Toespraak van minister Koenders tijdens conferentie over VN-vredesoperaties

Toespraak | 26-02-2015

President Horta, Under-Secretary-General Ladsous, Madame Executive Director, dear friends, colleagues,

There are so many around here this afternoon that I recognise, sitting in this audience. I see my old colleague David Gressly from MINUSMA, and so many others, Hilde Johnson off course, I can’t name you all, but I'm extremely pleased that you all came to the Netherlands at this very important moment.

When you were speaking, Madame Executive Director, I could not help but think of somebody who spoke thirty years ago, Willy Brandt, then Bundeskanzler, who said: Peace is not everything, but everything is nothing without peace.

That was thirty years ago. We are living in a particularly risky and dangerous world today. I am glad that we’ve had such a large turn-out for the conferences yesterday and today: on peace operations and on the role of women in conflict and peace.

This is an excellent opportunity to find synergy between two themes that are best tackled together. It’s a shared responsibility. For men and women. For defence personnel and diplomats. For governments and NGOs. So I’m happy to see such a wide variety of partners here today: government partners, civil society groups and the UN. And not only a wide variety, but also many high-level participants, among them former Special Representatives of the UN Secretary-General (SRSG’s).

I salute the women present from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Burundi and Colombia – to name just a few places. You - activists that I spoke to earlier this afternoon - face the bitter reality of conflict in your countries every day. I am here to listen to your ideas, on how my country can better support your work.

I would also like to highlight the presence of our valued UN partners: the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and UN Women among others. I acknowledge your leadership, and I hope we can help you in providing solutions to current challenges.

I would like to underline the importance of today’s topic. We find ourselves confronted with hybrid warfare and complex conflicts; we witness in today’s world a combination of proxy warfare, marginalization of groups, ethnicities and women in society, use of extreme violence and extreme ideologies as a poisonous element. This puts the UN and all of us for new challenges, because it breaks the trend of reduction of conflict that we saw during the last decade. In a time of shifting power-centres in the world and of malfunctioning of the UN Security Council in case of mass atrocities like in Syria. All together this amounts to enormous challenges for UN-peacekeeping and for the effective implementation of resolution 1325.

Would the UN - I am talking about the first topics of today - be ready for peace support operations if – admittedly unlikely at this specific moment in time – Steffan de Mistura would succeed in his top down armistice with bottom up approach? And what would the role of the UN be in a country like Libya where ISIS is on the rise? Political negotiations under the great leadership of Bernardino Leon are underway, but we don’t know yet if they will succeed.

And then the other topic: does the UN have the answer to the misogyny that we have seen for some years now - rape as a weapon of war, hatred of women as an intrinsic, crucial element of the extremist ideologies? We heard the stories this afternoon of colleagues and activists in Syria and Iraq.

And most importantly - for the discussion at this conference – do all countries want to chip in or do they leave the troop contributions, intelligence, logistics, training of UN peacekeeping operations to but a few countries in the world?

This is an excellent opportunity to look for solutions.

The UN is a unique organisation for the world’s needs. It is the only place where legitimacy can grow and the conversation can take place. The essence is to give the political, financial and military capital to the UN so that it can effectively act.

Peacekeeping - as we all know - is the most cost-effective means to provide our citizens with security. The total cost of all peacekeeping operations is comparable to the expenditure of the Dutch defence budget. That is the reality. It is often an untold success-story. That doesn’t mean that all peacekeeping operations are a success. Not all of them are, but there are many of them that are a success. And we are discussing here today - in the context of these two issues - how we can assist the improvement and reform of UN peacekeeping operations.

2015 will be an important year for peacekeeping and for the role of women in conflict and peace. The two conferences held here aim to keep up the momentum in at least two ways.

• First, we want to contribute to the debate on peace operations now that two major UN reviews are being conducted. And I applaud the work of president Horta and his team.
• Second, the conferences seek to enhance the commitment of European countries to UN peace operations, in close cooperation with the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. It is an important element to stimulate.

Let me start with the first goal. 2015 is a year in which the world is working to adapt peacekeeping practices to the demands of our time. Fifteen years ago, two pioneering documents changed the nature of peacekeeping: the Brahimi report and UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. This year the implementation of both will be reviewed, to assess what has been achieved so far - and that is a lot - and consider new challenges facing peacekeeping operations.

The Netherlands organised these conferences to generate useful input for the reviews, building on the experiences of the many participating parties, both member states and experts. Allow me to begin my contribution today with a political assessment of the challenges we face in the field of peacekeeping.

