POLITICS: Outgoing US Envoy Blasts UN Peacekeeping Department

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 20 2001 (IPS) - The outgoing US Ambassador to the United Nations Friday lambasted the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping operations (DPKO) for being lethargic towards the spread of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) among UN peacekeepers worldwide.

“I have to state with reluctance that I am not satisfied with the performance of the DPKO,” Ambassador Richard Holbrooke told a meeting of the Security Council.

The one-day meeting, summoned specially to discuss “HIV/AIDS and International Peacekeeping Operations”, was the third such meeting in a year.

Holbrooke said the Department was given a clear mandate by the Security Council in July last year to enhance HIV/AIDS awareness and education among peacekeepers. But he found out that a start had been made only Friday – six months after the Council adopted a resolution on AIDS and peacekeepers.

Waving a copy of an AIDS manual for peacekeepers put out by DPKO, Holbrooke said the publication was not only five years old, but it was also too sexually explicit.

“The manual is not user-friendly. It was technical, wordy and outdated. And an average soldier will not be able to comprehend the manual unless he has an advanced degree,” he added.

Further, he said, one needed a magnifying glass to find out what HIV/AIDS did. “I am blunt about it because human lives are involved,” Holbrooke said.

For starters, he called for the creation of a separate unit in DPKO specifically to deal with the spread of AIDS among peacekeepers. Moreover, there was also a need to fill the empty slots in DPKO’s Medical Unit.

“We spend billions of dollars on peacekeeping. We spend millions of dollars to protect peacekeepers. But we only spend about 500,000 dollars to protect UN soldiers from HIV/AIDS,” he told delegates.

“It would be the cruellest of ironies if peacekeepers who had to come to end a war were, in turn, responsible for spreading a deadly disease,” he added.

The United States would not send a single of its soldiers overseas if he or she tested positive for the disease, Holbrooke asserted. Instead, they were kept at home and treated. But some countries, however, for social and cultural reasons did not do that, he added.

Implying that this was being done because of a strong stigma attached to being HIV/AIDS positive, he said there was an urgent need for de- stigmatisation.

But Holbrooke’s concern over the spread of AIDS among peacekeepers was in marked contrast to the stand taken by India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

Ambassador Kamalesh Sharma said the Security Council had expressed its concern at the potential damaging impact of HIV/AIDS on (and by implication through) peacekeepers.

“We find objectionable the imputation that peacekeepers are either necessarily at risk or carriers of the disease,” he said.

Sharma said that India had participated in almost every peacekeeping operation, and certainly in every operation set by the United Nations in Africa.

“Not one Indian peacekeeper has either arrived in the theatre in Africa with HIV/AIDS or left with it. Our soldiers have died in Africa and elsewhere of diseases – most recently in Sierra Leone from a particularly virulent form of cerebral malaria – but no one has died of AIDS,” he noted.

Sharma said singling out HIV/AIDS awareness for peacekeepers, as the Council has done in its recent resolutions, is not only needless, it presents a misleading picture of the problems that peacekeepers face and must prepare for.

“If peacekeepers are properly trained and disciplined, AIDS awareness will come with it; if they are not, they and the operation will fail,” he warned.

Sharma also pointed out that the problem of the treatment of AIDS also boils down to one of trade. A small group of pharmaceutical companies invoke provisions of multilateral trade agreements to deny affordable medicines to the vast number of patients, particularly in Africa, who cannot pay what is charged.

Cheaper generic alternatives are available, but these multilateral agreements are being used to stop their export. As a result, he said, millions are being condemned to a painful death through the policies of these pharmaceutical companies.

Jean-Marie Guehenno, head of DPKO and Under-Secretary-General for UN Peacekeeping Operations, told the Council that the question he had to ask himself was: what impact do 38,000 or even 50,000 peacekeepers deployed worldwide have on this epidemic that has affected tens of millions of people. And what can DPKO do to make a contribution in helping to prevent its spread.

“The reality is that a number of peacekeepers, like any sample of people from around the world, are likely to have been infected by HIV, prior to deployment, and this risk does not apply only to peacekeepers coming from countries with high prevalence rates,” he said.

It is also a fact that some, though certainly not all, of our peacekeeping missions are deployed to parts of the world where there is a relatively high incidence of HIV/AIDS.