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Posted 3:52 AM
by Mary
1) UN Peacekeeping Helps Break Cycles of Conflict
In the aftermath of war, people face a number of challenges on the road to lasting peace: rebuilding basic infrastructure, addressing political grievances, and healing broken communities. The international community can help prevent countries emerging from conflict from slipping back into violence through United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions.
Currently, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations reports that over 82,600 people, including troops, police, and military observers, are deployed around the world in fifteen UN peacekeeping operations. The department also supports and directs three UN political and peacebuilding missions in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Burundi. In these missions, UN peacekeepers monitor the implementation of peace agreements, assist in the demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration of armed groups, and help provide a safe space for refugees to return home. To learn more, go to:
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/
Posted 10:14 PM
by Mary
HANS BLIX: FROM COLD WAR TO A COLD PEACE
UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com, UN/ - 01 April 2007 -- Kofi Annan has noted that the world is now “sleep-walking” into new arms races. In recent years we have, indeed, moved to a rather cold peace and need to change the course.
We drew a sigh of relief when the Cold War ended and Communism and the Soviet empire collapsed.
The Baltic and Eastern European countries became free and many conflicts around the world were resolved.
In the U.N. Security Council the almost automatic veto disappeared and with the decision in 1990 to intervene against Iraq ’s occupation of Kuwait the U.N. system for collective security functioned as it was originally meant to.
President Bush spoke about ‘a new international order.’
As Mikhail Gorbachev has recently written, the 90’s were regrettably also a time when the political leaders missed opportunities that were opened by the ending of the Cold War.
No peace was concluded.
The US became the world’s sole military superpower and this has increasingly influenced the American foreign policy: in recent years the US has often acted as a ‘lone wolf’ rather than as the ‘lead wolf’ it was during the Cold War.
The enormous military power has been seen as a means to uphold a ‘Pax Americana’.
A passage in the US National Defense Strategy of 2005 declares that :
“The end of the cold war and our capacity to influence global events open the prospects for a new and peaceful system in the world.”
If this passage reflected self-confidence, the authors had, on the other hand, a rather low opinion of the U.N., which together with terrorism, were seen as obstacles to a realization of the world order contemplated:
“Our strength as a nation will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.”
The sentences quoted point to a will to uphold peace by military power rather than by diplomacy and multilateral cooperation.
It is hard to avoid the impression that – almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War – military calculations still dominate the long-term thinking about major global relations.
Terrorism is formally made the chief enemy but precautions are taken against the growing power of China and Russia .
The new generation of nuclear weapons that is planned in the US cannot very well be designed for use against terrorists and the agreement between the US and India on nuclear cooperation suggests a wish to create more counterweights to the future China than Australia , Japan , Taiwan and South Korea .
It may well be with the future Russia in mind that the US shows an ambition to expand NATO to comprise the Ukraine and Georgia (Senator Lugar wants to keep the door open also for Azerbedjan and Kazakhstan ).
There is a risk that these policies that are dominated by military thinking, if they continue, may lead to conflicts which could have been avoided through a policy aiming more at cooperation and less at alliances.
Mr. Putin’s outburst in Munich recently may have been prompted by the American plans to place pieces of the missile shield on Russian doorsteps, but the Russian fuse has surely been burning with irritation for a long time.
Perhaps China ’s shooting down of a satellite of her own was an outburst against American military ambitions in space.
The International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction that I chaired argued in its report (www.wmdcommission.org) that after the Cold War there are no good reasons for the enormous nuclear arsenals and that the nuclear weapon states, notably the US and Russia, should take the lead in moving the world to disarmament.
A major article (Wall Street Journal, 4 Jan. 2007) by Mr. Kissinger and three other seasoned statesmen from the Cold War urging nuclear disarmament may be a sign that the climate in the US is beginning to change.
Perhaps it is also a good sign that the very White Paper that explains why a new British nuclear weapons program is needed is circulated with a letter from Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, in which she says that :
“We stand by our unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of nuclear weapons and we will continue to press for multilateral negotiations toward mutual, balanced and verifiable reductions in nuclear weapons.”
It would be welcome if these words of commitment were followed by political action.
HansBlix@MaximsNews.com
