A FESTIVAL OF NATIONS : U.N. Meeting Ends With Vow to Work for Peace : Celebration: Leaders pledge to build a better world but also take the opportunity to push own agendas.

The largest assemblage of international leaders in history closed the United Nations’ 50th birthday celebration Tuesday with a declaration that the leaders “will work with renewed vigor and effectiveness in promoting peace, development, equality and justice and understanding among the peoples of the world.”

With the United Nations under much criticism from many quarters, the declaration was a far more prosaic document than the resounding preamble that U.S. poet Archibald MacLeish fashioned for the U.N. Charter in 1945. In his most famous phrase, MacLeish pledged the United Nations “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

The 1995 declaration, awaiting approval by acclamation at the final session of the three-day summit, was drafted on the eve of the conference by a committee of 50 U.N. ambassadors who had wrangled for many months. The ambassadors found much to praise in the half-century history of the world body, but they were far from boastful.

“The United Nations has been tested by conflict, humanitarian crisis and turbulent change,” the declaration said, “yet it has survived and played an important role in preventing another global conflict and has achieved much for people all over the world.”

In contrast to the committee-drafted declaration, Czech President Vaclav Havel’s address to the General Assembly stood out for its poetic elegance.

“If the future of mankind is not to be jeopardized by conflicting spheres of civilization and culture,” Havel said, “we have no alternative but to shift the ray of our attention from that which separates us to that which unites us.”

Havel, a playwright and political philosopher, proposed such innovations as a permanent military strike force and a worldwide U.N. tax. He declared:

“Mine is a vision of a United Nations consisting not--as happens so frequently today--of divided nations . . . but of united people, belonging to a world in jeopardy which can be saved only by uniting all human forces.”

Havel was one of more than 80 presidents, royal personages, prime ministers and lesser ministers who addressed the summit in the General Assembly hall on the actual birthday of the United Nations. The U.N. Charter, signed in San Francisco four months earlier, was officially ratified on Oct. 24, 1945.

Aside from Havel, Tuesday’s long list of speakers featured Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Most leaders pushed their own agendas.

Izetbegovic chided the United Nations for failing to save his country from the aggression of the ethnic Serbs who live in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He demanded the withdrawal of Serb artillery from the outskirts of Bosnian cities.

“The United Nations acted effectively in stopping the [Persian] Gulf crisis,” Izetbegovic said. “Unfortunately, this efficacy has not repeated itself in the case of aggression against my country. The price of hesitation has been enormous. My people paid this price.”

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Without mentioning by name Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian president also said that “those who have led their people to the path of crime must be removed.” Both Karadzic and Mladic have been indicted by the special international tribunal in The Hague on charges of war crimes in Bosnia.

A discordant note came from President Pasteur Bizimungu of Rwanda, who accused some neighboring African countries of harboring some of the Rwandans responsible for the terrible 1994 massacres, mainly of ethnic Tutsis.

“Now, planners and perpetrators of genocide are welcomed in some capitals not only as ordinary, innocent refugees but as heroes deserving to lead people,” he said. Bizimungu, naming only one alleged protector of the killers, accused President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya of “associating with those criminals and protecting them.”

The declaration awaiting final approval did not use the term “peace enforcement”--a phrase that has come into disrepute because of the United Nations’ failure to secure peace in Somalia and Bosnia. But it did pledge U.N. members “to enhance the capabilities of the United Nations in conflict prevention, preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping and peace-building.”

Turning to economic development, the declaration stated that “notwithstanding past efforts, the gap between the developed and developing countries remains unacceptably wide.”

Clearly upbraiding the United States, the document stated that “member states must meet, in full and on time, their obligation to bear the expenses of the organization.” The United States, with an unpaid balance of $1.4 billion, is the United Nations’ biggest debtor.

According to the U.N. staff, the list of speakers during the three-day summit included 92 heads of state, eight vice presidents, 38 prime ministers, 10 deputy prime ministers, 21 foreign ministers and nine ambassadors.

More than 48 hours after a massive group photograph of 189 leaders and U.N. officials was taken at the beginning of the celebration, U.N. officials could still not identify all the people in the photo.

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Asked if his office had prepared the identifications, U.N. spokesman Joe Sills told reporters: “I almost wish you would have asked about the identity of the Western Sahara voters, because that’s easier.” Sills was alluding to the trouble that a U.N. mission was having in accrediting voters for a referendum on the future of the African territory, which is now controlled by Morocco.

U.N. officials clearly did not want to make a diplomatic gaffe by pinning the wrong name on any of the faces in the photo.

“We have not identified everyone with certainty,” Sills said, “and we are going to wait until we do before announcing anything.”