S/PV.6165
6165th meeting
Wednesday, 22 July 2009, 10.30 a.m.
New York
Post-conflict peacebuilding
Mr. Dabbashi (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya) (spoke in Arabic): I am pleased to see you, Sir, presiding over this important meeting. Your brotherly country launched this wise and timely initiative, and we are extremely thankful to you for it. We also thank the Secretary-General for introducing his valuable report (S/2009/304), and the Chairperson of the Peacebuilding Commission and the representatives of the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank for their important contributions.
Over the past two decades, the United Nations has done a great deal to prevent and resolve conflicts and to maintain and build peace. While the Organization has several achievements in this area to its credit, efforts to ensure stability and economic recovery, in particular in the aftermath of a ceasefire or the signing of peace agreements, continue to face great challenges. In-depth study is required to overcome the difficulties and shortcomings and to determine the most expeditious way to end a conflict, restore trust among the various sectors of an affected society, and implement programmes to promote economic recovery and sustainable development.
In his report, the Secretary-General defines the most important and urgent objectives for peacebuilding in the immediate aftermath of conflict. These include providing basic security, delivering peace dividends, shoring up and building confidence in the political process, and strengthening core national capacity to lead peacebuilding efforts. I do not believe that anyone can have any objection to those goals, but the great challenge is how to respond effectively to those priority goals.
In his report, the Secretary-General proposes a plan for rapid response within the United Nations and other actors in order to meet the following challenges: first, to ensure rapid deployment of more effective and more solidly structured United Nations teams; secondly, to set priorities and ensure that resources are available to implement them; thirdly, to provide United Nations support for national ownership and developing national capacity from the beginning; fourthly, to strengthen and rationalize United Nations capacity to identify staff, expertise and resources that can be deployed immediately in the post-conflict peacebuilding environment; and fifthly, to work with donors to ensure that financing mechanisms function more speedily and flexibly and are more risk-tolerant and better aligned.
We thank the Secretary-General and other United Nations departments for putting forward these elements. However, we feel that it is clear that each of those elements faces a number of challenges, which will demand greater effectiveness, despite the enormous efforts of the Secretariat and Member States in recent years. I would like to focus on the two most important challenges, which I believe are critical to building and consolidating peace. These two challenges are capacity-building and financing.
We all know that, in the aftermath of a conflict, the institutions of a State have been dismantled. The country lacks capacity and expertise on the ground. The financial system is completely ineffective. The sources of financing are not guaranteed. These conditions make national Governments incapable of carrying out their mission.
There is no doubt, then, that the first priority of peacebuilding is to form a stable political system. This requires building and developing essential capacities of the State so that it can restore its legitimacy and provide basic services to its citizens. This will promote economic recovery and strengthen the labour market. That is why we support the view that building such capacity must be a prime element of any peacebuilding effort from the very onset. We believe that such capacity should be based primarily on available local expertise, and after that on expertise provided by countries that share the same culture, as well as by regional and subregional organizations, whenever possible.
Major international organizations should take full advantage of local capacities in the given country. We should avoid the excessive use of international staff so that employment opportunities in the country in question are not undermined. Two sectors where it is important to strengthen capacity in post-conflict peacebuilding are security and finance.
The first is linked to stability, security and justice, which are key to restoring citizens’ trust in their Government and convincing them that peace has its dividends. The second sector is clearly linked to State revenue and to its management. If there is no effective financial or tax system, the State will not be able to meet its obligations or provide basic services to its citizens, and runs the risk of social instability and relapse into conflict.
Reconstruction efforts face a number of obstacles resulting from limited financing channelled through weak and often inadequate mechanisms. It is therefore necessary to find a way to make financing flexible, predictable and rapid, as well as sufficient and timely. We hope that the Partnership Framework Agreement between the United Nations and the World Bank will provide for effective management of multi-donor funding and facilitate the use of that funding.
We also hope that the Peacebuilding Commission will play a greater role in finding innovative ways to secure funding for peacebuilding and to encourage donors to provide speedier, more flexible and more risk-tolerant funding. We believe the Peacebuilding Fund can make a greater contribution to bridging the gaps between pledged funding and available funding.
We welcome the workplan proposed by the Secretary-General with regard to the United Nations response in the early post-conflict phase. We reaffirm the importance of the role to be played by the Secretary-General’s representatives on the ground in bringing together all influential actors in the aftermath of a conflict, so that strategies and plans of action can be adopted based on a national approach and tasks prioritized and delimited. Financing must also be provided from the outset.
