Rising demand for peacekeeping stretches UN's resources, Fréchette says

Poorer countries are providing the greatest contribution to United Nations peacekeeping operations but even this support is insufficient to meet rising demands, Deputy Secretary-General Louise Fréchette said today in India.

"Already there has been a marked shift in the composition of our peacekeeping forces, with the share provided by OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation for Development] countries declining and that of developing countries rising," she said in her keynote address to the Sixth Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses Asian Security Conference, hailing India's longstanding support.

While acknowledging that "it certainly makes sense for Europeans to take the lead in peace operations in the Balkans," the Deputy Secretary-General pointed to existing inequities. "There is a manifest imbalance between the 30,000 NATO peacekeepers deployed in tiny Kosovo and the 10,000 UN peacekeepers deployed in [the Democratic Republic of the] Congo, which is the size of Western Europe, and where some 3.5 million people may have died as a result of fighting since 1998."

Solidarity is not only a matter of peacekeeping, she added, pointing out that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - a set of global antipoverty targets agreed to at a 2000 UN summit - remain out of reach. "Unhappily," she said, "the commitment to follow through on these Goals has been uneven, resulting in a loss of momentum in the drive to attain them."

Ms. Fréchette also said the current security paradigm - the "Post 9-11 context" - has raised a number of questions which must be resolved in order to strengthen the system of collective security. Among these is the perception by countries that they have the right to unilaterally use pre-emptive force without agreement by the Security Council.

"This logic represents a fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world peace and stability have rested for nearly six decades, and could easily lead to a proliferation of the unilateral and lawless use of force, with or without justification," she warned.

The UN Charter, she emphasized, is not "a suicide pact." But she added that States would not adhere to it unless they had confidence that threats would be dealt with through collective action. The Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, she said, would seek to tackle these issues as part of the "enormous effort of will" needed to forge a common, multilateral strategy.