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PARIS, Jan 12 (AFP) - World leaders are still unsure what role they want the United Nations to play 50 years after its founding, UN leader Boutros Boutros-Ghali said in Thursday's edition of the French daily Liberation.
"We find ourselves in a new situation, the post Cold-War age which we don't yet know enough about," the UN secretary-general said in the interview marking the 50th anniversary of the world body.
"I would add that the Gulf War gave too much credibility to the United Nations. The result was a credibility crisis when people realised it could not resolve all problems.
"That being said, the UN has managed to settle a good dead all the same: We succeeded in El Salvador, in Mozambique, in Cambodia..," he said.
On Bosnia, Boutros-Ghali said "the mandates were clear at the outset" but "it was when people sought to change them that difficulties cropped up. In Yugoslavia, we were given a mandate to keep the peace and not to make war. Secondly, we were not given the means to carry out these mandates."
In Rwanda, "I assure you that with 400 paratroops, we could have stopped the genocide," Boutros-Ghali said. "I knocked on the doors of 35 African heads of state to get their troops to participate but they did nothing."
"I have 20,000 trained men with the proper equipment and who know exactly how to carry out peace-keeping operations. The problem is that on each occasion I have to secure the agreement of the various states to put these troops at my disposal," the secretary-general said.
On proposals to make Germany and Japan permanent members of the Security Council, Boutros-Ghali said that if they could play a bigger role in the United Nations he would "be the first in favour".
"It is certain that if you let in Japan and Germany, why not accept India, Indonesia and why not Brazil, Argentina, Mexico or other European states. It's up to diplomats to resolve these issues and they will not be resolved in 1995," Boutros-Ghali said.
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