India for fast action on peace building

India's permanent representative to UN calls for fast action to evolve a peace building process to help poor countries.

India has called for expeditious action to evolve a peace building process that would assist needy countries with funding, mobilise donor support and design policies to consolidate peace.

HT Image

The painful history of the post-world war years illustrates the fragility of peace in post-conflict societies, said Nirupam Sen, India's permanent representative to the United Nations, citing Nietzsche - "peace is an interregnum between two periods of war".

"To reiterate the metaphor of steering, if 31 pilots argue over a ship's steering wheel, the ship will only run aground," he said asking member countries to expeditiously find common ground on the role of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC).

In India's view, that common ground lies in recognising that the goal is to assist candidate countries with funding, mobilise donor support and design policies that would consolidate peace, Sen said.

It was thus self-evident that the PBC is not merely about donors of money and recipients, but also about provision of advice and policy support, both through 'learning by example' and through assistance in designing policies based on the specificities of the society concerned, he said.

Since one size clearly does not fit all and what works in a small and more homogeneous country may not in a large and fractured state, Sen said it is important to focus on whether resources are going to the most important place - institution-building.

"We also believe that there is no gainsaying the fact that the lead actor in any post-conflict peacebuilding instance must be the nation concerned," he said.

"We believe that we need to renew our focus and our commitment to the larger cause of assisting the candidate countries that are before us. We need to listen more closely to their concerns and react with greater dispatch to their requests."

"If we do so, in a manner that most directly addresses their concerns, we will not only be able to assist the states concerned in the process of post conflict peace consolidation, but would have also demonstrated the efficacy of this new mechanism that the PBC is" Sen said.

This would have beneficial effects ranging from a more result-oriented discourse within the PBC, to greater donor willingness to assist not only the candidate countries themselves, but also to fund the PBC, he said.

In India's view "the 'teething troubles' of which we are wont to speak, can be addressed once we place the larger picture and the overarching goal before ourselves," Sen concluded.