Opening of the Annual High-Level Meeting Between the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United Nations and Partner Organizations in the 'Tripartite Plus' Format

Secretary General Davis,
Mr. Fau,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,


It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to the Palais des Nations in Geneva to our annual High-Level meeting between the Council of Europe, the OSCE and the United Nations. It is particularly fitting that we are gathered in the historic Council Chamber to discuss the theme of post-conflict peacebuilding and the prevention of the recurrence of conflict. The masterpieces of the great Spanish mural painter José-Maria Sert y Badya serve as the perfect setting for our theme, depicting powerful images of the death of peace, but also of its resurrection, the rebirth of hope, science, social and technical progress, and ultimately, of the solidarity of peoples. Let us use this context of humanity’s past experience as a source of inspiration in our work today.

I am particularly pleased to note that, our long-standing partners in the Tripartite-plus formula, the European Commission (EC), the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union (EU), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), are being joined this year by representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). A wide range of representatives from the UN system – including Secretariat departments and offices, UN field presences in the wider Europe, and the funds, programmes and specialized agencies are also taking part. This is a source of satisfaction for us, since UNOG leads this process on behalf of the UN system and such wide participation by UN colleagues is a good sign. I should like to give special acknowledgment to the presence of UN field representatives based in Tajikistan, Kosovo, Cyprus and Georgia and look forward to their contribution on various items based on their practical field experiences.

We, the three principal conveners of the Tripartite process, have conceived this as a results-oriented meeting. We all want to leave Geneva not only with improved awareness of our institutions’ programmes, but also with concrete proposals for increased synergies. For many years, our annual gathering has provided an excellent opportunity to exchange information and to have a lively discussion on issues that are at the top of our agendas. Our meetings have also allowed us to make concrete proposals for more effective cooperation and on action that needs to be taken in order to address the many challenges ahead of us. Above all, the purpose of these Tripartite meetings is to identify and maximize the impact of cooperation between our organizations and to enhance our comparative advantages.

Today’s meeting takes place at a crucial moment for the United Nations. One year after the 2005 World Summit UN reform is successfully delivering its first results. Last week, the Human Rights Council completed its first session here in Geneva. And on 23 June the Peacebuilding Commission held its historic inaugural session in New York.

The Peacebuilding Commission, created in the wake of last year’s World Summit in New York as an intergovernmental advisory body, will develop integrated strategies for reconstruction and development as well as best practices. It will also make sure that political attention remains focussed on a country when it falls off the radar screen and that reliable, long-term funding for peacebuilding is secured, for example through the Peacebuilding Fund, which is also to be created soon.

One of the principal problems our organizations are facing on the ground is the lack of coherence and coordination. It is no secret that the United Nations family is itself difficult to coordinate and lacks agreed goals towards which the whole system can work. I should note, that almost as we speak, a high-level panel on UN system coherence is meeting just nearby, in Geneva, trying to address this very issue across the UN system. In addition to the UN, there is a wider range of actors, including regional organizations, international financial institutions, bilateral donors, NGOs. That is just the ‘outside’ players! A crucial role belongs to the governmental and civil society institutions of the countries in question. Absence of coordination between all these key actors, as they attempt to build peace in a cost-conflict environment, could doom the effort from the outset.

It is exactly this kind of coordination gap, together with the financial and institutional gaps, which the Peacebuilding Commission is called upon to eliminate. The Commission was designed to bring together and to coordinate among all the important actors in the field of peacebuilding. Regional organizations will be invited to meetings of the Commission, when appropriate, and will be able to make their contributions. In this context, the newly created Standing Committee of Regional and Other Organizations will play an important role, since it agreed in its Terms of Reference last February, inter alia, to “extend support for the Peacebuilding Commission and consider ways in which participating organizations might cooperate with it.”

However, as far as peacebuilding is concerned, we are still navigating in what could be called “un-chartered waters”, and there is still much work to be done. To give but one example: the General Assembly, the Security Council and ECOSOC will need to come up with a well-coordinated framework of interaction with the Peacebuilding Commission.

As you know, UNOG as convenor this year, acts as facilitator the Tripartite process and brings together all the main United Nations and other actors dealing with these problems. Today’s topic builds on previous Tripartite meetings, particularly on the one hosted by the OSCE in 2004 in Vienna, which assessed threats to security and stability, and the one hosted by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg last year on the rule of law, which is an essential component of any peacebuilding process.

Ladies and Gentlemen:
Today, stabilising and rebuilding failed or failing states has become one of the major challenges for the international community. Without coordinated international as well as internal peacebuilding efforts, these states can become breeding grounds for terrorism, drug trafficking, crime, trafficking in human beings and other human catastrophes, which can spread to neighbouring countries. As a result, the international community faces a whole range of challenges beyond armed conflict.

