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Bent

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2015-11-13

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2015-11-13

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un-security-council

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1. “In fact, it collapsed right after the conflict began. We need to have clarity on this matter, and we need to take the time to do it right as we put the pieces together. Many of the missions I have been involved in suffer from diluted potential because we start to move too quickly. I believe we were doing that prior to the conflict. That is what we are hoping to do now in this case, and what we have been trying to do through these regimented programmes that focus on community-oriented policing and the protection of civilians.”

   2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

2. “That is what we have been trying to do in restructuring the entire mission, specifically United Nations police, so as to put in place dedicated teams for the specific areas we have to address. We have teams for public order, which are made up of a combination of United Nations police and FPUs. We have teams for community policing, which do nothing but work with community watch groups - nationals at the sites. And we have teams on gender and child violence. We are working very well with those teams, but the dynamics are immense. I would therefore ask again that we look at this as a package. We need to focus on what we absolutely need to get done. In a sense, capacity-building takes place from the top and the bottom at the same time. Building from the bottom up takes too long, but if we do not structure it correctly it will collapse.”

   2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

3. “There are not enough FPUs to work with the groups that focus on protecting women and children. We put them in and expose them to great danger, without giving them the protection they need to comfortably do theirjobs. I think it may be for that reason that some countries have started to reduce their contributions. No one feels good about asking people to volunteer for a mission and then putting them in harm's way. And while we do have a gender focal point, we also have to deal with rotations. Taking in and training someone as a gender focal point and then having her rotate out eight months later means that there is no longevity. We have been asking for team packages in order to address some of those issues. We are short on resources and personnel, and we need to make the most of the limited resources we have available.”

   2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

4. “We had always been in search of female police officers, but we needed more because, as has been pointed out by several members of the Council, women have a unique advantage in those sites, where we are dealing with a population that is primarily made up of women and children. We had to have some way to take advantage of that and leverage it, so we asked all the police-contributing countries to provide as many women as they could. We were at 20 per cent at one time, but I believe our numbers are sliding down below 18 per cent now. That is not enough. One point I would like to make in that regard is that we also have to look at the fact that we are dealing with a very harsh environment: people are working outside in the elements, with a hostile group present and females going unprotected.”

   2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

5. “You have to train them for the environment they are in. And you have to train them, within that environment, for what they are up against. In the first stages, we realized that our induction training was inadequate for when people came to the mission. I am not saying that the external training was inadequate, but we had to get them to understand what they were going to be facing when they came to the mission. We adjusted our induction training to focus on the protection of civilians, women's protection, sexual and gender-based violence and dealing with the locals as separate ethnic groups. Along with that, we also started to request more females.”

   2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

6. “Within a mandate, we can have statement that says "by any and all means necessary within your resources and capabilities in areas of deployment". What exactly does that mean? Is your area of deployment South Sudan? Is your area of deployment the protection-of-civilians site you are assigned to? Is your area of deployment the specific purpose you came to the mission to perform? In the first parse of that, we had people who came to the mission for capacity-building. They were not there to carry out any engagement with civilians. Yet for almost a year we had to reassign them to do something with which they were not comfortable and for which they were not trained. Those things get very critical. Resources and capability come into play too, because the training is not as simple as training people to come to a mission.”

   2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

7. “IfI have a team that is cut off inside a site and things get to the point where the team is suffering injuries that require the use of deadly force 4 which has happened, and deadly force has not been used - the force contingent does not come in with a higher level of escalation; they come back in with containment and control. That leaves us vulnerable to an apparent abuse of force. We are not properly equipped. We do not have the resources to go into a site such as Bentiu, which has 121,000 internally displaced persons, with 30 FPUs to control a situation where 200 or 300 people may be rioting. The dynamics of some of the content of the mandates therefore become almost irrelevant. We have been working intra-mission to coordinate. But it is incredibly dynamic, in part due to the institutional framework.”

   2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

8. “As soon as you lay hands on someone who is beating a woman and try to pull him off, you can suddenly be surrounded by 20 or 30 of his supporters who want to know why you are taking that person away. Thus the rules of engagement became very critical. We tried to address that through a standard operating procedure in responding to such incidents. But we found that the force contingent was correct in the View that it should not engage the civilian population and that its only capacity in most of its work with us was to support us in containing an area of conflict and locking it down. Most of what the force cotingent does is to help us form a perimeter and shut down a site. It comes in and extracts us from a perimeter whenever we have an issue.”

   2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

9. “When FPUs were unable to engage quickly to get into position in the presence of an armed component that required the use of higher force in a situation they could not control - and in many such situations we have had armed opponents with knives and machetes, throwing rocks or beating us with sticks, which meant that we were suffering injuries - we often had to withdraw. It is not simply a matter of having 20 or 30 formed police units armed with weapons that one thinks can defend itself and control the situation. We are talking about hundreds of civilians surrounding them with machetes, knives, rocks and sticks, even jumping and biting. The decision to use force to protect themselves becomes a very critical issue because of why we are there in the first place. Sometimes such escalation occurs just on a whim. Anything can ignite them.”

