.224 or by email at info@unac.org: