UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 20 - The General Assembly and Security Council passed resolutions on Tuesday founding a Peacebuilding Commission to help stabilize and rebuild societies emerging from war.
Creation of the commission represented the first concrete achievement of a session dedicated to adopting proposals for major institutional and management changes, which were showcased this fall in the largest meeting of heads of state and government in the United Nations' 60-year history.
Jan Eliasson of Sweden, president of the General Assembly, said the commission was critical for keeping war-torn countries from reverting to hostilities, which he said had occurred in half the cases over the past 20 years where conflicts had ended.
The commission is intended to pick up the international effort in such countries when peacekeeping missions are completing their tasks of bringing fighting to an end and monitoring cease-fires.
Secretary General Kofi Annan told the General Assembly that while many parts of the United Nations had traditionally been involved in helping countries in longer-term recovery after protracted conflicts, there had never been an entity to coordinate those activities, develop expertise and strategy and focus attention on reconstruction and the building of institutions.
"Too often," he said, "a fragile peace has been allowed to crumble into renewed conflict."
The new commission will have 31 members. Seven, including the 5 veto-holding permanent members, will come from the 15-member Security Council; 7 from the 54-nation Economic and Social Council; 5 from the 10 top contributors to the United Nations; 5 from the 10 nations that supply the most troops for peacekeeping missions; and 7 chosen to assure geographical balance by regional groupings.
Representatives of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other institutional donors will be expected to attend meetings.
While the Peacebuilding Commission was always considered the least controversial of the institutional proposals under consideration, and was approved by consensus without a vote, its passage still raised concern among many members of the 191-member General Assembly. Those members felt that they and not the 15-member Security Council should play the dominant role in its function.
Maged Abdelaziz, the ambassador from Egypt, told the General Assembly that the makeup and rules of the commission constituted a "flagrant contravention with the principle of national ownership of peace-building activities" and held the new commission "hostage to the prerogatives of the Security Council."
In an effort to achieve balance, the resolution said that while the commission's main purpose would be to provide advice to the Security Council, it would submit an annual report to the General Assembly for debate.
John R. Bolton, the American ambassador, said the United States supported the Peacebuilding Commission. But he said he was concerned that reform proposals the United States thinks of as a priority, like the modernization of management practices and the creation of a Human Rights Council, were lagging and needed to be addressed before the biennial budget is decided this month.
He noted that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called on the United Nations to institute "a lasting revolution of reform."
Mr. Bolton said, "A lasting revolution takes a lot more work than we've accomplished so far."
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