Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury has been a long time supporter of NP. On June 25th he spoke on behalf of NP at a briefing sponsored by the Peace and Security Funders Group at the UNICEF Headquarters in New York where he challenged funders to provide one half of the funds needed for NP to grow to 200 paid peacekeepers and 750 reserves. Read below his letter to the Financial Times.

UN peacekeeping mission must tackle the roots of violence

Published: May 24 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 24 2008 03:00
From: Mr Anwarul K. Chowdhury.

Sir, Harvey Morris (and the FT) deserves our appreciation for his article highlighting the dilemma being faced by the United Nations over its soaring peacekeeping budget, which amounts to $7.3bn (“UN peacekeeping in line of fire”, May 17/18). Resources, of course, are a major constraint in structuring UN peacekeeping operations.

But a deep-rooted and possibly greater constraint is the Security Council’s decision-making process for these operations dictated by the five permanent members whose individual national considerations invariably convolute the mandates. This practice has become so obvious and so much expected that the UN secretariat goes out of its way to accommodate these points of view in their reports and actions. There is an urgent need to look into this aspect of the decision-making processes to make them more democratic, inclusive, objective and contributing to global peace and security.

Another dimension that requires attention is the basic rationale and purpose of the peacekeeping missions. The present fire-brigade-like approach of rushing in to put out the fire does not take into account why the conflict occurred in the first place and how to prevent it from happening again. Conflict-prone societies need a much broader and longer-term approach by the United Nations in particular. It needs actively to promote a culture of peace that alone can ensure a sustainable freedom from violence.

The people need to be empowered in a way so that individually and collectively they value tolerance, understanding, respect for diversity and non-violent ways of resolving problems. The enormous resources that the UN peacekeeping missions spend are not really worth the results we have seen over the years. It would be worthwhile for the Security Council to include a “culture-of-peace” impact clause in each of the peacekeeping mandates.

A fraction of those resources, if spent on building the culture of peace as envisaged in the UN General Assembly’s comprehensive programme of action adopted by universal consensus in 1999, would be truly worthwhile, particularly by eliminating the need to initiate new peacekeeping missions or continue existing ones.

Until our societies are empowered to value non-violence the billions of dollars spent on the UN's peacekeeping operations are a waste of money the international community can ill afford.

Anwarul K. Chowdhury,
New York, NY 10010,
Former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations