United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann on Friday urged the international community to render greater support for global peacekeeping efforts.
Addressing a General Assembly meeting commemorating the 60th anniversary of UN peacekeeping operations, d'Escoto said the 20 UN peacekeeping operations around the world, involving more than 110,000 personnel, are "characterized by their unprecedented scale and complexity."
He deplored the "astonishing" and "shameful" fact that current annual budget for UN peacekeeping, at approximately 5.6 billion dollars, represents only one-half of one percent of global military spending.
"This mad asymmetry dooms our best intentions," d'Escoto stressed.
He cited the daunting tasks facing UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as an example.
"Our peacekeeping operation in the DRC ... is in crisis," he said, noting that the UN mission there has one peacekeeper for each 10,000 civilians in the conflict areas.
"This glaring example serves to remind us that despite our best intentions, the bitter reality of the conflicts in many countries dwarf the ability of peacekeepers to fulfill their mandates," d'Escoto said.
"The General Assembly has the responsibility to ensure that operations are equipped with the tools needed to fulfill their mandates," said D'Escoto. "But almost without exception, they are still being sent into harm's way with insufficient resources at their command."
UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro also called on the world community to strengthen support for peacekeeping operations around the globe.
"Peacekeeping ... has become one of the cornerstones of international diplomacy," Migiro said, noting that the peacekeeping missions have over the decades evolved beyond monitoring ceasefires to broader mandates such as post-conflict rebuilding, helping democratic governance, supervising elections and strengthening institutions.
"Peacekeepers need our support. They need clear and achievable mandates," she said. "They need the political will and material resources of our Member States."
Migiro paid tribute to the more than 2,500 peacekeepers and UN personnel who have lost their lives while performing their missions.
"Now more than ever, the world needs the blue helmets, and the blue helmets need the world's support," she said.
UN peacekeeping began in 1948 with the deployment of unarmed UN military observers to the Middle East in a mission to monitor the Armistice Agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Since 1948, 63 peacekeeping operations have been deployed by the United Nations, 17 of them in the past decade alone. Over the years hundreds of thousands of military personnel, as well as tens of thousands of UN police and other civilians, from more than 120 countries have participated in UN operations.
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