Q&A: UN deputy chief on Haiyan, ISIS and blue helmets

Ayee Macaraig

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The UN's number two diplomat talks about the global implications of problems the Philippines faces like disaster risk reduction, terrorism and peacekeeping

GLOBAL IMPACT. UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson grants Rappler an interview in his office at the UN Headquarters in New York. Photo by Ayee Macaraig/Rappler

UNITED NATIONS – “I wake up every morning asking myself: Where did we lose anyone yesterday?”

As the United Nation’s number two diplomat, Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson knows all too well the dangers peacekeepers face. After all, he gets a daily dose of diplomatic cables from the field, sometimes bearing tragic news about his own colleagues and friends.

Sweden’s former foreign minister and ambassador to the UN, Eliasson says that the Philippines’ concern on the safety of peacekeepers and its willingness to play an active role in the review of UN peacekeeping are “very important” and “reasonable.” (READ: After kidnappings, UN to focus on peacekeepers’ safety)

“We will need to really think about the security of our people but not only the peacekeepers. With terrorist organizations, there is a growing danger now for anyone associated with the United Nations. They look for the soft targets. It might be the humanitarian workers, the human rights monitors, the civilians, even families if they are around,” he tells Rappler in his office at the UN Headquarters in New York. 

The UN’s first Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs also weighs in on rehabilitation, disaster risk reduction and development a year after Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) devastated the central Philippines. (READ: After world aid, gov’t must scale up Yolanda rehab)

A renowned diplomat who helped mediate conflicts in Darfur and between Iran and Iraq, Eliasson discusses the growing threat of foreign terrorist fighters, some of whom hail from Southeast Asia. He admits that both a military and a political strategy is needed to counter groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

In a brief but candid interview, the man who has worked for and with the UN for 3 decades elaborates on some of the key foreign policy challenges for the Philippines and the international community. Here is our full exclusive interview.

 

What lessons did the international community learn from extreme weather events like Super Typhoon Haiyan?

First of all, we should realize that we live in a period where the forces of nature are becoming more vehement, more violent than ever before. It’s no coincidence. It is truly related largely to climate change because earthquakes and tsunamis are something different. But when it comes to storms and hurricanes, floods, droughts, there is certainly a relation to climate change. So primarily, we need to be better prepared. We should count on the fact that we will deal with vehement natural forces to begin with.

Secondly, when something happens, we need now definitely to be better prepared in all respects. In terms of how we organize operations under extremely difficult circumstances, and also how we strengthen building codes. We need to do everything we can to make sure that you have a more durable and a more resilient environment. Of course, that goes even more for the situation we are dealing with when a disaster, a hurricane has struck. How we can build back better? That is generally the rule we should have.

If we see earthquakes occurring in California or Japan, you will see the rate of loss of life is much less than what you see in the Philippines or other countries. Haiti is an another example, the earthquake there. There is a direct relationship between poverty and the effect of natural disasters.

STRUCTURAL CHANGE. Eliasson says besides rebuilding post-Haiyan, the Philippines must focus on long-term changes like developing an effective early warning system. File photo by Dennis M. Sabangan/EPA

I myself have a traumatic memory of this because I was the first UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. I came into office just after the horrible cyclone wave struck Bangladesh [in 1991]. A 6-meter high cyclone wave drowned around 120,000 people in 45 minutes. When I came back and analyzed the people who had perished, it turned out that many of them were people who were so poor that they were planting their rice on land that did not exist on the land map, 30 centimeters above the sea level.

At that time, Bangladesh did not have warning systems. Now, they have an excellent warning system: meteorological warnings, sirens, shelters. Bangladesh has lost only 1,000 or so since then – “only” I say – because compared to 120,000. You need to bring in the early warning systems aside from the building back better task.

The Philippines expressed concern about the safety of peacekeepers in kidnapping and siege incidents. How will the high-level review of peacekeeping address the concerns of troop-contributing countries like the Philippines?

The safety of the peacekeepers will certainly feature very high on the agenda of the panel. I just met them [on Tuesday, November 18]. I discussed this. Because we are asking them to analyze the new environment in which peacekeeping operations are taking place. That environment is so much more complicated than when I started to work in the United Nations many, many years ago.

Back then, it was automatically assumed that the UN would be a neutral, impartial body and accepted by all parties as impartial and neutral. That is almost the exception in today’s world where you deal with so-called asymmetrical threats: terrorist groups, groups who have not given up arms. We will have to have a capacity to deal with almost combat situations.

This will mean that we in the future will have to either go the direction of what we did in Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to have an operation with a more muscular component: the French paratroopers in Mali, and the intervention brigade in the Central African Republic.

