Opening Address by Foreign Secretary at the 11th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Peacekeeping Training Centres (IAPTC), Centre for United Nations Peacekeeping

Opening Address by Foreign Secretary at the 11th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Peacekeeping Training Centres (IAPTC), Centre for United Nations Peacekeeping

New Delhi
October 25, 2005

Lt. General Nambiar, Director of the United Service Institution of India,
Lt. General Puri, Deputy Chief of Army Staff,
Lt. General R.K. Mehta, Military Adviser to the UN Secretary General,
Maj. General John Kofi Attipoe, President of the IAPTC,
Distinguished participants and guests,

It gives me great pleasure to be with you today at the inaugural session of this very special event that India is hosting for the first time – the 11th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Peacekeeping Training Centres (IAPTC). I extend a warm welcome to all the participants and guests and wish you all fruitful deliberations and a pleasant stay in India.

2. India has a long and illustrious history as one of the longest serving and largest troop contributors to United Nations peacekeeping. India’s support for UN’s peacekeeping activities flows from its commitment to the UN Charter and an enduring civilisational belief in the value of world peace. With more than 74,000 personnel having served creditably in 41 out of the 60 UN peacekeeping operations established so far, including some of the more challenging operations, such as those in Sinai, Congo, Cambodia, Somalia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Lebanon and Sierra Leone, we can be justifiably proud of our experience and credentials in this area. It is therefore, natural for India to play an active role in a laudable endeavour like the IAPTC, whose objective is to promote more effective peace operations through cooperation in research, education and training in peacekeeping. As you are probably aware, we have also offered to take over the mantle of hosting the IAPTC Secretariat at the Centre for UN Peacekeeping, for the next five years. If given the opportunity, we would like to assure you that we shall endeavour to do our best in consolidating and taking further the excellent work done by Canada’s Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, which initiated the IAPTC in 1995 and has hosted the Secretariat ever since. We look forward to your support and acceptance of our offer and hope that India will be the first country the Secretariat will move to, since the inception of the IAPTC.

3. On this occasion, let me dwell briefly on why India is willing to shoulder responsibilities and play an active role in fora like the IAPTC. Having contributed troops to UN Peacekeeping since 1950, beginning with the UN Mission in Korea, we are well aware of the growing complexity and challenges in Peacekeeping today. Indeed, the very context of UN Peace keeping has changed dramatically – from keeping peace between two or more conflicting States to keeping peace within a State, where there are sometimes several parties to a complex conflict, including some who are not necessarily committed to a peace agreement. The primary objectives of peacekeeping too have expanded radically – from the simple maintenance of ceasefire to multidimensional mandates involving a range of tasks: disarming and reintegrating warring groups, providing humanitarian relief, assistance in post-conflict reconstruction, facilitation of elections, peace building through training and development of indigenous institutions, establishment of the Rule of Law chain, and occasionally even providing transitional administration. Naturally, peacekeeping, which was the exclusive preserve of armed forces now involves a multiplicity of actors – police, paramilitary, NGOs, civilians, regional organisations and even private companies. In addition, to prevent the unraveling of peace agreements that are arrived after painstaking efforts, modern peacekeeping operations are frequently armed with robust Chapter VII mandates with larger troops and deterrence capabilities. This trend is illustrated by the fact that out of the 16 UN peacekeeping missions that are underway, eight are in Africa, out of which four are Chapter VII operations. The complexity and scale of these operations also means that peacekeeping missions today are more resource-intensive and costly.

4. While it is abundantly clear that the complexity of contemporary peacekeeping makes collaboration, partnership and synergy inevitable at an operational level, we believe that at a conceptual level, such collaboration is even more critical. Sharing of experiences, exchange and interaction are vital in understanding the changing dynamics of peacekeeping, their implications, preparing for future trends, developing best practices, streamlining training curricula and educating the various actors involved in peacekeeping. It is in this sense that bodies like the IAPTC have a valuable role to play, and where India would like to contribute.

5. While there are other agencies like the UN’s Best Practices Unit for consolidating lessons learnt in peacekeeping for future application and the UN Training Advisory Group to coordinate the military, police and civilian aspects of training in peacekeeping, IAPTC provides a ready and more informal platform for agencies directly involved in peacekeeping to exchange experiences, evolve best practices in peacekeeping training and network with international organizations and academic institutions to streamline and make peacekeeping more effective. With the wide range of tasks, partners and actors involved in contemporary peacekeeping, the IAPTC will need to focus on developing integrated training to facilitate interoperability in peacekeeping missions. We, in India, have made a beginning at this Centre by integrating trainees from the Air Force, Navy and Civilian Police in our training capsules, which were traditionally targeted at the Army. Given the number of peacekeeping training centers in the world, the IAPTC will also need to play a critical role in standardizing training modules and methods, while recognizing that training in many ways, has to respond to national and regional specificities. Since many of the peacekeeping operations are in Africa, IAPTC can perhaps also contribute productively in terms of building peacekeeping capacities in Africa.

