UNEPS
United Nations Emergency Peace Service
UNEPS is beingdesignated as a standing, individually recruited, gender sensitive,integrated, rapidly deployable UN peacekeeping service to provide effective,prevention-based response to genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes againsthumanity and natural disasters. Often described as an international “911,”UNEPS could deploy within 48 hours of authorization to stabilize apotentially dangerous emergency situation. While a UNEPS deployment isunder way, the UN would gain more time to find the necessary resources andpersonnel needed to organize a longer-term and more permanent operation asneeded. However, we believe that a timely UNEPS deployment could managemany crises entirely, thus reducing the need for expensive, lengthy,complementary peacekeeping operations.
UNEPS would consist ofapproximately 15,000 civilian, police, and military professionals expertlytrained on genocide and conflict prevention. The service would have mobilefield headquarters and would act preventively, stopping a conflict before itescalates into a full-scale humanitarian disaster. Because the Service wouldbe individually recruited from citizens worldwide, UNEPS would not beaffected by the unwillingness of Member States to deploy portions of theirown armed forces in times of crisis. Thus, prolonged delays typical of thecurrent process of force generation for UN Peacekeeping operations would beavoided, and the chance that a conflict would escalate to uncontrollablelevels would be significantly reduced.
While most focus on the number of livesthat would be saved by this service, it is also instructive to note that thefinancial benefits of UNEPS would be significant. According to the CarnegieCommission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the international community couldhave saved nearly $130 billion of the $200 billion it spent on managingconflicts in the 1990s by focusing on conflict prevention or earlyintervention rather than post conflict reconstruction.
What can I do?
The UNEPS coalition is working hard to buildsupport for the proposal within the UN, with diplomatic missions, andthrough parliamentary networks in all global regions. At the same time, itis very important for citizens all over the world to urge their governments– all of which have formally endorsed the principle that the internationalcommunity has the ‘responsibility to protect’ innocent civilians if theirown government does not do so – to support a proposal that would ultimatelysave lives of innocent civilians that would otherwise be lost due to delayedaction by the UN and its Member States. A growing group of organizations,including EarthAction, believe that the UN Emergency Peace Service proposalis both necessary and politically viable. Please see the websites of ourpartners to learn more:
UNEPS site by Japanese Senator Inuzuka