Safety of our peacekeepers paramount

Editor,I support our defence forces’ continuing role in helping to reinforce peace in our neighbourhood, and beyond. Insecurity in our region can hardly leave us unaffected as it has a tendency to spread beyond the original country sooner than later. However, senior Rwanda Defence Force commanders and their political masters need to always keep the safety of our men and women in such operations as their primary priority as we all know from bitter experience that the dysfunctional bureaucracy at the UN Department of Peace Keeping Operations will not. This is not to imply they should fold their arms and simply look on when innocent civilians are under attack – again something for which the UN is renowned, especially in this sub-region – but that the means at their disposal are commensurate with their tasks.Given our recent history with the UN in the DRC, I am very skeptical about this Organisation and whether it really still serves the ideals for which it was originally established or whether it has been captured by interests inimical to world peace and security.Until the UN and some of its critical organs cease to be the exclusive tools of a few countries (e.g. the transformation of the peacekeeping department into an extension of the French Government through that country’s de facto exclusive right to name its head and then using this power to pursue narrow French interests at the expense of the common global welfare), the UN will continue to be dysfunctional and a danger to global peace and security (the very opposite of its purpose).I hope Rwanda will, as a matter of topmost priority, work closely with other members of the Security Council, to wrest UN peacekeeping from the control of a few countries and the illegitimate influence of such non-state actors as the arsonists of HRW and their ilk.Mwene Kalinda(Reaction to the story, “RDF speaks out on safety of peacekeepers”, December 29, ).

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Safety of our peacekeepers paramount