UN General Assembly
1996

quickly once they were no longer fuelled by unbridled military assistance and by positions of continual escalation in both hemispheres. Today, unfortunately, we are forced to recognize that the state of the world for the most part belies these optimistic visions; many old conflicts continue to resist the international community’s attempts to settle them. Pernicious and persistent intra-State conflicts have broken out. The conflicts in Africa and in the former Yugoslavia illustrate this situation. Indeed, from Angola to Somalia, from Burundi and Rwanda to Liberia, Africa is beset by conflicts whose nature, as we are forced to recognize, prevents the proper and effective implementation of the solutions proposed. It is true that significant progress has been made in some of these conflicts, particularly in Angola and to a lesser extent in Rwanda. We need to continue our efforts in this direction. In other conflicts, the road to peace remains uncertain. In Liberia, the situation is extremely murky due to the difficulty of managing conflicts between rival factions, despite the initiatives of the United Nations, the