"Kofi Annan is trying to enforce a universal standard of behavior among forces serving under the U.N. flag," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "The problem is that it only really works if enforcement is universal too, and Annans proposal still leaves it up to the home country of the troops to actually prosecute and punish violators. In practice, that dilutes the the code, because weve already seen that different countries dont apply the same penalties or strictness in applying codes of conduct." Consistent standards could be upheld, of course, by the proposed International Criminal Court of Justice currently under discussion in the U.N., which would create a permanent, independent war crimes tribunal. That would be if the U.N. could persuade Russia, China and the U.S. to accept the creation of such a court.
Why the U.N. Decided to Police its Policemen
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Now even the peacekeepers will have to behave. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on Wednesday signed on to the Geneva Convention, extending the rules of war to cover U.N. peacekeeping forces. Although that may sound a little superfluous, the present situation is that such forces are only governed by the codes applied by each nation contributing troops - which has resulted in widely divergent responses when soldiers from different countries have engaged in abuses during peacekeeping operations. While Belgian and Canadian troops were severely punished for torturing captives in Somalia, Pakistani personnel werent even charged for similar abuses during the same peacekeeping mission.