6. Recognizing the need for larger collaboration and synergy, India has been making conscious efforts in this direction, even at the international level. In this very Centre, we have trained over 160 foreign officers from 50 countries, with the Government of India funding the participation of nominees from developing countries. Over the last few years, we have established bilateral Joint Working Groups on peacekeeping issues with a few countries, which provide not only a forum for exchanging views on policy and operational aspects of peacekeeping, but also for planning joint activities and identifying institutional cooperation in peacekeeping. We have held several joint exercises, seminars and training capsules in peacekeeping, in collaboration with other countries and the United Nations.

7. We are also looking at establishing mutual cooperative frameworks with other Peacekeeping Training Centres. For example, in two weeks time, a batch of senior police officers would be leaving for the first training programme being conducted by the Centre of Excellence for Stability Police Units (COESPU), set up recently in Italy, under a G-8 initiative. In view of the fact that India has a range of well-developed paramilitary services, including the largest paramilitary force in Asia which has more than one hundred and sixty thousand personnel, we are looking beyond, at a larger collaboration in terms of exchange of trainers and establishment of institutional cooperation between COESPU and the various paramilitary training Centres in India. Even with the UN, we have been actively involved in cooperation in the realm of training and specifically, in evolving the Standardized Generic Training Modules. More recently, in view of serious concerns over recent revelations regarding sexual abuse and exploitation by UN Peacekeepers, we have been engaged with the UN in sharing our processes of training and inculcating discipline in our Armed Forces, particularly considering that there have been no allegations against any member of the Indian contingents and Indian peacekeepers have been upheld by the UN as a model of exemplary discipline. We have wholeheartedly endorsed the Secretary-General’s policy of ‘zero-tolerance’ and assured our fullest cooperation in implementation of the same. We also recognize the validity of the present international focus on building peacekeeping capabilities in Africa, since the greatest need for peacekeeping continues to be in this continent. India has participated in virtually every UN Peacekeeping mission mounted in Africa. We have also taken a number of bilateral initiatives of our own for financial and technical assistance and are looking at other ways of enhancing our collaboration with African countries in the area of Peacekeeping.

8. As the world’s largest democracy, India has also been deeply committed to the establishment of the UN Democracy Fund to assist nascent and transitional democracies in institutional capacity building. The Fund was launched recently on 14 September 2005 on the margins of the High Level Plenary Meeting of the UN in New York, at which the UN Secretary General was flanked by the Prime Minister of India and the President of the United States. India is contributing US $ 10 million to this Fund, and has already released US $ 5 million, making it the largest single remittance so far. Through this Fund, we also support ideas for sharing of experiences and best practices and meaningful use of the Fund for post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation. We hope that this would assist in peace building efforts, wherever required.

9. India has always believed that as far as possible, there should be a clear distinction between a peacekeeping operation and post-conflict peace building. We have therefore welcomed the proposal to establish a Peacebuilding Commission in the United Nations, as an inter-governmental advisory body to help countries transition from war to peace. We are engaged constructively in discussions on this issue, to ensure that we get the concept and its implementation right from the very beginning. On the issue of partnership between the UN and regional organizations, while we recognize that an inter-locking of capacities between the United Nations and regional organizations would be expedient and effective in many crisis situations, in any such partnership, we believe that the centrality and leadership of the UN should be maintained, in the interests of legitimacy, neutrality and impartiality.

10. As regards the rapidly changing landscape in peacekeeping, we are alive to these developments and are following them closely. We are diversifying our areas of engagement in peacekeeping; upgrading our training and streamlining our deployment and management mechanisms. With the completion of deployment in the UN Mission in Sudan, we will have around 9,000 Indian personnel serving in UN Peacekeeping Missions. In response to the accent on gender mainstreaming, we have deployed women officers in Kosovo and also in a challenging mission like MONUC in Congo. We are also deeply interested in new proposals and initiatives in this area. For instance, we support the various initiatives being considered in the U.N. to deploy rapidly and effectively, and have already welcomed in principle, the two new initiatives that have been designed to optimize rapid and effective deployment - the Strategic Reserve and the Standing Police Capacity. We are actively engaged in discussions in the UN on the precise modalities of these proposals. As a leading troop contributor, the issue of safety and security of UN personnel continues to be an issue of abiding concern and we support moves to augment capacities in the field.

11. As the host country for this meeting and hopefully, as the IAPTC Secretariat, we look forward to a period of learning and enrichment through interaction with other training centers and agencies involved in Peacekeeping. Together, let us strive to perfect the art of peacekeeping in the spirit of the IAPTC motto “dedicated to the achievement of excellence”.

12. I wish the meeting and your deliberations all success.