Vice-President Joice Mujuru With Her Chinese Counterpart, Zeng Qinghong
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire Photo File
Herald Reporter
A delegation of Communist Party of China Politburo members is expected in Zimbabwe tomorrow and will hold meetings with President Mugabe and the Zanu-PF leadership as part of a three-day friendship visit.
Cde Wang Gang, a member of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee, will lead the delegation.
In a statement yesterday, the Chinese Embassy in Harare said: "The Communist Party of China will send a friendship delegation, led by Honourable Wang Gang, member of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee, to visit Zimbabwe from 31 May to 2 June 2010."
Accompanying the delegation will be an arts troupe of handicapped people that will hold performances in Zimbabwe.
Apart from the meeting with President Mugabe, they are expected to meet Zanu-PF national chairman Cde Simon Khaya Moyo, party director for external affairs Cde Stan Mudenge and other senior officials.
Zimbabwe marks UN Peacekeeping Day
In Zimbabwe, the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture and the United Nations Information Centre undertook an educational awareness campaign in Bulawayo Metropolitan Province from 26-28 May 2010.
The campaign was targeted at pupils in forms 3-6.
Its aim was to raise awareness to UN Peacekeeping and Zimbabwe’s contribution to global peacekeeping.
Over the years, commemorations in Zimbabwe have taken the form of Educational Awareness Campaigns in different parts of the country and involving the abovementioned parties.
There are also observances around the world, where some countries will honour their own peacekeepers abroad, but the UN also organises festivals, discussion forums, and memorials in cooperation with local and national groups.
2010 Theme
This year, the Day is being commemorated under the international theme Haiti Standing, in memory of 96 peacekeepers who lost their lives during the Haiti earthquake. The local theme is: Celebrating 19 Years of United Nations Peacekeeping.
United Nations Peacekeeping
United Nations peacekeeping is a unique and dynamic instrument developed by the Organisation as a way to help countries torn by conflict create the conditions for lasting peace.
The first UN peacekeeping mission was established in 1948, when the Security Council authorised the deployment of UN military observers to the Middle East to monitor the Armistice Agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Since then, there have been a total of 63 UN peacekeeping operations around the world.
The term "peacekeeping" is not found in the United Nations Charter and defies simple definition. Dag Hammarskjöld, the second UN Secretary-General, referred to it as belonging to "Chapter Six and a Half" of the Charter, placing it between traditional methods of resolving disputes peacefully, such as negotiation and mediation under Chapter VI, and more forceful action as authorised under Chapter VII.
Over the years, UN peacekeeping has evolved to meet the demands of different conflicts and a changing political landscape. Born at the time when the Cold War rivalries frequently paralysed the Security Council, UN peacekeeping goals were primarily limited to maintaining ceasefires and stabilising situations on the ground, so that efforts could be made at the political level to resolve the conflict by peaceful means.
Those missions consisted of military observers and lightly armed troops with monitoring, reporting and confidence-building roles in support of ceasefires and limited peace agreements.
With the end of the Cold War, the strategic context for UN peacekeeping dramatically changed, prompting the Organisation to shift and expand its field operations from "traditional" missions involving strictly military tasks, to complex "multidimensional" enterprises designed to ensure the implementation of comprehensive peace agreements and assist in laying the foundations for sustainable peace.
Today’s peacekeepers undertake a wide variety of complex tasks, from helping to build sustainable institutions of governance, to human rights monitoring, to security sector reform, to the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants.
The nature of conflicts has also changed over the years.
Originally developed as a means of dealing with inter-State conflict, UN peacekeeping has been increasingly applied to intra-State conflicts and civil wars.
Although the military remains the backbone of most peacekeeping operations, the many faces of peacekeeping now include administrators and economists, police officers and legal experts, de-miners and electoral observers, human rights monitors and specialists in civil affairs and governance, humanitarian workers and experts in communications and public information.
UN peacekeeping continues to evolve, both conceptually and operationally, to meet new challenges and political realities. Faced with the rising demand for increasingly complex peace operations, the United Nations in the past few years has been over-stretched and challenged as never before.
The organisation has worked vigorously to strengthen its capacity to manage and sustain field operations and, thus, contribute to the most important function of the United Nations—maintaining international peace and security.
Message from the Secretary-General
On the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, we honour the sacrifices of the men and women who lost their lives while serving under the UN flag.
This year’s commemoration is a somber one. The past 14 months have been especially deadly for UN peacekeeping.
Ambushes in Darfur . . .
Terrorism in Kabul . . .
And a plane crash in Haiti . . .
These were among the tragedies that struck peacekeeping last year, killing 121 people.
That toll was nearly matched in a few seconds with the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti last January.
The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti lost 96 peacekeepers — the biggest single loss of life in peacekeeping history.
But that dark day also became one of our finest hours, as the men and women of MINUSTAH set aside their own trauma, got the mission quickly back on its feet, and helped the people of Haiti cope with the horrific aftermath. As we honour such moving displays of courage and dedication, we also pay tribute to the more than 122 000 military, police and civilian personnel who serve with distinction in our operations across the world.
Their efforts directly help millions of people . . .
By providing security and promoting reconciliation . . .
By clearing land-mines and demobilising combatants . . .
By strengthening institutions and the rule of law . . .
By delivering aid and repatriating refugees and displaced persons
By supporting democratic elections, reforming the security sector . . . and so much more.
Peacekeeping is an indispensable part of the UN’s work for a better world. Let us give it the support it needs to succeed.
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