The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Ms Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey has put before the Security Council of the United Nations (UN) recommendations in its quest to integrate effective resilience in peace operations.
According to Ms Botchwey, integrating effective resilience in peace operation requires the reconfiguration of the UN Peace Operations and dealing with the recommendation of the 2015 High-level Panel on Peace Operation (HiPPO) report.
Others include the operationalisation of the Security Council’s agenda on youth and women and a coherent action across the UN Systems.
Ms Botchwey gave the recommendations yesterday when she chaired the opening of a high-level debate of the Security Council of the UN on the theme “Integrating effective resilience-building in peace operations for sustainable peace.”
She explained that the recommendations were paramount in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which looked to be in danger due to cascading and interlinked crises per latest report.
“The link between peace and development is clear for all. The latest report on the SDGs has noted that cascading and interlinked crises are putting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in grave danger, along with peace and security and humanity’s very own survival,” Mrs Botchwey said.
For this reason, Mrs Botchwey noted that there was the need to ensure that adequate funding across the peace continuum was made available as well as the establishment of a strong ecosystem to make the “triple cross pillar nexus” a reality.
In addition, she said danger of the UN achieving the SDGs Agenda 2030 due to interlinked crises called for the promotion of a transformative, prevention-focused and conflict-sensitive response.
Furthermore, she opined that the inadequate budget for peace building support had created a sustainability gap as a number of host countries of peacekeeping missions turn to interventions by outside forces.
“Ghana is concerned that the resources devoted to programmatic interventions of peacekeeping missions are dwarfed by those devoted to kinetic operations. Equally, it has not been lost on any member of this Council that the budget for peace building support represents a smaller share of the resources available for peace operations,” Mrs Botchwey said.
“That sustainability gap now threatens current peacekeeping missions as a number of host countries of peacekeeping missions turn to interventions by outside forces, while at the same time limiting the mandate of peace missions,” Mrs Botchwey added.
Mrs Botchwey also bemoaned the extent to which poor countries had to shoulder the burden of addressing socio-economic and political complexities and challenges that drive the rising levels of terrorism and violent extremism, while bearing the cost of the kinetic operations needed to defeat the terrorists at the same time.
Integrating effective resilience building in peace operations, she said, had to be a central preoccupation of the Security Council in order to remain a credible guarantor of peace and security, citing Sahel as an example, where the stability and viability of States are tested daily, with violence and deaths rising with each attack.
She therefore called on members of the Security Council to give off their best saying “our capacity to deliver lasting peace and security rests on our ability to understand and address the underlying conditions for conflict, as much as our ability for conflict management.”
BY BENJAMIN ARCTON-TETTEY
