UN makes plea for military helicopters

Peacekeepers hope countries fighting insurgency in Afghanistan will offer their helicopters when operations end in 2014
UN in need of military helicopters
The UN has asked Britain and other nations for military helicopters which are needed for peacekeeping missions. Photograph: Leon Neal/PA

The head of UN peacekeeping operations has made an impassioned plea to Britain and other European countries for military helicopters – which are badly needed for missions in Africa, notably Sudan.

The UN undersecretary general, Alain Le Roy, told the Guardian that his organisation faced unprecedented demands on its relatively meagre resources. He compared his annual budget of $7.5bn (£4.6bn) for 14 separate peacekeeping missions with the $116bn spent every year on the conflict in Afghanistan and the $41.3tn spent every year on arms sales.

He said he hoped the UK and other countries would at least offer their helicopters and specialist troops to the UN after they end their Afghanistan combat operations in 2014.

India had recently withdrawn 20 helicopters from UN operations for security operations at home, he said.

UN peacekeepers faced "an unprecedented number of demands which have dramatically increased", Le Roy said. In Darfur, Sudan, there were two million displaced people. For the past four years he had been asking for 18 military helicopters for UN operations there. The work of 120,000 UN peacekeepers engaged in missions from Haiti to Timor-Leste, formerly East Timor, was unsung and largely unnoticed yet had saved the lives of many people.

UN peacekeepers had been praised by the leaders of Timor-Leste, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and most recently the newly elected president of Ivory Coast where the UN had played a key role in the recent civil war, Le Roy said.

Four million people had died in the Democratic Republic of Congo but the UN had prevented the deaths of many more "doing a job no one else wants to do". He added: "Outside the UN there is nobody."

In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, Le Roy said the UN was considering what role it could play in Libya. "The range of possible needs may draw upon the widest and most varied capacities at the disposal of the organisation, civilian and military, as appropiate."

Speaking to the Guardian, he said the UN could take on a civilian role monitoring a ceasefire but not deploy peacekeepers.

In his RUSI address, he said that in 1995 Britain had more than 10,000 "blue helmets" engaged in UN peacekeeping operations around the world. The number has fallen to 300 today. Only two European countries, France and Italy, were in the top 20 troop contributors to the UN.

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