As we talk with candour, we open the doors to new possibilities and new areas of cooperation in advance in democracy, in combating terrorism, in energy and environment, science and technology and international peacekeeping.
As I prepare for my second term as Secretary-General, I am thinking hard about how we can meet the expectations of the millions of people who see the U.N.'s blue flag as a banner of hope. We have to continue our life-saving work in peacekeeping, human rights, development and humanitarian relief.
The U.N.'s impartiality allows it to negotiate and operate in some of the toughest places in the world. And time and again, studies have shown that U.N. peacekeeping is far more effective and done with far less money than what any government can do on its own.
We in the Philippines know we have to perform our own role in terms of promoting peace in the world. We are actually members of the U.N. peacekeeping forces in many areas.
The change began in Somalia, where we discovered that we were involved in an operation where there was no peace, so there was no more a peacekeeping operation because there was no peace.
We are the biggest donor to the United Nations, contributing 22 percent of the regular operating budget and nearly 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget.
So I've gone in and out of the U.N., working on counter-terrorism, on U.N. reform, on peacekeeping, peace and security issues, many things through the years but always with a strong interest in humanitarian issues, and human rights issues as well.
As one of the leading troop-contributing countries, Ethiopia attaches great importance to strengthening the role of United Nations peacekeeping to address challenges to international peace and security.
Peace enforcement is a much more difficult kind of operation than peacekeeping.
Let's say we were a peacekeeping force in some small country that most people had never heard of. And we were there to host a peaceful election, and we then found out a bunch of stuff was hacked. We probably would push to have another election to make sure that would be fair.
