UNITED NATIONS, Dec 5: India, one of the leading troop and police-contributing countries, has steadily supported the UN’s initiatives to improve peacekeeping operations and the world body counts on New Delhi as a major partner in peacekeeping, a top UN official has said.
Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix highlighted technology, increasing the number and role of women in peacekeeping missions and accountability for crimes against the Blue Helmets as crucial areas of cooperation with India in an exclusive interview with PTI here ahead of the 2023 UN Peacekeeping Ministerial meeting.
The Ministerial meeting is scheduled for December 5-6 in Accra, Ghana. It will bring together ministers and delegates from over 85 countries and international organisations to express their collective commitment to UN Peacekeeping, the UN said.
“We very much count on India. India is one of the major partners to peacekeeping. It’s one of the leading troop and police-contributing countries, but in addition to that, it is also a country that has steadily supported all the initiatives to improve peacekeeping,” Lacroix said.
Lacroix said that India has several capacities that offer avenues for cooperation with UN peacekeeping.
Technology “is a key area where we certainly have to do more and more in cooperation with India. We also count on India to help us in terms of increasing the number and role of women in peacekeeping,” he said, adding that there are many areas in which New Delhi’s role and cooperation “will be very critical.”
“I would also like to mention the importance of working more on accountability for crimes against peacekeepers, which is also an area in which India has really been in the lead, and we’re very grateful for that,” he said.
The ministerial meeting seeks to secure vital political support and concrete commitments to strengthen UN Peacekeeping efforts to meet current and future challenges and needs, in line with ongoing reform under Action for Peacekeeping and the A4P+ (Action for Peacekeeping Plus) implementation plan, the UN said in a statement.
The flagship event, co-hosted by the United Nations and the Republic of Ghana, marks the fifth such meeting at the ministerial level and the first to be held on the African continent.
The event will focus on crucial issues such as advancing sustainable peace, protecting civilians, strategic communications, and improving the safety and mental health of peacekeepers.
During the two-day event, Member States and the UN will also work together to improve environmental management of peacekeeping operations and deploy more women peacekeepers to ensure more diverse and inclusive operations, the UN said.
Lacroix said the ministerial meeting will be a “very important opportunity” for UN peacekeeping and member states to recommit politically to peacekeeping because all peacekeeping operations are political in nature.
“We need the political support, the political engagement in favour of political efforts and all the efforts to improve peacekeeping,” he said.
Lacroix noted that “ultimately, peacekeeping is a political endeavour.”
“Our goal is to help parties secure and implement peace agreements and related processes. To succeed in a world that is more divided than ever, we need the united and active engagement of Member States,” the UN peacekeeping chief said.
“As missions navigate unprecedented challenges and threats, the Ministerial is an important opportunity for Member States to demonstrate their support and make concrete pledges to strengthen our effectiveness,” he said.
The meeting will also aim to take stock of efforts in terms of improvement and effectiveness of peacekeeping as well as think about new avenues and ideas “to take this work forward” and continue efforts to improve UN peacekeeping.
He added that another very important objective of the ministerial is to collect pledges from member states.
“We need capacities from member states. We need not only police or military units or individual personnel, but we also need their support in terms of training, providing us with new ways of adapting to new technologies, improving the way in which we communicate, counter fake news and disinformation,” he said.
Lacroix further said that a key challenge facing UN peacekeeping is the new forms of conflicts, adding that threats, such as armed groups, terrorist and criminal groups, and new enablers, such as digital technologies-enabled forms of threats, including fake news and disinformation, are creating more challenges for the implementation of peacekeeping mandates.
“We should not forget that in spite of these challenges, the peacekeepers continue to play a very important role in preserving the ceasefire, which is critical,” he said.
Lacroix stressed that peacekeepers also protect hundreds of thousands of civilians daily even though “we would want to be able to do more”.
The ministerial meeting will be an “opportunity to look at new ways to complement the work that we do to address these challenges.”
The UN said that the Accra meeting is the latest in a series of high-level events that have enabled world leaders to pledge resources to help missions fully implement their mandates.
Apart from garnering political support, contributions by Member States at meetings in New York, London, Vancouver, and Seoul have helped generate rapidly deployable military units, key aviation assets, better medical capacities and advance the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, the world body said.
Since 1948, more than two million peacekeepers from 158 countries have served in 71 operations. Today, nearly 80,000 women and men from over 120 countries are deployed in peacekeeping missions across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
India is among the largest contributors of uniformed personnel to UN Peacekeeping, with more than 6,000 military and police personnel deployed to Abyei, the Central African Republic, Cyprus, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, the Middle East and the Western Sahara.
About 177 Indian peacekeepers have made the supreme sacrifice, the highest number from any troop-contributing country. (PTI)
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