January 31, 2007Foreign Affairs

The women keep the peace. The men carry the luggage.

Messing with Indian women is a bad idea. Liberian thugs may be the latest ones to find this out.

This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.

If there was any need to make a statement about women’s equality, then the UN could not have chosen a better one. It’s first all-female peacekeeping police force has been deployed to one of the most lawless places—Liberia.

Commander Seema Dhundiya, who will head the Formed Police Unit (FPU), arrived in the capital Monrovia on Sunday along with logistics and engineering specialists who will prepare for the rest of her unit, which is expected to arrive around 29 January, said UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) spokesman Ben Dotsei Malor.

The FPU contingent will consist of 125 personnel, made up of 103 female officers and 22 male staff serving in logistics roles. The women will be formed into three platoons of 30 women each, comprising one platoon leader and 29 officers, and while the contingent will be based in Monrovia they may be deployed anywhere in the country. [AllAfrica]The ladies, of course, are likely to discharge their duties with professionalism. But India must ask itself why it must risk the lives of its troops—men and women—for the United Nations. India does not need UN peacekeeping jobs. It is not strapped for hard currency, and has no shortage of opportunities for combat experience. Unless the UN Security Council is restructured to include India, there is very little reason to dispatch troops into conflicts that the UN deems as important.

Related Posts: Blue helmets in Congo; and Blue Turbans in Lebanon.



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