Opening Remarks by Minister Sue van der Merwe at the Seminar of Special Representatives and Envoys dealing with Burundi: Cape Town 22 February 2008

Your Excellencies, Ambassadors and Special Envoys
Distinguished Guests

It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you all to Cape Town and to South Africa for this important seminar.

I believe this is an opportunity for us to share our collective experiences and thoughts on Burundi, and also on Peace making and Peace building in general.  We hope that these discussions will result in positive outcomes and that the programme of action to be developed here will enable all players to move forward towards the solution of the challenges that Burundi faces.

I would like briefly to share with you some of South Africa’s experiences in peace operations and our approach to post-conflict reconstruction and development.

However I believe that it is important to say that this in very much an evolving process.  There is no blue print for establishing peace, for maintaining peace and for the reconstruction of post conflict societies.  What is certain is that no peace will be sustainable without development, nor will peace be sustainable without the involvement of civil society; indeed the nurturing of a robust civil society must form part of the peace-building continuum.

Reflecting on our own experience based on our involvement in peace operations in the continent and beyond, we have come to appreciate the complexity and multidimensional nature of African conflicts.  Bringing an end to the destruction associated with it requires a complex integration and structuring of a number of capabilities and functions.  Over the last two years, our government has been grappling with finding ways and means to address the challenges associated with producing effective and efficient integrated peace missions.

We hold the view that at the heart of designing a successful peace mission is the ability to simultaneously dismantle war economies and systems of profiteering and plundering that sustain conflict, whilst replacing these with economies that produce public goods to all citizens.  This view of course is premised on our foreign policy vision of an African continent, which is prosperous, peaceful, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and united, and which contributes to a world that is just and equitable.  In our efforts to realise this vision, we are guided by the African Union’s (AU’s) Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development Framework (PCRD), which finds resonance in the United Nations’ Multidimensional and Integrated Peace Operations.

From our standpoint African Union and United Nations efforts provide a foundation from which we can start to redefine security to include the human aspects in the implementation of peace operations.  Defined from integrated, rather than a purely state-centric perspective, the concept of security assumes a much broader dimension entailing the establishment of a safe and secure environment within which the civilian components could carry out their humanitarian, peace making, peace building and reconstruction tasks.  Such a broadening of the definition of security therefore transcends traditional definitions which were solely about protecting state sovereignty against aggression.

A broadening of the definition of security will therefore as a mater of course therefore also necessitate the formation of state-civil society partnerships to be able to come up with new understandings and meanings of security in a changed global environment.  In his report entitled “In Larger Freedom”  former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Anan enunciated this argument clearly when he argued

Sovereign States are the basic and indispensable building blocks of the international system.  It is their job to guarantee the rights of their citizens, to protect them from crime, violence and aggression, and to provide the framework of freedom under law in which individuals can prosper and society develop.  If States are fragile, the peoples of the world will not enjoy the security, development and justice that are their right.  Therefore, one of the great challenges of the new millennium is to ensure that all States are strong enough to meet the many challenges they face.

He goes on to argued that:

States, however, cannot do the job alone.  We need an active civil society and a dynamic private sector.  Both occupy an increasingly large and important share of the space formerly reserved for States alone, and it is plain that the goals outlines here will not be achieved without their full engagement.

.. And this indeed informs our own approach to support to peace missions on the African continent and further a field.

South Africa as you know is involved in many countries on the continent in support of peace and reconstruction efforts.  In addition to Burundi we are involved in 10 other countries.  These included the Comoros, Central African Republic, DRC, Somalia, Rwanda, Eritrea/Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Cote d’Ivoire.

In fact over the past few years, this work has become a significant inter-departmental project of our government.

South African government departments involved in other countries on the continent include, in addition to the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Defence Force, the South African Police Services, Public Service and Administration, Home Affairs and others.

This involvement has caused us to review our budgeting for this work and to re-look our funding requirement.

I am pleased to say that in the 2008 Budget our Minister of Finance announced additional support for these efforts:

I quote from his speech on Wednesday this week:

“After being the recipient of development assistance from many countries during our transition, South Africa is increasingly becoming a donor in its own right.  Mainly channelled through the African Renaissance Fund, we are budgeting to spend over R1.3 billion over the next three years to support development and the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals on our continent and beyond.  We play a catalytic role in ensuring that developed countries honour their commitments to stepping up development finance allocations.  We have pledged R272 million to the International Development Assistance of the World Bank and the African Development Fund of the next three years.  To date, the Development Bank of Southern Africa has lent over R7billion to our continental neighbours.”

While we do this as a demonstration of how important we regard this task, we recognise that there is still a lot of work to be done.

We, as government are currently reviewing our existing policy on South African participation in international peace mission and are working on a revised white paper in this regard.

We therefore look forward to the outcomes of this seminar which I am sure will help to guide us in our own efforts to support our neighbours on the continent in their efforts to attain enduring solutions in post conflict situations.

I wish you all with your deliberations and look forward to positive outcomes of this important meeting.