   2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

10. “Weapons were being sneaked in - including machetes and knives - and we therefore quickly had to combine with the force contingent directly in order to handle some of those situations. With respect to protective gear, we asked for it up-front in January 2014. And we pushed for it again, because many police-contributing countries cannot provide such equipment. We lacked it, so we were at risk. We were trying to rely on the minimal formed police units (FPUs) that we received in-mission and on the force contingent. That is where the rules of engagement began to become apparent.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

11. “One must remember that, during that interim period, we had no adjusted mandate. During that gap, United Nations police tried to push forward without restrictions, with the knowledge that we needed to maintain some type of policing and control of the growing camps. During that time, we started to identify our own inabilities, with a view to addressing, through policy and procedure, exactly what we could and could not do, and we learned how to tie it all together. With regard to the rules of engagement, we knew that we needed to focus internally and that the force needed to focus externally. We had trouble securing the porous perimeters of the sites because of a lack of resources, inadequate fencing and an inadequate ability to observe the perimeters day and night.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

12. “Mr. Bent: I thank the members of the Security Council again for their kind remarks, their obvious support for United Nations police and their concerns about our operations within peacekeeping. I probably will not be able to answer all the questions, but I will try to. At the outset of the conflict, intra-Mission cooperation was very tenuous. We were engaged in capacity-building, which was mostly unrestricted. Everybody focused on his or her own area ofimportance, and there was not much integration. When the conflict started and forced us to all come together, making the world a lot smaller, there appeared to be some stepping on toes and some conflicts of interest in the cooperative relationships among the different components. There was a lack of clarity on the issue of primacy and focus.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

13. “I would ask that the Council invest in the Panel's recommendations, which would help to provide missions with the flexibility, resources, guidance and support needed for the successful implementation and maintenance of the protection of civilians mandate.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

14. “However, the Guidelines on Police Capacity-Building and Development recommend that the host Government have ownership of the process of reform and that plans be phased, with one phase being completed before the next begins Let me conclude by restating that the UNMISS protection of civilians mission faces many challenges and dangers. However, we are confident that given sufficient support, guidance and flexibility, as outlined in the report of the Hi gh-level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, resolution 2185 (2014) and the Guidelines on Police Capacity-Building and Development, our mission has the capability to adjust and prevail through innovative and sustainable approaches and programmes.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

15. “It is envisioned that this concept will be the future policing strategy and ethics base for the future police service in South Sudan. Finally, we would like to reference resolution 2185 (2014) and the Guidelines on Police Capacity-Building and Development, considering that police are a bridge between civilians and Governments. Police interact with civilian populations on a daily basis while guiding, assisting and protecting them. This is the embodiment of resolution 2185 (2014), identifying the centrality of police in peacekeeping.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

16. “UNMISS is also actively engaged in supporting and implementing cross-cutting programmes with other mission components in the areas of gender violence and women's and child protection. These innovations are combining the focus of these concerns into an overarching community policing strategy that is being supplemented by IDP community watch groups within the protection of civilians sites. This overarching strategy is also being aligned to support and enhance the external portion of the community policing strategy, which involves the SSNPS and community watch groups as IDPs return to their homes, and also to support the efforts of the SSNPS under the pilot project for safe return. These efforts also align with and support perfectly the concept of the newly proposed joint integrated police.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

17. “Currently, UNMISS and the United Nations police are engaged in supporting the pilot project for safe return through curriculum support and human rights training to select South Sudan National Police Service (SSNPS) officers. This training is supported by the respective components of our human rights, women's and child protection sections. The United Nations police is also supporting the SSNP identification card project and the 777 emergency call centre - all of which are approved in consideration of the Human Rights and Due Diligence Policy and are supported in an attempt to foster an improved public perception of the SSNPS and build confidence within the IDP populations that safe return to their homes will be possible.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

18. “As exemplified by the recent report of the High- level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (see S/2015/446), in which a change was called for to improve the efficiency of peacekeeping operations. Considering the dynamics of South Sudan, it is imperative that new ways be identified to engage and improve the mission. The Panel report calls for tailoring mandates to meet the dynamics of the mission. In the section on four essential shifts, it calls for being more field focused and to awaken the United Nations on the distinct and important needs of the field missions. It calls for new approaches, a convergence of expectations and capabilities, and for clarity of purpose and potential. From our experiences and Observances of the dynamics in South Sudan, the Panel's recommendations could not fit our mission more appropriately.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

19. “UNMISS has seen its protection of civilian sites expand from housing several thousand internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the first days of the conflict to hundreds of thousands of IDPs spread across the four major UNMISS protection of civilians sites. The United Nations police has been tasked with maintaining public safety and security within those sites.There are constant, daily threats to our staff, and situations can easily escalate to where staff members are surrounded by tens and even hundreds of aggressive and threatening IDPs. Serious physical injury to United Nations personnel has happened on several occasions. In reponse, UNMISS continues to look for innovative ways and a better way of doing things.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source

20. “Mr. Bent: I would like to thank you, Sir, for giving me the opportunity to speak to the Council today in representation of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and United Nations police and in regards to the protection of civilians in South Sudan. In the past 22 months, UNMISS has been engaged with adjusting from a post-conflict/recovery mandate, focused on capacity-building, to a series of crisis/ conflict-adjusted mandates focused on the protection of civilians. The scope of this tasking is vast and includes civilians sheltering for safety in various venues, including those which are within United Nations compounds.”

    2015-11-13 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7558 (2015) · source