By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, March 4 -- Trouble has been brewing for more than a month in the UN's Special Committee on Peacekeeping or C-34. And now it has gone public, as it were, with a notice in the UN Journal that the meeting set to be held today has been postponed.
"The meetings of the Working Group of the Whole of the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations, scheduled for Monday, 4 March 2013, have been postponed to a later date, to be announced in the Journal."
Why? Chairperson Rivas of Canada, numerous sources complain to Inner City Press, has ignored the views of most of the C-34's more than 140 members, particuarly those in the Non-Aligned Movement. Rivas has tried, on his own, to distinguish procedural issues in a way proponents found “insults.”
Back on January 25, sources tell Inner City Press, Canada set up
a working lunch to discuss the working methods. But concerns were voiced by multiple delegations; “the chair expressed the intention to find a way to make sure that the non-operative-, and corresponding operative paragraphs will, somehow, be linked during the negotiations.”
The NAM delegation voiced criticism [even then] towards the Chair before proposing to all delegates to stabilize a "huge amount" of last year's report. A lengthy discussion on the definitions of "stabilization" and "standardization" was the result. In the end the, broadly supported, agreement was that all delegations will submit a proposal regarding the chapters and sub-chapters they are willing to stabilize during a later meeting at the Canadian mission.
And that didn't work out, either. Meanwhile DPKO's Herve Ladsous proceeds with UN drones, even though after his presentation last year to the C-34 many members complained to Inner City Press. This is among the reasons there's so little overseeing of UN Peacekeeping at the UN. Watch this site.
