From a letter to Financial Times, 24 May 2008, by Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations:

"Another dimension that requires attention is the basic rationale and purpose of the peacekeeping missions. The present fire-brigade-like approach of rushing in to put out the fire does not take into account why the conflict occurred in the first place and how to prevent it from happening again. Conflict-prone societies need a much broader and longer-term approach by the United Nations in particular. It needs actively to promote a culture of peace that alone can ensure a sustainable freedom from violence.

"The people need to be empowered in a way so that individually and collectively they value tolerance, understanding, respect for diversity and non-violent ways of resolving problems. The enormous resources that the UN peacekeeping missions spend are not really worth the results we have seen over the years. It would be worthwhile for the Security Council to include a “culture-of-peace” impact clause in each of the peacekeeping mandates.

"A fraction of those resources, if spent on building the culture of peace as envisaged in the UN General Assembly’s comprehensive programme of action adopted by universal consensus in 1999, would be truly worthwhile, particularly by eliminating the need to initiate new peacekeeping missions or continue existing ones.

"Until our societies are empowered to value non-violence the billions of dollars spent on the UN's peacekeeping operations are a waste of money the international community can ill afford."