The political situation we find ourselves in today in Europe and the countries around its borders is turbulent, to say the least. In 2014 conflict came closer than we thought possible after the Cold War. What we once regarded as faraway problems - and I’m talking now about my own country - are now impacting our own societies. The people of the Netherlands experienced this acutely and tragically last summer, with the crash of flight MH17.

Hybrid warfare is the new normal: today, distinctions of the past have become even more blurred. Conventional warfare, irregular warfare and cyber warfare have blended into one. Asymmetrical warfare is a threat to peace operations. Regular military forces are being confronted with guerrilla groups, terrorists and common criminals who work in unity and who sometimes are the same people. In such an environment it is difficult to tell friend from foe, ally from enemy. Transnational crime, cybercrime and terrorism blur the distinction between internal and external security, and between war and peace.

Often there is no peace to keep. Troops face hybrid warfare in the field, where civilians are not just bystanders but targets. This is a great concern, even more so because a recent report by UN OIOS concluded that there is a ‘persistent pattern of peacekeeping operations not intervening with force when civilians are under attack’. When people are not protected and have no choice but to flee their homes, the impact on their lives and on the stability of their country or region is profound and long-lasting.

Exclusion - as we all know - is a major driving force of many of today’s wars. This is indeed true for Iraq, Mali, the Central African Republic and many other conflicts in the world. As Guéhenno recently wrote in his essay “10 Wars to Watch in 2015”: ‘Stabilising the world’s most vulnerable areas should be a major, global foreign policy imperative – and not just a moral one, given that these regions often serve as a haven for terrorists and transnational criminals.’ We need therefor an integrated approach to conflict if we want to regain a sense of security.

It is good to see that the peace operations review is examining the whole spectrum of peacekeeping operations and Special Political Missions (SPMs) and that peacebuilding and prevention are key elements of the High-Level Panel’s mandate. The deployment of a mission depends on the specific context in which the mission has to operate. Prevention, early recovery, peacekeeping, peacebuilding and state-building are all part of a continuum that requires strong cooperation – much stronger than today – between DPKO, DFS, DPA and UNDP. Funding streams are not keeping pace with the growing awareness that mediation, early warning and peacebuilding are essential to preventing renewed conflict. So, to reiterate what I said last month during my visit to UN Headquarters: it is of the essence that One UN becomes a reality, also beyond the sphere of development.

The challenges I just mentioned require a thorough rethinking of peace operations. I would like to applaud the work done by the Under-Secretary-General Ladsous and his team to constantly try to find a way in this complex world to adapt peacekeeping operations. Now we have the review to see if we are on the right track. And I am glad to see here today the members of the UN Secretary General's High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, in particular its chair, Mr Ramos-Horta with his experience as a former Head of the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau. But also as the former President of Timor-Leste when he has experienced the other side, where he has been on the receiving end of the UN. If you have seen it from the other side, it is quite helpful, isn’t, for seeing the strengths and the weaknesses?

Building on what has been said here over the last two days and on my experiences as a former special representative of the Secretary-General, and my country’s experiences in MINUSMA, I would suggest six points to consider.

First, all missions are political. No missions are purely military or civilian. Fostering political solution is key. It sounds like a cliché, but it it’s often forgotten. Peacekeeping operations should first and foremost support a political solution.

Second, leadership and proper doctrine in protecting civilians is key to the success of the mission and its overall credibility. A proper doctrine for protection of civilians is key as expectations are high and means are limited. And the doctrine has to effectively incorporate support for political processes. And that is not always easy; sometimes you have to choose. Mission leadership are confronted with those choices. And in any case mission leadership should take full responsibility and be accountable for how well it protects civilians. And peacekeepers need to get out of their compounds. And they must have the means to do so.

Third, we have to be serious about our commitment to ensuring the participation of women in peacekeeping, peace negotiations and peace-building. I’ll come back to that point in a second. I applaud what has happened since the adoption of 1325. But I also agree with what many have mentioned: there are a lot of seminars, a lot of meetings, a lot of white papers, a lot of experts. But we have to really make a difference for the women in the field.

Fourth, missions need a mandate fit for purpose; and a doctrine for the use of force. In order for peacekeeping operations to have sufficient manoeuvrability, the Security Council must provide them with appropriate and feasible mandates. Fifteen years ago Brahimi already made some suggestions for that.

