Secretary General Releases Report on Brahimi Implementation Analysis and Summary

On June 12001, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan released the third follow-up report to the Brahimi panel's recommendations of August 2000, "Implementation of the Recommendations of the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations and the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations." This report includes the first comprehensive managerial review of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. It focuses on improving the DPKO's managerial structure, and changing its organizational structure to make the planning and implementation of peacekeeping missions more effective and efficient. For the most part this report is an in-depth exploration and fine-tuning of suggestions already put forth in the Brahimi Report, departing from the report's original suggestions in some areas. It also provides some updates on progress the UN has made toward implementation of these recommendations.

The report presents three options for equipment procurement and storage to meet the 30-90 day rapid response goal identified in Brahimi:

• a heavy strategic reserve

• a light strategic reserve 

• a medium strategic reserve 

It recommends maintaining the medium-sized reserve, a reserve of critical peacekeeping equipment only, at the UN Logistics Base in Brindisi Italy. Meeting the rapid, effective deployment goal is the rationale for many of the organizational and managerial reforms set out in the report, including several requests for increases in staff levels at the DPKO.

The report and its recommendations are an essential step in improving UN Peacekeeping. However, the report fails to address several essential recommendations included in the Brahimi Report. The implementation report makes no mention of how to guarantee clear and achievable Security Council mandates, although it does nod briefly in this direction by suggesting that the UN collaborate more closely with Member States and the Security Council when planning peace missions. The report also abandons the Information and Strategic Analysis Secretariat envisioned in the Brahimi Report, converting it into a mere advisory panel for the Executive Committee on Peace and Security. This move threatens one of Brahimi's most essential reforms, an attempt to create a single unit to gather, analyze and dispense information related to Peacekeeping.

This report disappoints those who were hoping for a concrete evaluation of the barriers to the implementation of Brahimi. It makes no mention of the supreme obstacle facing peacekeeping reform, the lack of political will. It also makes no mention of the difficulties involved in securing additional resources to carry out its recommendations. Without acknowledging and confronting the apathy surrounding the reform process these obstacles can never be surmounted, and effective peacekeeping will remain a goal instead of an achievement.

+ Summary of the Brahimi Report