Your Excellency Ambassador Sérgio Danese, PR of the Federative Republic of Brazil and current President of the UN Security Council; Your Excellency, President Michelle Bachelet; Your Excellency’s Ministers and Permanent Representatives to the UN; Distinguished fellow participants at this important open discussion; Ladies and gentlemen:
Speaking as an African, Mr President, I thank you most sincerely both for placing on the Security Council agenda the important question of ‘Peace through Dialogue’, as well as inviting me to participate in this Security Council open discussion on various elements of the global struggle for peace in the world.
As Your Excellency’s know very well, for many decades now, to date, the overwhelming majority of UN Peacekeepers has been deployed in Africa for the obvious reason of the regularity of conflicts on our Continent which were and have been a threat to international peace and security.
As the Council also knows, some years ago, the African Union took the solemn decision to ‘silence the guns by 2020’. The concrete reality, however, obliged the African Union later to extend this target date to 2030.
I make these comments to emphasise that obviously Africa and specifically the African Union will continue to require direct cooperation with the Security Council to address the challenge of securing peace on our Continent, Africa.
Only three years ago, in September 2020, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the UN, a former UN staff member, Mark Cogan, made some observations relating to UN/Africa cooperation on matters of peace.
He wrote that “Since the start, UN peacekeeping in Africa has been a miserable failure.”
He then cites a number of examples including the 1960 UN intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the intervention in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, the second intervention in the DRC in 1999 to stop a civil war which had already killed more than three million people, as well as the interventions in South Sudan and Mali.
Obviously, neither the UN nor the AU want to perpetuate any failures regarding conflict prevention and resolution in Africa.
In this context, I would like to remind Council of elements of the 2015 Report of the United Nations High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO).
One of these elements is what the HIPPO calls the “primacy of politics.” In this regard it says:
“Lasting peace is not achieved nor sustained by military and technical engagements, but through political solutions. The primacy of politics should be the hallmark of the approach of the United Nations to the resolution of conflict, during mediation, the monitoring of ceasefires, assistance to the implementation of peace accords, the management of violent conflicts and longer-term efforts at sustaining peace.”
The second element refers to what HIPPO calls “global and regional partnership for peace and security”, about which it says:
“The Panel fully endorses the Secretary-General’s recent statement that “we have entered an era of partnership peacekeeping”…With a new conviction, the United Nations and regional organisations must mobilise their comparative advantages in responding to emerging crises while sustaining support to long-running ones. A bold new agenda is required to build a strong global-regional framework to meet those challenges through responsible and principled strategic partnerships.”
I mention these two elements in the HIPPO Report because of their direct relevance to what needs to done to strengthen the peace effort globally.
Concerning our Continent, it goes without saying that our continental organisation, the African Union, which has a strong African Peace and Security Architecture, has the comparative advantage that it is best placed to ensure the primacy of politics in its area of jurisdiction, Africa, on which the HIPPO insisted in terms of the prevention and resolution of conflict, even where violent conflict has already broken out.
It is obvious from this that this observation would also apply to the various important interventions related to the prevention and resolution of conflict mentioned in Chapter VI of the UN Charter.
I would like to believe that this observation about the AU applies equally to other regional organisations.
All this emphasises the important point made by HIPPO that “A bold new agenda is required to build a strong global-regional framework to meet those challenges through responsible and principled strategic partnerships.”
It is in the vital interest of the Security Council to ensure that its regional partners, like the African Union, are strong enough to discharge their responsibilities as part of the global peace architecture.
In this regard it would be important that agreement is reached to use some of the UN resources to fund AU-led peace operations.
This would help to elevate the practical importance of Chapter VIII of the UN Charter.
Nothing I have said seeks to weaken the Security Council.
To the contrary, for it successfully to discharge its solemn obligation to guarantee international peace and security, the Security Council requires strong regional partners capable of assisting it in the context of Chapters VI, VII and VIII of the UN Charter.
I hope this important session of the Council will help towards the realisation of this objective.
Thank you.