And special representatives - I know that myself - must not hold back in making use of them. They are responsible. They should act proactively, wisely and decisively. There needs to be a clear command and control procedure - which it is not always there, it is sometimes difficult, not all military want to be in that chain of command. And the mandate must be implemented fully, including the use of force when necessary.

Fifth, missions need adequate staffing, training and preparation. Both military and civilian missions often struggle to find sufficient staff and logistics in time. This is unacceptable and undermines the credibility of the mission. The credibility of the mission is proven in the first four months. That is the moment to show credibility, for all actors who want to destroy a peace process. Missions and country teams need to work together in an integrated and coordinated manner in all phases of the process, from early recovery to peace-building. But missions also need to base their decisions on all available intelligence and information. We must improve the flow of information. I am very happy with the innovation that we do now have an intelligence unit in Mali. A few years ago you just couldn’t talk about intelligence in the UN. Now we have a strong part - at least in the mission in Mali - which means we have eyes and ears. And those eyes and ears are important. When you talk about 1325, and we talk about the protection of women: how can you protect women that go to a market place, who might be the victim of an ideology, of rape as an instrument of warfare, without eyes and ears?

And six: we need strong leadership to make One UN a reality. We must be able to monitor closely what we do in an area that is still underfinanced in any peace building strategy and that is early recovery. Humanitarian action is underfinanced because of all the crises in the world. Early recovery doesn’t have the many, the means and the bureaucratic structures needed to act proactively. I want to applaud David Gressly who is here today: you did that Northern Mali, with a lot of constraints. If a strategy is really integrated, you can be there in time, you can grow. The same goes - off course - for all the other aspects of a mandate.

A crucial condition for ensuring the protection of all civilians in conflict zones and for achieving lasting impact is sufficient capacity. That is why the second goal of today’s conference, the European Regional Conference on Peace Operations, was to get a better sense of what capabilities are required for current and future peace operations. It is clear that we - here in Europe - must do more and do better.

UN deployments depend on what member states are willing to do and able to offer. There is, for instance, a huge lack of enablers in peacekeeping operations. This is a critical shortcoming, and the West could make a significant difference in correcting it. For instance, the Netherlands’ contribution of Apache helicopters and transport helicopters to MINUSMA is of great value to the mission. Other partners strengthen missions by providing strategic air support. Absolutely crucial, but still more is needed.

One of the aims of today’s event was to get an overview of the level of interest among European states in increasing their contributions to those operations. And I think Europe is getting back into peacekeeping. I understand that tomorrow the Under-Secretary will have a meeting with European ministers of Defence. Very important, because we have to put our money where our mouth is.

And it also means some adaptation. A lot of European countries were not operating in UN missions because they were used to EU and especially NATO operations. The have to get used to working in an organisation - not of 28 but of 193 countries. That requires some adaptation, from both sides. I think that the importance of our meeting today is to make sure that this happens.

And with all these crises going on simultaneously, we have to rethink our national defence budgets. In Europe we are increasingly realising that 0.5% of GDP is simply not enough. I would like to emphasise again how cost-effective peacekeeping operations are, only when they are part of an integrated approach.

I have a whole story about our own commitments. I am not going to read it for you, because I never like to do a speech that says the Netherlands is doing this and this and that. We’re doing a lot and we would like to continue to contribute to peacekeeping operations in a very effective way, including by providing high-end capabilities. It is important that member states are reliable partners for the UN. They are important for the provision of materials, and for the financing and facilitation of pre-deployment training of staff of other countries. How could I support our very courageous troops in the part of northern Mali when they weren’t sufficiently trained against explosives? We have ample opportunity to support these troops in this crucial effort, which will only happen more often given the rise of asymmetric warfare. Through our funds and through the training provided by our instructors, troops from Burundi, Uganda, Burkina Faso and Benin, and other countries, are taught not only military skills but also some of the issues that deal with gender and human rights.

Let me go back to one point, the crucial point of integration of women in peacekeeping, peace talks and peacebuilding, of 1325.

When discussing the issue of peacebuilding, the question inevitably arises: who are we building peace for? Who are we building it with? Many women present here today know that all too often the answers to these questions are not always self-evident. Peace can be a selfish business: the business of the people who happen to be sitting around the negotiating table. Paramount for sustainable peace is the inclusion of women in all aspects of peace making.

