Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today the UN Parliamentary Group, chaired by Senator Chris Back and me, commemorated the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, which occurs on 29 May each year. Our special guest was Peter Drennan, AFP deputy commissioner, who has just been appointed as the new UN Under-Secretary-General for Safety and Security. This position will make Mr Drennan the most senior Australian in the UN system. As I said to him today, he has a very tough job ahead of him, keeping 145,000 civilians in the UN safe from harm.

On previous occasions in this place I have talked about my former colleagues and dear friends from the UN who were killed on duty, some through violence as with the terrorist bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003 that killed 23 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello and my good friend Jean-Selim Kanaan. Other UN staff have been killed through disasters such as the Haiti earthquake in January 2010. One hundred peacekeepers died that day in Haiti, including four of my friends, along with 200,000 Haitian people.

Unfortunately, we can say with some certainty that the task of keeping UN staff safe is only going to get harder, with increases in attacks on humanitarian workers as well as more severe and frequent extreme weather events throughout the world that impact most heavily on poor countries, where UN staff tend to be based. But, as I noted at the UN Parliamentary Group meeting today, danger can come in other ways too.

I want to just briefly relate the experience I had in Kosovo as a civilian in the UN peacekeeping mission. I had delayed my departure from Australia to Kosovo for one week in order to finish marking exam papers at the university where I was lecturing. The flight I had originally been booked on was a World Food Programme charter flight from Rome to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. That flight, on 12 November 1999, crashed on landing in Kosovo, killing all 24 passengers and crew, due to inadequate and unsafe facilities and procedures for civilian aircraft at Pristina airport. I had had a lucky escape, thanks to those exam papers. The UN staff on the plane were not so fortunate.

I arrived in Kosovo via Skopje a week later. It was the middle of winter, and that winter of 1999-2000 was terrible. There were no snowploughs to clear streets of snow, so the roads and footpaths became extremely icy and dangerous. Cars would slip off roads onto footpaths and people would slip off footpaths onto roads. I was covered in bruises from having fallen over so many times and was terrified of breaking a limb and being sent home, as others had been. There was no running water or electricity. We relied on candles for a bit of light and warmth at night-time. My Japanese friend Yoshi fell asleep one night in his house, with the candle burning. It went on to burn down the house, and he was lucky to get out alive. A Spanish friend, Jose Luis, lived in an apartment where the landlord had just installed a generator in the stairwell. He was trying to be helpful, only he did not leave any outlet for the carbon monoxide fumes. Jose Luis was lucky to have woken up in the middle of the night and staggered out onto the road. He spent the next three days in hospital on oxygen. When I saw him, he said, 'You know, Melissa, there are a thousand little ways to die in this place.'

Last year, a Filipino peacekeeper died of malaria in Liberia. He was one of 106 peacekeepers who died while carrying out their duty under the UN flag in 2012, bringing the total number of lives lost in the history of peacekeeping to more than 3,200. As the UN Secretary-General noted in his message for the International Day of UN Peacekeepers:

Today, more than 116,000 UN personnel from more than 120 countries serve in 16 peacekeeping operations. At great personal risk, these military, police and civilian personnel help stabilize communities, protect civilians, promote the rule of law and advance human rights.

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Over the past year, the Security Council has established two peacekeeping operations—in Mali and the Central African Republic—again highlighting its trust in UN peacekeepers to take on tough challenges. The UN … Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo helped the Government defeat the 23 March Movement rebels that had preyed upon civilians in the country’s east. In South Sudan, for the first time in UN peacekeeping history, our peacekeepers systematically opened the gates of their bases to tens of thousands of civilians, saving their lives and protecting them from either Government or opposition forces. In a historic breakthrough, a woman was named the first female Force Commander of a UN peacekeeping operation.

Earlier this month, the Security Council established the “Captain Mbaye Diagne Medal”, named after an unarmed Senegalese peacekeeper who lost his own life after saving as many as 1,000 people during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. This medal will honour UN personnel who demonstrate exceptional courage.

It is clear that the UN's new Under-Secretary-General for Safety and Security will have his work cut out for him in terms of the obvious and the not so obvious dangers to UN staff. We wish Peter Drennan well in this critical task.

Debate interrupted.