Last week BBC news ran a five part special report, "Keeping the Peace," exploring various aspects of UN peacekeeping. The final installment contains and interesting Q and A with John Bolton and the head of UN peacekeeping Jean-Marie Geuhenno, who discuss the political utility of peacekeeping missions. In a second installment, reporter Patrick Jackson speaks with a number of South Asian soliders about their experiences overseas. Collectively, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, make up 40% of all UN peacekeepers deployed around the globe. As Jackson points out, UN missions are highly sought after assignments for these soldiers. (Not surprisingly, however, the soldiers tend to prefer deployments to Cyprus over Sudan.)
Yet another installment explores changing peacekeeping tactics forged in Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti. In the last couple of years, these missions saw a new a new assertiveness in UN peacekeeping strategies that the Dutch General commanding peacekeepers in Eastern Congo described as the difference between being neutral and being impartial. "Being neutral means that you stand there and you say 'Well, I have nothing to do with it,'" Maj Gen Patrick Cammaert explained to Patrick Jackson. "While being impartial means that you stand there, you judge the situation as it is and you take charge." The whole series is well worth a read.
"The Secretary-General is gravely concerned about the continuing heavy fighting in Mogadishu, which has reportedly killed more than 250 people and forced more than 320,000 from their homes in the past six days alone," spokesman Michele Montas told reporters in New York.More
The United Nations-sponsored International Compact for Iraq (ICI), which seeks to consolidate peace and pursue political, economic and social development, will be launched in Egypt early next month.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that he and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would attend the launch in Sharm el-Sheikh on 3 May.
The Compact is a five-year national plan that includes benchmarks and mutual commitments from both Iraq and the international community, all with the aim of helping Iraq on the path towards peace, sound governance and economic reconstruction.More
Over on her Pajamas Media outlet Claudia Rosett sets her sites on Unicef. The offense? Having the temerity to warn about a potential food shortage in North Korea thusly: "A potential food crisis faces the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, with serious flooding last year leading to a possible shortfall of 1 million to tons of grain, a fifth of total food requirement for 2007..."
According to Rosett, Unicef is worthy of our scorn because the children's aid organization should have blamed the government of Kim Jong Il for the shortage instead. She may have a point. Except for the fact that the very next paragraph of the UN News Center report to which she refers, says: "Meanwhile, far less food is coming into the country because of the Government's decision not to accept humanitarian aid, Unicef country representative Gopalan Balagopal said on a recent visit to his agency's headquarters in New York." (emphasis mine.) Rosett seems to have artfully excluded this point.
Of course, anyone with even a basic understanding of North Korea would understand the underlying reason behind the dire humanitarian situation. That said, it is important to note that Unicef, like most humanitarian organizations, serve in countries at the pleasure of the host government. Humanitarian aid is based on the principle that people need not starve to death or lack basic medical care just because they are citizens of an odious regime. Humanitarian organizations are therefore loathe to jeopardize their access to vulnerable populations by condemning host governments. So when Rosett beseeches Unicef to say, instead, that North Korea "faces potential food crisis due to murderous, wasteful, degrading, abusive tyranny of Kim Jong Il's regime," she is basically asking Unicef to sign its own eviction notice, North Korea's starving children be damned.
In North Korea and Iran, would-be proliferators are starting to think twice about their nuclear pursuits. In recent months, North Korea has agreed to a suspension of its nuclear program. And although the rhetoric in Tehran has continued to be unyielding, it appears that internal fissures are beginning to form in Iran's resistance to international efforts to curb its nuclear programs. After many miserable years, international non proliferation efforts seem to have received a welcome boost.
So what caused this turnabout? One common element may be the punitive sanctions imposed on these countries by a unified Security Council. This new installment of UNF Insights explains how Security Council sanctions have helped prod North Korea and Iran away from their nuclear ambitions and offers recommendations on how to strengthen international non-proliferation regimes
Perhaps the most disturbing detail to come out of this new UN report on Darfur are revelations that the Sudanese government has painted military planes and attack helicopters white, thereby disguising them as humanitarian aircraft. Some planes have even had "U.N." stenciled on their wings.
This is deeply problematic for two reasons. One, the types of airplanes used by the Sudanese military are not your typical bombers. Rather, they are Russian-made Antanovs, which are designed principally as transport planes. The Sudanese military, however, has refitted Anatanovs to function as bombers. So from a distance it is hard to make out whether a white transport plane belongs, say, to the World Food Program, or whether it is a refitted Antanov, armed to drop payloads filled with thousands of tiny shards of metal.
What makes this new development more troubling is that air transport is the main way that humanitarian organizations access Darfur. By disguising military aircraft, the Sudanese government may forestall efforts to enforce a ban on offensive military over-flights in Darfur. When governments or policy makers call for no-fly-zones over Darfur, humanitarian organizations can now rightly worry that their planes may be mistaken for military aircraft.
In a UNHCR-organized conference in Geneva, some 450 delegates met to discuss the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have fled their homes.
"There was truly a humanitarian spirit that allowed us to work together, to work together in a committed way for the same purpose - the people we care for, the Iraqis displaced inside and outside Iraq," UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) António Guterres told a concluding news conference after the two-day gathering that drew representatives of 60 nations. There are some 1.9 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) inside Iraq and 2 million refugees abroad.More