Thursday, August 10 2006 12:43 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

United Nations: India has called for integrated action at the national and regional levels in concert with the UN Peace Building Commission to bring about lasting peace in West Africa.

"It is only through integrated action at various levels that the consolidation of peace can be made effective and durable," India's Permanent Representative to the UN, Nirupam Sen, said during an open debate on "Peace Consolidation in West Africa" in the Security Council Tuesday.

Suggesting a multi-level approach, he said at one level the Peace Building Commission will implement its mandate of proposing integrated strategies for post-conflict peace building and recovery, ensuring predictable financing and developing best practices for cooperation between relevant actors and stakeholders.

At another level, effective regional initiatives are essential, Sen said extending full support to the efforts of the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union (AU) in cooperating to address questions of peace and security in West Africa.

Finally, it was equally essential that international institutions and partners find ways to support the efforts of countries emerging from conflict through highly concessional aid, debt waivers, assistance with disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of former combatants, employment generation strategies and extension of appropriate technologies.

With Ghana Foreign Minister Akufo-Addo in the chair, Sen said fundamental to a successful and long-term preventive approach are sound macroeconomic policies promoting sustained employment-driven growth.

Expenditure on social sector programmes of poverty eradication, education - in particular of women immunization and basic health, and on basic infrastructure, creates conditions for sustained economic growth, he said.

Noting that developing societies such as ours do not live on bread alone, but equally on solidarity, Sen said India and others have written off the debt of the seven Highly Indebted Poor Countries.

India will continue its economic and scientific initiatives, such as TEAM 9, which involves a concessional credit of $500 million along with technology transfers to countries in the West African region; further cooperation with NEPAD, as well as the satellite and fibre optic connectivity mission announced by India's President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for the entire African continent.

"The history of conflict in West Africa has shown that stability can be imposed for a while by force of arms and the determined involvement of the world. But history also tells us that such stability is often short-lived," he said.

Indeed, recent World Bank studies underline that countries that have suffered conflict in the recent past are also likely to see conflict return the risk that the country will fall back into conflict within the first five years of the end of a conflict is nearly fifty percent.

This worrisome statistic is made worse by the fact that armed conflict inevitably increases military expenditure in the countries involved. This not only crowds out other public spending, but on a worldwide basis, exceeds spending on international development assistance.

India believes that conflict prevention efforts must include 'operational' prevention: a response to immediate and pressing crises such as preventive diplomacy, and 'structural' prevention, implying long-term structural preventive measures to prevent crises from arising or to prevent them from recurring, Sen said.

Estimates show that the international community spent around $200 billion on seven major interventions in the 1990s while a successful preventive approach is estimated to have costed almost $130 billion less.

Another essential pillar of the process of economic transformation involves development of effective mechanisms to resolve social tensions arising from the legacy of conflict, including through rehabilitation, reconciliation and reconstruction.

It also includes the development of credible institutions of governance, stable political structures including political parties and credible strategies to effectively mobilize human and material resources.

"Hence, the need for the Peace Building Commission not only to work with the Security Council but above all to take into consideration inputs from other UN bodies and work under the overall guidance of the UN General Assembly," the Indian ambassador said.