RWANDA: More Women Heed Call for Peacekeeping

For the past few years, Rwanda has been making global headlines for its outstanding role in providing the much-needed females in various peacekeeping missions in the world.

"I will miss my family very much...and then there is fear associated with a new environment," she told The New Times in an interview.

"Far away deployments are part of our duty...and it comes with great challenges but we have been equipped with life saving skills,” she adds.

Official figures from the peace keeping unit at the Rwanda National Police indicate that of the 490 police personnel on deployment, 150 are female.

Last Friday, the Inspector General of Police, Emmanuel Gasana, told a contingent of 100 policewomen headed for a peace support mission in Sudan's troubled region of Darfur that 'for the force, standards had been set high and it cannot be them to lower them'.

The police chief told the unit composed of young women averaging 25 years of age to count themselves lucky because they have been entrusted with such a noble mission - peace support operations.

Speaking during an interview with The New Times, Supt Egide Rugengamanzi, who heads the peace keeping unit at the Rwanda National Police, said while in Darfur, the young women will be deployed in a wide range of departments; traffic police, administration, communications and recruitment, among others.

"We have a duty to help those in need...behave well. It earns you and the country respect," Gasana cautioned them.

Role of police in post-conflict recovery

During the past decade, civilian police have constituted 10-20 percent of all UN personnel deployed on missions with almost all newly established UN operations including civil police components.

Peace support personnel are often tasked with establishing security where domestic policing structures are inadequate or absent or the home government lacks capacity. Police assume so-called executive policing functions and thus become responsible for establishing and maintaining law and order.

Increasing female police officers

With conflicts ravaging the globe, United Nations peacekeepers are in great demand, and as the U.N. recruits more officers to staff those operations, it is also trying to attract females.

In Rwanda, it is part of a wider policy approach to have women engage in every activity; economic, social and polity.

"We need more female police as soon as we can get them," UN Police Adviser Andrew Hughes, told the Pan African News Agency (PANA).

"The goal is to have member states raise the number of female police officers serving in UN peacekeeping missions to 20 percent by 2014, up from its current level of eight percent," he noted then.

Research has shown that women are often at greater risk in armed conflict, even if they are not central to the conflicts, making it a necessity to involve them in peace keeping operations, not for gender equality fixing purposes, but also because female peacekeepers play a vital role in peacekeeping operations.

In some communities, UN officials say women don't want to speak to men directly, so female peace keepers help give them a voice, and in some instances, the presence of female peacekeepers have actually helped galvanize the local women's own aspirations on whether to join politics or their national police.

The argument is that when guns go silent, law and order is what brings security back to civilians, and often the most traumatised in a post-conflict society are women and children.

In such circumstances, women create trust and boost confidence for communities recovering from conflict, and help the UN police take into account all the needs of those societies.

Every opportunity comes with its own challenges

Jane Mutesi, 27, is a police constable, a wife and a mother of two who is part of the team; hers is a mixture of optimism and apprehension.

"I will miss my family very much...and then there is fear associated with a new environment," she told The New Times in an interview.

"Far away deployments are part of our duty....and it comes with great challenges but we have been equipped with life saving skills...," she adds.

Regarding the concerns, Supt Rugengamanzi said; 'They face social challenges' but the command is always there to assist.