Statement by Chargé d'Affaires a.i. Dmitry Polyanskiy at a UNSC briefing on UN Peace Operations
Mr. President,
We thank the delegation of Pakistan for convening today's meeting. We consider it very timely in light of the fact that the Secretariat is currently working on a report to review UN peace operations. We listened carefully to the statements by Under-Secretary-General Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Assistant Secretary-General Martha Pobee, and Chief Executive Officer of the International Peace Institute Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein. We are grateful for the assessments provided.
Russia has consistently supported the peacekeeping activities of the United Nations. We are convinced that the foundations thereof, which were laid down many decades ago, remain fully relevant today. These include absolute respect for the sovereignty of host countries, strict adherence to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, and, of course, commitment to the basic principles of peacekeeping – consent of the parties, impartiality, and non-use of force except in self-defense and in defense of the mandate.
It is no coincidence that we keep evoking these fundamentals when we are discussing the future of UN peace operations, which – as we see it – comprise two instruments with different mandates, objectives, as well as with different allocated resources and capabilities, namely peacekeeping operations (PKO) and special political missions (SPM).
The point is that, in our view, the current problems with UN peacekeeping have a lot to do with moving away from the classic principles and trying to “reinvent the wheel” instead of taking a clear-headed look at things.
For example, there is overall consensus that PKO mandates should be clear, focused, and have specific timelines and indicators. This is precisely how UN missions used to be in the past, when the “blue helmets” understood their goals and conditions for implementing them.
But instead of returning to this healthy approach, we are seeing the opposite trend at the UNSC: when discussing mandates, everyone is trying to put new and new bright “ornaments” on the “Christmas tree,” while the real need for them or their added value are not that obvious, to say the least.
Peacekeepers are tasked with quite trendy but essentially secondary issues, having to do with human rights, gender, and climate. Costly missions remain in countries for decades, they expand excessively, and become deeply embedded in the fabric of the host country’s domestic policy, which may sometimes entail risks of interference in internal affairs or threats of security collapse when the mission is withdrawn.
At the same time, the effective implementation of these overloaded mandates, which consume considerable resources, is something that gives rise to great many questions on the part of UNSC members, host countries, and the international community as a whole. This seriously undermines the credibility of UN peacekeeping. The UN Secretariat, unfortunately, is not always ready to face the truth and propose realistic solutions based on sober assessments and “learning from mistakes.” Instead of that, we’ve largely seen attempts at self-justification and blame-shifting: sometimes host governments are at fault, sometimes – contingents are poorly trained, and sometimes all the problems are attributed to misinformation or the geopolitical context. But UN missions are, by design, meant to work in adverse crisis conditions; the very essence of their presence is to be where problems arise, where the situation is inherently difficult, including politically. Accordingly, these problems need to be resolved in close cooperation with the host government, whilst building trust with the local population.
We know how difficult this is, and we pay tribute to the courage of all peacekeepers who every day risk their lives on the ground, as well as to the efforts by special political missions providing assistance to host countries in various aspects of the political process.
We fully support the work that is being done by the United Nations in these fundamental and vital areas, but we cannot agree with an approach, whereby attention and resources are dispersed on pseudo-threats, with “innovative” solutions being devised to combat these very threats, or whereby the discussion is altogether shifted away from practical and pressing issues to some “exotic” scenarios, such as adapting peacekeeping to possible “conflicts of the future.” This is despite the fact that we are still facing quite conventional conflicts and, to tell the truth, the UN has not yet learned how to tackle them effectively. And this precisely what should be our top priority today.
Mr. President,
We are convinced that to be effective, UN peace operations need to be guided by the search for practical solutions to concrete problems rather than by some “creative” and speculative conjectures. Over the 80 years of its work, the UN has gleaned sufficient expertise and tools to help States in preventing conflicts, reaching peace agreements and creating political conditions for their implementation, as well as to provide peacebuilding assistance to them. Each particular situation may require a unique solution, which would hinge on political goals, objective conditions on the ground and successful experiences of the past. This is what the UN Secretariat should be guided by when providing member States with realistic, tailored and resource-efficient solutions that the UN is capable of delivering.
This understanding seems to be plausible given the worsening financial crisis facing the UN and the Secretary-General's initiatives to cut costs. We hope that such a pragmatic view will also prevail within the ongoing review of the future of all forms of UN peacekeeping operations.
At the same time, we are far from absolving UNSC member states of their responsibility to agree on realistic and implementable mandates and timely transformations thereof, as well as of their right to take decisions on the withdrawal of missions. This is exactly the line that Russia has consistently pursued at the UNSC. Penholders of country files have a special role to play in this regard. They must act in good faith and in the interests of maintaining international peace and security, rather than attempt, in a neo-colonial tradition, to push their national interests into resolutions or incorporate in these resolutions instruments to advance their agendas.
On a separate note, we would like to stress that any peacekeeping initiatives should be discussed within the UNSC and the UNGA Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations, rather than at separate conferences held in European capitals. We consider it unacceptable to give the UN label to the events whose organizers tend to use discriminatory approaches when choosing participants, as Germany did when it hosted a ministerial-level meeting on peacekeeping in Berlin in May. We also emphasize that there is a need for the Secretariat to be genuinely impartial, as per Articles 100 and 101 of the UN Charter.
In conclusion, I would like to once again reiterate our support for the UN peacekeeping and special political missions, whose military, police, and civilian personnel continue to carry out their tasks in good faith, often putting their own lives at risk. We stand convinced that in the future such operations will remain relevant, and we hope that through our joint efforts we will be able to determine which formats will be most effective and sustainable.
Thank you.
