UN General Assembly: Summit on Strenghtening International Peace Operations

It gives me great pleasure to be able to participate in this debate, since peacekeeping operations are one of the main prides and successes of this organization, and I think it’s extremely important to have this debate. Unfortunately, it looks like that in the foreseeable future we will need more peacekeeping operations, not less. And that is only if we are lucky enough to create some peace that we can then keep.

Most peacekeeping missions and I think that in the future it needs to be more so, combine and should combine military and civilian projects as a peacekeeping package. And in that sense CAPMATCH, created here in the UN, is also a very important instrument. Or to put it more simply a very important list of capacities that we have.

I respect and am grateful for the big donors. Without them there would be no peacekeeping operation. But I will try to make a case for the small donors, since I think that if you look at the objectives of the peacekeeping operations, they’re to help – on the ground, they need to be efficient, they need the be accepted by the people of the country in which they work, they have to be capable of creating sustainable peace, but they also have to be supported by global consensus, and try to build global consensus, interest and support for each individual peacekeeping mission. And in building global consensus I think it matters that you get as many countries involved and participating, even with small contributions, in order to support this consensus and push forward this whole idea.

So Croatia will train women police officers and we will focus on that because it has proven to be effective and efficient, and we can increase the numbers. Thank you.