Global Policy Forum

The United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan, was heavily involved in two of the organisation's most catastrophic failures: Rwanda and Srebrenica. He does not want to preside over another failure of intervention by the international community and yet the UN response to the disastrous civil war in Liberia has been slow and muted.

The security council has yet to meet to discuss a mandate for Liberia and none is planned for the next few days. It is a sign of UN weakness in the aftermath of the struggles over Iraq that the focus of calls for intervention has been the US rather than the UN.

A US flotilla, with 2,000 marines aboard, is heading for Liberian waters and a regional grouping, the Economic Community of West African States, has been urging the US, which has historic ties to Liberia, to lead an intervention force made up of troops from Nigeria, Senegal and Ghana.

Mr Annan, a pragmatist, has suggested intervention in three phases: Nigeria sending a force of 1,500 as quickly as possible, followed by a multilateral West African force that would include US soldiers and, finally, a UN peacekeeping force.

He is having to compromise as conditions in the capital, Monrovia, are deteriorating. The Nigerians will not, as they should be, going in under the UN banner. Nor will any multilateral force that includes the US. In an ideal world, there should be no need for the US, but the West Africans are reluctant to send troops unless the US is involved.

The prime minister, Tony Blair, is scheduled to meet the Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, in Downing Street today and could try to persuade him that the West Africans, despite setbacks in the early 1990s, are capable of achieving stability in Liberia without US help.

Liberia is a sad reminder of the urgent need for the UN to overhaul its peacekeeping operations. Mr Annan, who at present has to scour the world, often unsuccessfully, for soldiers, desperately wants reform. He needs a pool of well-trained soldiers to mount multilateral interventions. Such a reform was proposed by a UN study two years ago, but Mr Annan failed to persuade the security council to implement it.

The international community is unwilling to supply either money or soldiers. Until it does, there will be messy, unsatisfactory compromises, as in the intervention force being prepared for Liberia, with the US sitting offshore, without a UN mandate.

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