MAIN ADDRESS BY HON. PRIME MINISTER TUILAEPA SAILELE MALIELEGAOI OPENING CEREMONY OF THE PARTNERS IN PACIFIC PEACE EXHIBITION
Samoa Police, Prison & Fire Service Station, 27 May 2004
Your Excellency Phillip Allars and staff, I wish to acknowledge your generous effort and assistance in supporting this exhibition. This is indeed a marvelous opportunity to pay tribute to the efforts of Australian and Samoan forces in the peacekeeping missions in East Timor, Liberia and the Solomon Islands. These missions have been executed under the charter of the United Nations and RAMSI.
And for me personally I am very pleased, that the seeds that led to RAMSI were first planted here in Samoa.
After the rebellion staged by Mr. Speight, the latest in a series of three in Fiji, we put through a call to all the Leaders of the Pacific that it was about time that we should sit down and talk about mapping out a strategy to solve the problems emerging in our midst of this nature.
It was certainly an embarrassment that the Secretary General of the Commonwealth located many thousands of miles away had to travel especially to the Solomon’s to solve our problems, while the Secretary General of the Forum was sitting in Suva, not knowing what to do.
It was that first meeting of the Forum Ministers of Foreign Affairs here in Samoa, that provided the guidelines later approved in the Forum Meeting of the same year held in Biketawa, Kiribati, and which was named “the Biketawa Declaration”. And of course, the Solomon’s Crisis provided the first opportunity to invoke the provisions of that Biketawa Declaration.
The purpose of today is to extend the public’s appreciation into the meaning and implications of peacekeeping missions and therefore the efforts of the Samoan and Australian forces as Pacific partners in peace.
As we speak, I pay special tribute to these men and women in uniform and I am truly humbled by the power of ‘peace’ and how many of these men and women from our small country Samoa can extend this simple and powerful message of ‘peace’ beyond our village boundaries and indeed beyond our national border.
The ultimate goals of the United Nations, according to its charter, are to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, to establish conditions under which justice and respite for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life. Its primary purpose, therefore, is to maintain international peace and security.
A peacekeeping operation undertaken by RAMSI or the United Nations can be defined as an operation involving military personnel, without enforcement powers, to help maintain or restore international peace and security in areas of conflict. These operations are voluntary and are based on consent and cooperation.
The United Nations peacekeeping operations in East Timor, Liberia and RAMSI Peacekeeping in the Solomon Islands have been most commonly employed to supervise and help maintain ceasefires, to assist in troop withdrawals, and to provide a buffer between opposing forces. However, peacekeeping operations are flexible instruments of policy and have been adopted to a variety of uses, including helping to implement the final settlement of a conflict.
Our men and women that we send away as peacekeepers have no rights of enforcement and the use of force is limited to self-defence as a last resort. This means that if a party chooses not to cooperate, it can effectively defy a peacekeeping operation. At all times the lives of these men and women are put at risk. Those officers of the Samoa Police Force who serve in peacekeeping forces are equipped with light defensive weapons but are not authorized to use force except in self-defence. This right is exercised only sparingly because of the obvious nature that if a peacekeeping force uses its weapons, its impartiality is in question.
This requirement sometimes demands exceptional restraint on the part of all the officers serving in peacekeeping forces.
I would like to acknowledge the many times these men and women have put aside their military weapons and opted to face danger with a Pacific smile. They have faced danger with our most powerful weapon – human integrity based on our Samoan cultural principles of service with respect for one another. Thereby spreading a more powerful message of hope, integrity and human kindness.
Finally I would like to directly thank the families of those officers, the wives, husbands, children and families who prayed earnestly for their safe return. Thank you for giving the gift of these officers to your country, to the world and spreading the message of ‘peace’.
THANK YOU.