The UN’s head of peacekeeping operations said that a divided Security Council was hampering the work of the so-called Blue Helmet forces, which turn 75 on Monday. Jean-Pierre Lacroix said a long list of countries had benefited from the “millions of men and women who have served under the UN flag” since the forces’ creation in 1948. But he added that paralysis and conflict between the United States, Britain and France on one side and Russia and China on the other was making operations difficult. “We are suffering from the fact that our member states are divided,” the undersecretary general for UN peace operations said. The French diplomat, 63, added that the UN was finding it “more difficult to achieve the ultimate objectives of peacekeeping: to deploy, support the implementation of a peace agreement and then gradually leave”. Although the 15-member council regularly renews the mandates of peacekeeping missions, Lacroix called for more unity so they can better “influence the implementation of peace agreements and political processes”. Indian peacekeepers among 15 killed in anti-UN protests in Congo’s east May 29 marks the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, created in 2002 by the UN General Assembly to honour those who serve in conflict zones. Because next Monday is the Memorial Day holiday in the United States, the UN celebrated the peacekeepers’ 75th anniversary on Thursday, in memory of the “more than 4,200 peacekeepers killed in the cause of peace” since 1948. Secretary General Antonio Guterres observed a minute’s silence for the 103 peacekeepers who died last year. The UN stabilisation mission in Mali (Minusma), which has 12,000 peacekeepers deployed, has suffered the most fatalities of any mission in recent years. Since its creation in 2013, 185 of its members have died in hostile acts. More than 87,000 people from 125 countries are presently deployed on 12 peace operations around the world. They include in Lebanon, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cyprus, India and Pakistan. Lacroix noted that the “list of countries that have regained stability is long,” citing Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola and Cambodia in the 1990s and 2000s. But he argues that “the international community was much more united at the time, and the political processes in these countries were implemented with the active and united support of our member states”. As for failures, he pointed to the failure of UN peacekeepers to prevent the 1994 Rwanda genocide, which killed at least 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutus, and the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica during the war in Bosnia, Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since the Holocaust during World War II. The UN’s reputation has also been tarnished by numerous allegations that peacekeepers charged with protecting civilians sexually abused women and children, including in Central African Republic and Congo. Ukraine: Lessons to be learned from Bosnia’s Srebrenica, says Dutch PM Another high-profile blunder was the cholera epidemic in Haiti that began in 2010 after UN peacekeepers introduced the bacteria into the country’s largest river by sewage run-off from their base. Despite that, Richard Gowan, the International Crisis Group’s UN director, said “UN peacekeeping has a surprisingly decent track record” and “has done a good job of tamping down crises, protecting civilians and rebuilding broken states in cases from the Suez crisis in the 1950s to Liberia in the 2000s”. Lacroix pointed to other challenges peacekeepers are facing: more violent and dangerous operating environments and more sophisticated attacks and fake news and disinformation which are “a massive threat to the population and the peacekeepers.” And old and new drivers of conflict – including transnational criminal activities, trafficking, drugs, weapons, the illegal exploitation of natural resources, and the impact of climate change exacerbating competition between herders and farmers – are also having an “absolutely massive influence”. The Crisis Group’s Gowan said it was pretty clear that the UN is “trapped” in some countries like Mali and Congo where there aren’t enough peacekeepers to halt recurring cycles of violence. Nepalese peacekeepers accused of ‘heinous’ child rape in South Sudan Some African governments, including Mali’s, are turning to private security providers like Russia’s Wagner Group to fight insurgents, he said. “I think we should be wary of dumping UN operations outright,” Gowan told Associated Press. “We have learned the hard way in cases like Afghanistan that even heavily armed Western forces cannot impose peace. The UN’s track record may not be perfect, but nobody else is much better at building stability in turbulent states.” Additional reporting by Associated Press