SPORTS WEEKEND

Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the world’s major powers Thursday that the United Nations is facing a crisis of credibility and must regain the ability to make the difference between war and peace.

“Too many vulnerable communities in too many regions of the world now hesitate to look to the United Nations to assist them in their hour of need,” Annan told the Security Council during a special session at this week’s U.N. Millennium Summit. “No amount of resolutions or statements can change this reality. Only action can.”

To that end, the heads of state and government from the Security Council’s five permanent members--the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia--sat down to plot action, and came up with a resolution.

At best, the statement passed Thursday is a do-or-die declaration by the five powers of their political will to support the U.N. at a time when nations are tempted to circumvent the world body.

It pledged action in five key areas: preventing war, reforming peacekeeping operations, improving the efficiency of the world body and its programs, recruiting and keeping an able staff, and improving the U.N.’s financial situation.

In a separate session, the entire 15-member Security Council agreed in general terms to strengthen the U.N.’s peacekeeping forces around the world but did not outline how the goal would be achieved. Its members remained divided on whether the U.N. should intervene inside national boundaries in cases of ethnic or civil conflict.

The council resolved to hammer out a new structure for peacekeeping operations that would allow U.N. soldiers to respond faster, with a clearer mandate and stronger rules of engagement.

The council also called for revising the way peacekeeping costs are divided. The move would help reduce Washington’s assessments--and its arrears--to the world body. The U.S. owes about $1.7 billion for peacekeeping efforts, by the U.N.’s count, though U.S. officials argue that their nation bears a disproportionate burden under rules that haven’t been revised since 1973.

President Clinton said the U.S. strongly supports the reforms.

“We must do more to equip the United Nations to do what we ask it to do,” he told the council. But he also said that the definition of peace and security must be expanded to include factors that can destabilize a country, such as AIDS and poverty.

“Until we confront the iron link between deprivation and war, we will never be able to create the peace that the founders of the United Nations dreamed of,” he said.

After a series of tragic peacekeeping failures under his watch, Annan considers reform of the operations to be one of his most important legacies.

“When all else fails, and only armed intervention can save large numbers of people from genocide or crimes against humanity, there too the council must summon the will and the wisdom to confront the agonizing dilemma which such cases pose to the world’s conscience,” he said.

But China and Russia, among other countries, object to giving the U.N. power to reach within the borders of any nation where the government has not protected--or has even attacked--its own people.

China fears that the international community will meddle in its relations with Taiwan and control of Tibet, and Russia considers its war against the separatist republic of Chechnya its own business.

While the more than 150 world leaders meeting inside United Nations headquarters spent Thursday underlining their respective concerns, demonstrators outside the building rallied to press their pet issues.

In a meeting room at the New York Helmsley Hotel, two blocks from the United Nations, a delegation of Cuban women from Miami, Puerto Rico, New York and New Jersey protested Cuban President Fidel Castro’s presence at the three-day summit, which ends today.

“We are calling the attention of the international community and the assembly of the United Nations to the thousands and thousands of crimes committed by Castro throughout 41 years of totalitarian rule,” said Sylvia Iriondo, president of Mothers and Women Against Repression for Cuba.

“It is quite a mockery on the part of Castro and his regime to attend the assembly and stand there beside so many democratically elected leaders, when in Cuba there [have] been no elections in 41 years,” Iriondo added.

So far, demonstrators from a variety of causes, ranging from Jews opposed to any Israeli compromises with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to the Iranian resistance movement and the Falun Gong sect have protested outside the United Nations.

Police have kept the pickets behind blue-painted barricades several blocks from where the leaders’ heavily guarded motorcades enter the complex along the East River, and it is doubtful that many dignitaries have caught even a glimpse of the demonstrators.

There have been few arrests, and the protests so far have been generally peaceful.

The security precautions have been extraordinary. Since the start of the summit, three huge orange sanitation dump trucks filled with sand have been parked in a row blocking First Avenue in front of the world organization. Concrete barriers shield entrances to the building.

The New York Police Department operates two mobile command posts in large vans in front of the U.N. headquarters. Parked next to them is a Secret Service command post.

On Thursday, a Coast Guard cutter and five police boats--including a launch with scuba divers--bobbed at anchor in the East River protecting the complex.

And when Clinton entertained the world leaders at an evening reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, police closed more than a mile of streets near the site as a security precaution.

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster and researcher Lynette Ferdinand contributed to this report.