By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/dpko1horizon072809.html
UNITED NATIONS, July 28 -- Faced with demands to deploy peacekeepers in Somalia, to stop rape while working with rapists in the Congo and to police restive crowds in Haiti, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations has produced a report, which a UN official calls a "cry from the heart," called New Horizons.
On July 27 two UN officials who declined to be identified by name described the report and conundrums to a handful of reports on the UN's 37th floor. They called a budget cut of seven percent cut from what they'd asked for "doable," they described trying to get peacekeepers from new countries like Vietnam.
Inner City Press asked what the report is suggesting on the topics of sexual abuse and exploitation, procurement irregularities like the no-bid Lockheed Martin contract in Darfur, and on the human rights records of the troops the UN takes, from countries like Sri Lanka and Fiji or perhaps one day Myanmar and North Korea. Strangely, these relatively obvious issues for UN Peacekeeping are neither the focus nor in some cases even mentioned in the report.
On sexual abuse and exploitation, such as charges against the Moroccan contingent in Cote d'Ivoire or the Sri Lankan troops in Haiti, an official argued that upon repatriation to their countries, the peacekeepers are often disciplined. Inner City Press asked, then why doesn't the UN report on it?
The official said that some countries inform the UN confidentially of the outcomes, but do not consent to make it public. The UN shouldn't be surprised that its reputation suffers. Since the UN pays countries for peacekeepers, why not make the public reporting of discipline a condition of the the payments? It's not in the report, which might thus be called "Lost Horizons," a lost opportunity.
This official has previously told Inner City Press, after a question was left generally unanswered on camera at the stakeout by chief peacekeeper Alain Le Roy that DPKO has proposed that peacekeepers be tried in the communities they are charged in, but under the law of their own country. But member states, he said, shot down this proposal.
He added with helpful but too rare candor that the countries in the General Assembly jealously keep control of UN Peacekeeping, not wanting it taken over for example by the Nordics, with their ideas of a permanent rapid deployment force, or such countries as France, which in Cote d'Ivoire and Chad keeps its own national troops alongside more constrained UN forces.
The officials named as the largest UN missions those in Congo, Sudan and Chad and the Central African Republic. Two hours later, Inner City Press asked Victor Angelo, the chief of the UN Mission in Chad and the Central African Republic which known by the French or feline acronym MINURCAT, how the New Horizons plan would help him get deployment in MINURCAT up from the current less than half. Video here.
Angelo answered about stopping child soldier recruitment, which Inner City Press had previously asked about, but did not name any change New Horizon would bring. Lost Horizons, then?
Angelo said that soldiers don't deploy because their equipment is not ready. Inner City Press asked about the case of a French EUFOR soldier shooting an killing a Togolese peacekeeper serving the UN. Angela acknowledged the incident -- the only violent killing of a UN peacekeeper regarding which the UN did not issue a statement, either at the request of France or because the story was too isolated and strange -- and said that the shooter from EUFOR was caught two or three days later and is on trial in France. Will France report the outcome?
New Horizon will be the subject of a Security Council debate on August 5. It will not, the official said, just sit on the shelf, since it is written in prose reminiscent of Hemingway. He acknowledged, however, that despite all this planning ahead, the current renovation of the UN will leave some DPKO staffers twenty minutes away on Madison Avenue.
Inner City Press suggested they speed to meet with Le Roy on a fleet of Segways. The official envisioned bicycles instead: send in the clowns. Back to the future, Lost Horizons, a laudable mission hamstrung by politics, excuse making and lack of follow through. We will cover the August 5 debate.
Footnote: while the UN can unilaterally declare the officials it produces to answer question to be anonymous, what is seen with the eye is still for now on the record. On the 27th floor on Tuesday morning was Oscar Fernandez-Taranco, who only the day before briefing the Security Council the Middle East, but afterwards did not speak to the Press at the stakeout, or to a reporter who tried by the elevators. If the UN has a story to tell...
Also on the 37th floor was UN envoy to Somalia Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, who asked Inner City Press, perhaps as a joke, who had invited it so high. Inner City Press was told that his presence on the Peacekeeping floor on Tuesday was only because they have a big conference room, that the briefing was humanitarian and included John Holmes, who has yet to speak on Sri Lanka's backtracking on commitments to release its detainees or its self-exoneration in the murder of 17 aid workers from Action Contre la Faim.
In an attempt to get something at least on the record, Inner City Press at the subsequent noon briefing ask if Ould Abdallah will have a media availability on July 29 after he briefs the Council. He has been in New York for some days, the official answered -- Inner City Press saw him in the increasingly empty UN cafeteria on Monday -- and he will be asked to speak to the Press. We'll be here.