Or in serious cases, like if you go back to the operations against Iraq, when Iraq invaded Kuwait [in 1990], it was actually a militarily meticulously planned operation under the leadership of the United States. But the operation was given a blessing, authorization by the UN Security Council. That was when the term “coalition of the willing” was introduced. Maybe such situations would occur in the future. 

In both these cases and also traditional peacekeeping, we will need to really think about the security of our people. But not only the security of the peacekeepers, it also now, with terrorist organizations, the growing danger for anyone associated with the United Nations. 

'REASONABLE CONCERNS.' The UN's deputy chief says the Philippines' concerns on the safety of peacekeepers are reasonable and will be part of a major review of UN peacekeeping. File UN Photo/Mark Garten

They look for the soft targets, and the soft targets are not the French paratroopers. It might be the humanitarian workers, the human rights monitors, the civilians, even families if they are around.

We will not be able to say we cannot do it: go out to these dangerous situations. Of course, if there is a “coalition of the willing,” then we know it is going to be a combat situation but we are very much in a gray zone where we hope that the situation will not get complicated but it will in certain cases and we need to be well prepared.

Here, we have a problem that we are really a low-budget operation. If you look at what a UN peacekeeper costs as related, for instance, to a US soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan, I think it’s a fourth, 25%. 

So we don’t have the equipment level that we should have and I think the troop-contributing countries have the right to expect that help. I think that the member states, particularly the members of the Security Council, need to really make sure that we have the resources and that they are compatible with the mandates given and the environment by which we work. I think it will be a very important and difficult dialogue with the troop contributors.

We cannot guarantee that they will be like in Cyprus back in the 1960s and 1970s with no casualty for 10 years. It’s going to be much more difficult. We see the cables coming in every morning. I wake up every morning asking myself: Where did we lose anyone yesterday? And every time, we know it’s our colleagues. I know. I’ve lost so many friends myself. It’s a bad world but we need to be very open about this.

I also think it’s fair that the troop-contributing countries have a stronger voice in the discussions about peacekeeping operations. I was myself former foreign minister of Sweden and permanent representative here. So I’ve been in the General Assembly saying, ‘We as troop contributors want to have a voice,’ and I find that reasonable. We need to have a dialogue, growingly so if the dangers now so.

So will the review panel have that dialogue with troop-contributing countries?

They are an independent review panel. I just met them but judging from the composition of that panel, I feel very comfortable that they will not avoid any sensitive issues. It’s an excellent panel although we need more women in it. We are adding. You’re the first one to get the news. We just added new terms of reference, making reference to [Security Council] Resolution 1325 and its followers. 

(Editor’s Note: This resolution recognizes the contributions women make to conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peace-building, and stresses the importance of women’s equal and full participation in peace and security.)

It’s now part of the terms of reference and we will also have contact with some very important women who have been dealing with peace-building and peacemaking. It’s an improvement. I admit it’s an improvement that perhaps should have been done from the beginning.

The beheading of American aid worker Peter Kassig again highlighted the threat of foreign terrorist fighters. What more can the UN Secretariat and Security Council do to respond? 

This is not an issue only for the United Nations. This is something that goes very deep and we have to give serious thought to this. Let us first realize that these people who commit these unspeakable crimes almost seem to compete in brutality. They are out for one thing: they want to scare us. They want to provoke societies to lose their nerves, to take steps that even undermine the values for which we stand. They want us to be scared and worried. They want to gain power by spreading fear.

We have to be able to be cool, not to be provoked. And deal with this in a way that combines the different methods that you can employ in situations like this. You have to have a security component, even a military component in some cases.

I must admit, it might be strange to hear it from a UN man, but there’s a need to also be tough on the side of getting the perpetrators of these extremely brutal crimes. But then there has to be a more sophisticated, comprehensive political strategy.

In the case of Iraq for instance, it is important to drain the support from the Sunni community for ISIL (Editor’s Note: ISIL is another acronym for ISIS). That support came to them from the beginning because of the exclusion of the Sunnis from the beginning. This is a long way to go but I just came back from Iraq and I think the new government is going that direction.

The wounds are deep and this shows the importance of having inclusive societies. If you isolate a group and they aren’t part of the growth, political power, the central government then you pay a price for it later on. In this case, the wounds are very deep and partly infected. But I think the new government is on the right track and I think we should combine those security measures with a comprehensive political strategy. – Rappler.com 

Rappler multimedia reporter Ayee Macaraig is a 2014 fellow of the Dag Hammarskjöld Fund for Journalists. She visited New York and Washington DC to cover the UN General Assembly, foreign policy, diplomacy, and world events.   

 

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