61 Years of UN Peacekeeping: Send a Letter Thanking Peacekeepers for Their Service.

Take a minute to watch the message from George Clooney below. Then sign this letter and join us in thanking the 100,000 brave men and women from 118 countries serving as UN peacekeepers in 16 of the most volatile countries in the world, rebuilding societies wracked by violence, restoring confidence in people who have known little but war, and bringing peace to some of the tensest conflicts on earth.
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Dear UN Peacekeepers,

We may be far from the 16 countries where all 100,000 of you are deployed, but our thoughts and thanks are with you. You are as far as East Timor, as close as Haiti, and spread throughout seven countries in Africa. The work you have done over the past 61 years has benefitted the entire world, creating a more peaceful, stable, and secure place for people to live.

Your work as peacekeepers is complicated and diverse: rebuilding societies wracked by violence; ensuring peaceful, fair elections; and maintaining law and order in some of the most volatile situations on Earth. You face the daunting tasks of convincing armed groups to lay down their weapons and restoring the lives of thousands of children forced to become soldiers during war.

You create the conditions to bring warring parties to the negotiating table—resulting in an amazing 172 ceasefires, peace accords, and power-sharing agreements since 1945. You remove hundreds of thousands of mines from war zones all over the world, allowing communities to return home and rebuild their lives.

Your 61 years of hard work to bring peace to the world has produced extraordinary outcomes for millions of people.

We all have a vital stake in the work that you do. Individual governments simply cannot afford to—nor would be advised to—send their own troops to all of the places where you are deployed. With a budget of just $7 billion annually you operate in harsh climates to resolve seemingly intractable conflicts, and build hope and trust that peace can emerge, endure, and even thrive everywhere you are deployed.

Thousands of you—from 118 countries across the world—have given your life in the service of pursuing peace. Your work is heroic, and on behalf of all of those who have benefited, directly or indirectly, from six decades of UN peacekeeping: THANK YOU.

Sincerely,

Please Sign Your Name Below

[We will send this letter on your behalf to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and to all 16 UN peacekeeping missions currently in operation worldwide.]

http://www.globalproblems-globalsolutions.org/site/PageServer?pagename=BWC_Peacekeeping_Thankyou_2009