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Indian candidate for UN chief pledges peacekeeping revamp
Agence France-Presse
September 7, 2006
India's candidate for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's job pledged to help speed up the deployment of UN peacekeepers to conflict areas as part of reforms if elected.
"One manifest problem is speed of deployment -- we simply don't get our soldiers (into conflict areas) quickly enough," said Shashi Tharoor, a senior UN official nominated by New Delhi to succeed Annan when he steps down at the end of the year.
Tharoor, who is facing four other contenders, said that the time had come for the international community to organize itself to mount, deploy and command peacekeeping operations effectively and professionaly.
"We really have to run peace as effectively as governments have run war in the past," the 50-year old UN under-secretary-general for communications and public information told a forum of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Tharoor was special assistant to the under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations between 1989 and 1996.
He recalled that following the 1973 Middle East war, UN troops arrived to enforce peace at the contested Golan Heights within 48 hours of notice.
The swift deployment, he said, was partly due to Pentagon offer to fly the UN troops there.
"We don't have that anymore," he said, adding that the UN had to now first conduct tenders to get the cheapest possible trip to conflict areas.
Governments too seem to have lost urgency to provide soldiers for UN peacekeeping duty at very short notice, he said.
"I think we need to get the world up and running on a much more dramatic -- I don't want to use the word warfooting but let me say -- peacefooting to be able to do this better," he said on Thursday.
With 86,000 troops under the UN's own umbrella, it has more peacekeepers around the world than ever before in modern history.
Plans are afoot to have 10,000 blue helmet troops in Lebanon and potentially 17,000 more if they take up duty in the genocide-plagued Darfur region in Sudan.
There are also a large number of soldiers serving under the NATO and EU umbrellas not counted in the UN figures.
Tharoor also vowed to improve the administration of the civilian side of the UN peacekeeping operations.
"It is striking that the UN secretariat has 9,000 personnel around the world and the civilian staff of peacekeeping are 17,000 -- almost double," he said.
"That again is an area of our work in which we have to make sure that uneven quality is replaced by sustained professionalism," he added.
Tharoor called for enhanced commitments from governments to ensure successfull peacekeeping operations.
"I think it will be part of my job, if elected, to keep reminding governments not to send us in unless they have the political backbone to support us all the way," he said.
Tharoor, who has worked for the United Nations for 28 years, also pledged to to bridge a growing divide between developing and rich countries.
"I have been alarmed to see the old East-West divide now seemingly making way for a North-South divide in the organization, a divide that has been growing in the last couple of years and that seems to crystallize around the question of management reforms this year," he said.
Tharoor said he could stand on his 28-year track record in the United Nations in the battle for the top job in the global body.
He emerged second to South Korea's Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon in a straw poll conducted among four candidates in July. Jordan's UN envoy Prince Zeid al Hussein announced his candidacy on Tuesday, becoming the fifth candidate.
