Month: May 2007

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2007
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Posts on Peace

Throughout May and in coordination with the Price of Peace campaign, UN Dispatch will present "Posts on Peace," a month of insights on conflict and its causes, whether it be political instability, culture clash, poverty, or climate change. We will feature posts by thought leaders, contributors to other popular blogs, and our own in-house bloggers. The first Post on Peace, an interview with former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Andrew Young, is up in the Delegates' Lounge to the right. Please stop by regularly, use our new "Email" feature to send posts to your friends and colleagues, and sign up for our new weekly updates. And, over the course of the month, if a particular post strikes a chord with you or you have an insight on conflict in general,

and participate in the discussion.

Somalia

Yesterday, the Security Council asked the Secretary General to start contingency planning for a possible peacekeeping force in Somalia. Britain's UN ambassador Emyr-Jones Parry explains:
"Let's be clear, the Security Council report sets out the conditionality for deploying a force ... and there (first) should be sufficient peace to keep. At the moment, those conditions are not met." "Our hope is that the situation in Mogadishu is stabilizing and the violence there will come to an end, and that you can provide within the next months a degree of stability and political outreach in the country. If the situation continues to improve sufficiently, the U.N. would then be prepared to consider whether or not it should deploy."
There some frequent misconceptions about peacekeeping, one being that blue helmets can be deployed to stop a war in progress. The United Nations tried this in the 1990s in places like Bosnia, but found that it does not work. Rather, for a peacekeeping mission to be successful, warring parties must be amenable to peacekeepers' deployment. Peacekeepers are deployed to keep the peace, not impose one. In Somalia, peacekeepers cannot fight their way into Mogadishu. Rather, there must first be agreement by the belligerents to cease hostilities. Only then can peacekeepers provide the necessary security to oversee the country's political and physical rehabilitation.

Video: Former U.S. Perm Rep Andrew Young

Andrew Young.jpg Andrew Young, who also served as a Representative in the U.S. Congress, a top aide to Martin Luther King Jr., and the Mayor of Atlanta, was appointed the U.S. Ambassador to the UN by President Carter in 1977. We sat down with Ambassador Young recently to discuss his thoughts on the UN and how his early years formed his philosophy on conflict and its resolution.

CSD calls for policy push promoting energy efficiency

Kicking off the 15th session of the Commission on Sustainable Development, delegates in New York proposed a wide range of measures to bring modern energy services to the poor, reduce energy waste and cut climate change-causing greenhouse gases.
"We need a major policy push to promote energy efficiency, to generate new energy technologies, and to promote advanced and cleaner technologies," said Jose Antonio Ocampo, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, in an opening address to the two-week session.
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