The Hon. Kevin Rudd, Minister for Foreign Affairs; Your Excellency Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Your Excellencies, and members of the Diplomatic Corps; LTGEN David Hurley, Vice Chief of the Defence Force; Distinguished speakers, chairs and panellists; Distinguished Guests; Ladies and Gentlemen; and to my own Centre staff who have worked so hard to make this conference a reality and who continue to inspire me with their professionalism.
On behalf of the Asia Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence, I am very pleased to welcome you all to the Centre’s annual Civil-Military Affairs Conference which, this year, is titled Enhancing the Protection of Civilians in Peace Operations: From Policy to Practice.
We meet in the shadow of the death of another Australian brave soldier in Afghanistan, where Australia is applying the civil-military approach in Oruzgan Province, in very difficult circumstances. We salute Sergeant Brett Wood and join his family and his mates in mourning his passing.
But Afghanistan provides another example of a conflict where it is now more dangerous to be a civilian than it is a combatant. While the number of combatant casualties in conflicts has continued to reduce since the end of World War 2 – which is a good thing – the number and percentage of civilian deaths and injuries in conflicts has continued to increase. This is why the protection of civilians has become such an important issue.
The short video clip you have just seen on the Protection of Civilians in UN peacekeeping missions – or ‘POC’ for short – is a snippet of a joint project between UNITAR (the United Nations Institute for Training and Research) and the Centre. It is the joint brainchild of Peter Thomson at the Centre, and Evariste Karambizi of UNITAR, both of whom you will get to know throughout this conference. We hope to have a documentary available for POC training courses in July. Most of the people on the video clip wanted to join us for this conference. The contribution towards this training film is just one of the ways the Centre fulfils its mission, which is to support the development of national civil-military capabilities to prevent, prepare for, and respond more effectively to conflicts and disasters overseas.
This Civil-Military Affairs Conference – or CMAC as we call it – is the Centre’s annual flagship event, conducted on our home turf here in Queanbeyan. I would like to thank the ‘Q’ and the Queanbeyan City Council for enabling us to utilise these world class facilities – and at a better price than we could achieve in Canberra.
CMAC builds on the Centre’s successful hosting of the International Forum for the Challenges for Peace Operations which was conducted in this same venue in April last year. That conference focused on the Challenges of Strengthening the Protection of Civilians in Multidimensional Peace Operations, and copies of the proceedings are available in the lobby and on the Centre’s website.
Each year CMAC will focus on a specific topic in the civil-military space. In April next year we will address Stabilisation Operations, as part of an ongoing project we initiated last December, titled MAPSOP – the Multiagency Peace and Stabilisation Operations Project.
The Centre is privileged to have all of you here – to learn from each other, and to robustly exchange views in helping to advance practical mechanisms that will enhance the protection of civilians in peace operations.
A quick glance around this room reveals an impressive and inspiring group of civilian, military and police – policy makers and practitioners. This diverse group reflects the important reality that POC is a critical civil-military issue, and helps explain why it is a core component of the Centre’s Governance and Rule of Law Program.
Protection of civilians in peace operations is a cross-cutting issue which has its roots in international humanitarian law, refugee law and human rights law. Effective protection in peace operations requires an integrated approach across all protection actors in the field. This includes all the components of the UN or regional mission – political, military, police, civil affairs, gender affairs, humanitarian, human rights, and others – and the mission’s interaction with the UN Country Team, international organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, non-government organisations, and, most importantly, the host state itself.
In 2005 I was invited to participate in a seminal workshop at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana to consider the role of military peacekeepers in POC. Reflecting on my experience with successive UN mandated missions in East Timor from 1999, I was asked to consider what problems could have been avoided had a POC mandate been applied by the Security Council. I drew two important conclusions: the first was that a POC mandate would have required pre-deployment collaboration between the head of the UN humanitarian mission, Ross Mountain, and the Commander of INTERFET, General Peter Cosgrove, rather than taking 10 valuable days to accomplish this after their separate arrivals in Dili. The second lesson, this time for UNTAET, was that joint military and police planning would have been mandatory, and security operations would not have been planned and conducted unilaterally by the Peacekeeping Force, but after consultation with all mission components.
Equally, there are other important POC lessons from the intervention in Timor-Leste following the violence in 2006, but I will leave those comments for another time.
To help guide us through our deliberations over the next couple of days I would like to commend to you the excellent Background Paper by Alison Giffen which was circulated to all of you and which is also in your packs. Alison is Deputy Director and Research Fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington D.C. (another of the Centre’s valued international partners), and I am delighted that she has been able to join us in Queanbeyan.
Since the Centre’s hosting of the Challenges Forum on POC 13 months ago – and as shown in the conference Background Paper – considerable work has been done on POC by both the United Nations and the African Union, and by a number of countries who have started to develop POC doctrine for their military and police forces. This momentum needs to be continued, and this conference is one of the ways that Australia continues to show its commitment to POC. In addition to Australia’s support to the United Nations on POC, the Centre has also been privileged to work alongside the African Union on their efforts to develop Guidelines for the Protection of Civilians in African Union Peace Support Operations. In October 2010, the African Union Peace and Security Council welcomed the Guidelines and directed that they be mainstreamed into the activities of the African Union Mission in Somalia. The Centre’s support to, and partnership with, the African Union Commission continues.
The objectives for this conference are clearly stated in your programs. Fundamentally, the conference is designed to take stock of the recent developments in POC and to identify the next steps.
The timeliness of this conference is reinforced by the release of a study published by the American Journal of Public Health, examining the prevalence of rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The authors of that study have concluded that an average of 48 women and girls are raped every hour in the war-torn country. This emphasises the need, I think, for the international community to do more to protect civilians, and to think holistically beyond short-term military solutions.
Finally, it would be remiss of me to conclude my opening remarks without reminding you that this coming Sunday, 29th May, is International Peacekeepers’ Day. We should give tribute to the 2,900 UN staff who have paid the ultimate sacrifice on UN peacekeeping missions, and we should also recognise the vastly greater number of innocent civilians who have been affected by conflict.
It is my great pleasure now to invite our Foreign Minister, the Hon. Kevin Rudd, to deliver the opening address of this conference. Mr Rudd played a key role in the decision to establish the Centre, and opened the Centre in this very venue in November 2008. Indeed, the plaque from that opening is proudly displayed in our Centre. On that occasion, the Q was flooded when the sprinkler system was activated, and we had our wet-weather opening outside the front doors. I have it on good authority that that the flood gates will not be reactivated today. Despite that rather inauspicious start for the Centre I am pleased to say that the Centre has continued to prosper due in large part to Mr Rudd’s support.
Minister, it is indeed with great pleasure that I welcome you back to the Q, and invite you to open the conference.
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