UN welcomes SA’s Middle East peace initiatives

Pretoria - The United Nations has welcomed South Africa's contribution to trying to resolve the intractable Middle East conflict, saying the problem needed all the diplomacy it could get.

Cristina Gallach, UN Under Secretary General for Communications and Public Information, was commenting on President Jacob Zuma's appointment of two Special Envoys who have been travelling throughout the region for the past two years trying to bring rivals together and the recent meeting that had been convened in the Western Cape of Palestine factions from right across the political spectrum. “Conflicts like this need a lot of diplomatic engagement so if a country like this one, with strong diplomacy, that has a past we all know about, gets engaged, it can only be for good results. So we are very encouraged,” she told journalists in Pretoria.

She noted that there were other peace processes underway, including a revival of the diplomacy of the Quartet, comprising the US, Russia, the UN and the European Union- which has been seeking peace for many years. And there were also bilateral processes, mostly lead by the US.

“But the role of everybody that has an understanding, that has diplomatic strength, and that has a vision of peace, we think it's conducive to a definitely positive outcome.”

Gallach said she hoped all these peace efforts would address the sense of frustration, which was widely felt and which she shared, about the stalled peace process.

Gallach is in South Africa to co-chair the UN's 23rd annual media seminar on Peace in the Middle East. This is the first time it is being held in the southern hemisphere, and it is being co-chaired by the SA and Swedish governments.

The aim of the seminars was not to be platforms for negotiating an end to the conflict but just to inform the world about it, she said. So the seminar was focussing on innovative ways - such as virtual reality technology and the harnessing of comedians to convey its messages.

The UN General Assembly which launched the seminars, felt they were important to keep international focus on the issue.

Commenting on the relative dearth of Israeli voices at the seminar, Gallach said the Israeli government had been invited but had declined. She said there were several Israel born people participating, but added that since the seminar had been launched by the UN General Assembly to focus on the Palestine question, it was understandable why more Palestinians would want to have their voices heard.

But she also emphasised that the seminar emanated from a General Assembly “to promote the Palestinian issues, So one could understand why in this case Palestinians would be more keen and more eager to make their voices heard”.

She declined to comment on the merits of an argument heard at the seminar that the Middle East peace process would remain frozen until the international community put real pressure on Israel. But she noted that the UN and most countries, including the US, had called on Israel to stop its settlements in Palestine territory but so far in vain.

Looking at UN operations elsewhere, she was asked about the incident in Juba in July when UN peacekeepers reportedly failed to respond to desperate pleas for help from civilians, mainly foreigners, who were attacked, she noted that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had appointed a panel to investigate the allegations and was awaiting “with great interest” the results of the investigation.

She also said the allegations were taken extremely seriously to ensure the incident was not repeated, if the allegations proved to be true.

Gallach declined to give her opinion about whether the UN Security Council would ever be expanded to give permanent representation to more countries and regions.

She noted that the UN had undergone major reforms in its 71-year history but agreed that “without the reform of the Security Council in one way or another, the organisation is not fully reformed”.

Gallach said the UN was very excited about the prospect of a new Secretary-General who was in the process of being elected. This was partly because for the first time there had been a number of public debates and consultations in which the candidates to replace Ban, who will reach the end of his two-term limit at the end of the year, had had to participate and had given the public more information to enable them to formulate opinions about them. That was now over and the election process had now returned to its traditional form, of discussions in the Security Council in closed sessions.

She would not comment on recommendations from civil society that the Security Council should, for the first time, give the General Assembly more than one candidate to choose from or that from here on Secretaries-General should be elected for one seven-year term, rather than two five-year terms, so that they could act independently and freely from the start, without worrying about whether or not they would be re-elected for a second term. Gallach said it was up to member states to decide on such matters.

African News Agency