[Ngo-lwg] Vietnam to Participate in UN Peacekeeping Missions

Chuck Searcy chucksearcy at yahoo.com
Tue Feb 26 10:55:35 GMT 2013



Vietnam to Participate in UN Peacekeeping Missions 
HANOI, Vietnam February 26, 2013 (AP)

 
Vietnam says it will begin participating in United Nation's peacekeeping operations from early next year, a further sign that the Southeast 
Asian nation wants to assume a bigger role in international affairs.

Facing a rising demand, the U.N. has publicly appealed for countries to 
send more troops and police officers to help carry out its peacekeeping 
missions around the world.  Vietnam didn't say how large a contribution 
it was prepared to make. Most of the 115 participating countries 
currently make only token contributions of less than 40 people.

State-controlled Tien Phong newspaper on Tuesday quoted Vice Defense 
Minister Nguyen Chi Vinh as telling visiting assistant General Secretary Edmond Mulet that Vietnamese troops would be available from early next 
year. The report gave few other details.

Vietnam opened its economy to foreign investment in the 1990s and has 
followed a steady policy of embracing regional and international 
institutions. But the communist rulers of the country's 87 million 
people have shown no sign of relaxing bans on freedom of speech and 
political activism even as they seek greater global clout.

Countries contribute troops to the U.N. for a variety of reasons, 
including national prestige, the ability to influence individual 
missions and a perception that doing so may help in bids for elected 
seats at the world body. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged in 
2011 that sourcing peacekeepers was a major problem, saying he had been 
"begging leaders to make resources available to us."

There are currently 15 U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world.  
Bangladesh is currently the biggest contributor, with more than 8,000 
personnel, closely followed by Pakistan and India.  The United States 
and most European countries, while being the major bankrollers behind 
the peacekeeping program, mostly prefer to deploy their troops with NATO and EU or other Western-led missions.

A study last year by International Peace Institute placed Vietnam among 
33 countries that had potential to either begin contributing troops or 
significantly strengthen their commitment. Vietnam's neighbor, and 
fellow communist state, China, is a moderate contributor that the study 
said could become a larger player.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://ngocentre.org.vn/pipermail/ngo-lwg/attachments/20130226/4c9e60ae/attachment-0001.html 


More information about the Ngo-lwg mailing list