It is obvious to maybe all of us that women are a powerful force for peace. They build bridges between unlikely groups. They have mediation skills that are too often disregarded. They enjoy access to groups and actors that men cannot always easily engage with. Involving women in peace making makes peace not only more equitable and balanced in itself. It is a much more effective way to achieve peace in the first place.

But not everything is said by that. We should focus less on annual rituals in conference rooms and focus more on activists and experts in the field. Yes, we have to monitor, yes we need gender experts - and we are supplying them and I know others do this as well. It was key in the mission in Mali as well as in Ivory Coast: if you don’t have the personnel, people who look at it, who monitor it, who know the country, then forget about 1325.

But the idea of 1325 was not that women become the object of conferences and interesting seminars. We are really talking about engaging men AND women. Sometimes it’s complicated. I remember going to the peace negotiations in Algiers or to seminars about 1325 and there were no women around the table. We had done our seminars with gender experts, everybody was there: I was looking around the table and I didn’t see any woman. I have to say another thing: in Mali it’s slightly different, it is specific to the situation. If you talk to Tuareg, especially around a town like Kita and other places, it’s actually the women who carry the weight in decision making. The men could go to Algiers to negotiate, but they had to get back to get the women’s approval. So the women were in fact around the table and made it extremely complicated. But obviously that is not always the case. You always have to look specifically at the situation that you talk about. And I’m glad that at least we have here a mixed group because sometimes the male-to-female ratio in the panels is related to the conflict itself.

I think here again we have to be very specific, look at our actions and see if we are effective in what we are doing. If we don’t protect women that want to go to a market, it is not only bad for women. It is bad for the economy. If we see that the increase of hatred against women is part of those who fight asymmetric warfare, we have an additional problem that we really don’t know how to tackle yet. So 1325 is in that sense something that has to be modernised, has to be improved upon and therefore we have to expand our support for gender expertise in civilian and other areas.

There are many examples of this but let me just mention one. It is a great project that we have at the moment. This afternoon I spoke to one of the Syrian women from Damascus. It is a marvellous project at the moment in Syria trying to reach out to the women in Syria, If you talk about the human disaster you have there, about the powerlessness of the international community to act, where there is a proxy warfare on which the UN Security Council cannot get to an agreement, where people in Aleppo and Idlib are still threatened by missiles every day. Now, one thing we know is that there is no military solution to this; we know a military element could be important but there is no military solution to this. But in the meantime we cannot be silent and therefore I think every humanitarian and political effort of reaching out to those women who live in Syria is crucial. And therefore my country is supporting - with some other countries - a very - I would say - revolutionary project that tries to reach these women. So we can also make sure they have a voice.

We can also assist troop-contributing countries (TCCs) like India by financing gender training by UN Women, as part of their pre-deployment training. We hope all TCCs will follow India’s example. We also designed a bi-annual training course that we run together with Spain, where civilians, military personnel and police officers are taught to implement gender perspectives in multilateral operations.

What does it mean? Simply that if you have a Congolese police officer active in Bouaké in the western part of Ivory Coast, women there would talk to her and not necessarily to the other peacekeepers. Over the past four years, more than 500 people from over 40 countries and various international organisations have participated in these courses. We work together with the Spanish government and we signed today an agreement on continuing this training to build military and civilian gender capacity in peace operations.

Last example that I'll mention and I repeat what I just said about the Syrian women: it is important that we help now the modest moderate opposition in Syria, in fact women from all walks of life to unite around a common vision of the future for their country. In my view that is also part of 1325. I’m not going into details, but we have similar efforts in Iraq; there are women from Iraq here today.

Ladies and gentlemen

This year we will to come together and collect good practices for both reviews. There is a large responsibility for all of us to think through what the reviews should do. We should make sure that it doesn’t end up in another drawer. There are so many drawers in the world where you can put your reports in. I know, with president Ramos Horta that will not happen, so I am very happy he is in charge. We should seize this opportunity to capitalise on what we’ve learned and make it an integral part of the way we operate. This is not only an opportunity; it is a responsibility for us all.

And finally, I would like to wish you all very much success in this effort. You have a great responsibility. My country will continue to help you, I hope also in 2017-2018 as member of the UN Security Council. We are pleading obviously for your support. The Kingdom of the Netherlands, your Partner for Peace, Justice and Development. You may applaud for that, we are at the end of the day.

But obviously that is not the most important. The most important is that we together improve the effectiveness of peacekeeping operations, the protection of civilians and to work together in an integrated way with the colleagues who have fought in the last fifteen years for Resolution 1325.

Thank you very much.