To meet these challenges, there is a need for a holistic approach both in the planning and the execution of peacebuilding missions. The United Nations and international organizations acting together have been successful in ending wars, but building sustainable peace has proved much more difficult. We have seen an unacceptable number of peace agreements disintegrate within five years after the end of a civil war, with countries lapsing back into deadly conflict. Recent events in Timor-Leste, for example, seem to support this five-year rule. Actually, Timor-Leste did not even make it to the five-year mark, which is very disturbing, since this was not just any peacebuilding operation. It was an operation that was built from the ground up by the United Nations and it seemed initially as a great success. It included government institutions, laws, civil society, etc. As Kofi Annan underlined, as “in the case of Timor-Leste, undue haste to disengage from a transitional situation can result in reversals and a need to redeploy, at great cost to all, particularly the helpless civilian victims.”

At times, the international community has approached peacebuilding as a largely technical exercise, involving the ‘importation’ and introduction of knowledge and resources. However, we must also remember that peacebuilding is inherently political. The international community must not only understand local power dynamics, but also recognize that it is itself a political actor entering a frequently unknown political environment.

At the same time we are all aware of the gaps in our response to countries in post-conflict situations, which I mentioned above. We have not yet found fully efficient ways of linking emergency relief with reconstruction, institution-building, reconciliation and development. Nor have we managed to keep the attention and interest of financial institutions and bilateral donors on countries beyond the signing of peace agreements and the departure of CNN cameras. Thus, we are talking about institutional gaps, a financing gap, as well as the coordination gap mentioned above.

To bridge these gaps, sustained international attention is not enough: the real work of peacebuilding is still done by national governments and societies. International actors may provide critical support to these processes, but cannot substitute indefinitely for capable states. The different components of a peacebuilding strategy need to contribute to the overall goal of strengthening these fragile societies and preventing the outbreak or recurrence of conflict.

It would be unrealistic to hope that we can find all the solutions to even the above-mentioned problems in the course of our meeting today, let alone provide definitive prescriptions for the wider challenges facing post-conflict peacebuilding. What we can realistically hope to do in today’s meeting, based on the very impressive collective knowledge and practical experience gathered in this room, is to seek answers to some key questions:

• How can we effectively address the root causes of conflict?

• Once they are identified, and if peacebuilding is essentially a home-grown process, which is then the role of the United Nations and of regional organizations?

• When should the international community begin a peacebuilding process, how do we determine the priorities, reach out to the main stakeholders, build political consensus, establish country-specific groups in each case and put in place a long-term strategy?

• How do we assist divided communities in post-conflict environments to learn to live together in peace? The expert-level meeting of our Tripartite process met yesterday on this issue and we look forward to a report from that meeting, later this afternoon.

• What are the main elements of a comprehensive peacebuilding strategy? And how can a peacebuilding strategy strike the balance between the mantra of ‘national ownership’ and the application of the lessons we learned from other peacebuilding contexts?

• And looking at our own organizations, how should the UN and regional organizations prioritize and coordinate among the actors involved in peacebuilding? What institutional changes are required towards the goal of building responsible, legitimate and thriving states, and how should success be measured over the short- to medium-term?

• And last but not least, what do we know about the unintentional consequences of peacebuilding, such as a dependence on international humanitarian and development assistance and other? Indeed, what could these consequences be? Can such impacts be measured with any degree of confidence? What are the lessons learned that could help us develop best practices for international peacebuilding efforts and adopt a successful exit strategy? In other words: when is peacebuilding achieved?

There is a whole range of further questions that require answers, and all participants are welcome to raise additional ones and contribute their vision of the answers to any of the questions. If we manage to have our discussion stay on this practical course, we have a reasonable hope of coming up with some collective wisdom that will hopefully contain practical suggestions that our organizations and we could benefit from in our efforts at peacebuilding.

To conclude, I should like to reiterate my hope that our deliberations today will lead to some practical recommended actions so that we can make a valuable contribution to the 7th High-Level Meeting between the United Nations and Regional Organizations, to be convened by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York next September, as well as to the work of the Peacebuilding Commission. In a larger perspective, we hope that our input could ultimately contribute to the achievement of tangible progress on the ground in the area of peacebuilding.

I should like to end my opening remarks at this point and invite my colleagues from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Council of Europe to make opening remarks. Following their opening remarks, we will move to the discussion of item 1 on the agenda and I will invite brief informal remarks from everyone who wishes to contribute to the various – and all, if you wish – items on the agenda.