Fred Yiga, MA ’06, feels “we are on the right track with police development in South Sudan.” If this track eventually leads to stability in South Sudan, Yiga will deserve considerable credit as the UN police commissioner for the UN Mission in South Sudan.
Alumni Support UN's Efforts in African Conflicts Decades ago, when international conflicts tended to be between neighboring countries, the United Nations’ approach to peacekeeping was primarily focused on observation and reporting. The blue-helmeted peacekeepers would sit peering through telescopes, trying to make sure people on either side of the border behaved. Since the end of the Cold War, however, wars between sovereign states have increasingly been replaced by conflict within nations, often with meddling from proxy players. In the absence of functioning state institutions, UN peacekeeping missions have taken an increasingly hands-on role in these countries, expanding the scopes of their missions to include development, peacebuilding and state-building efforts, often in partnership with other organizations and agencies. Since the early 1990s in particular, peacebuilding and development have assumed greater importance throughout the UN system, beyond military-style peacekeeping activities. As a police planning advisor with the UN Office to the African Union, Kamal Uddin Tipu, MA ’04, represents one facet of the new, broader approach to peacebuilding being employed by the United Nations everywhere, but especially in Africa, where the majority of its multidimensional peacekeeping missions are. Working closely with the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Tipu helps the organization plan the policing components of its peacekeeping missions across Africa. While Tipu provides the AU with his expertise as a police officer, he has 20
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peacebuilder fall/winter 2013-14
Kamal Uddin Tipu, MA ’04, a senior police official from Pakistan, is police planning advisor with the UN Office to the African Union.
colleagues who address more than a dozen related areas, including elections monitoring, military and civilian logistics, medicine, mediation, mine action and other structures necessary for sustainable peace after violent conflict has ended in a country. “You have to go into all these areas to resolve conflict,” says Tipu, a deputy inspector general of police in Pakistan now deputized to the UN.
Police in support of stable governance In South Sudan, which gained independence in 2011 after decades of civil war within Sudan, Fred Yiga, MA ’06, is also working to establish a functioning police force in a country almost devoid of state institutions when it became independent. “The greatest casualties in South Sudan’s conflict were the institutions of governance,” says Yiga, an assistant inspector general of police in Uganda now serving as the UN police commissioner for the UN Mission in South Sudan. “Their frameworks and the whole notion of governance culture must be started from scratch.” And so Yiga has begun doing just that, establishing police officer screening and payroll policies, conducting a needs assessment PHOTOS courtesy Fred Yiga, EMU (for Tipu's), and Francois Traore