The images of war that showed uniformed soldiers of opposing armies meeting on the field of battle have faded into a more insidious vision of millions of civilians, including innocent women and children, being targeted and killed. With many inter-nation tensions at rest, new forms of conflicts have emerged within borders of a state: civil strife flamed by ethnic and religious tension and in many cases caused by greed and the control of a country's mineral or timber resources. At the center of these shocking developments is the emergence of civilians as the deliberate targets of warfare rather than its incidental victims. Today, victims of war cover all segments of the population regardless of gender or age. The ongoing human suffering and cost inflicted by conflicts in Angola, Afghanistan the Caucasus, Colombia, Sudan, the Great Lakes region of Africa, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, West Africa and elsewhere, are daily reminders of this fact. The Secretary General's reports on the atrocities of Srebrenica (A/54/549) and the genocide in Rwanda (S/1999/1257) have highlighted the human toll these conflicts are taking.
Another feature of internal conflicts today is that the dividing line between civilians and combatants is frequently blurred. Combatants often live or seek shelter in villages, and sometimes use civilians, even children as human shields. In some cases, communities provide logistic support to armed groups, either voluntarily or under compulsion, and become targeted as a consequence. Camps for refugees, or those displaced within their own countries are often used by armed elements as hiding places and as bases from which to rise up and continue the conflict.
The United Nations is in the forefront of grappling with the challenges of contemporary war. According to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, "The essence of the United Nations work is to establish human security where it is no longer present, where it is under threat, or where it never existed. This is our humanitarian imperative."