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http://www.un.org/apps/news/newsmakers.asp?NewsID=98
HESTER PANERAS, POLICE COMMISSIONER FOR THE AFRICAN
UNION, UN MISSION IN DARFUR – CAREER INSIGHTS
Hester Paneras,
Police Commissioner for the African Union - UN Mission in Darfur. Photo: UNAMID
11 November 2013 – In June 2013, Hester Paneras was appointed Police
Commissioner for the African Union – United Nations Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), which
was established to help stem the suffering in that region of Sudan, where since
2003 fighting has led to the deaths of and estimated 300,000 people and
displaced some 2 million more. Many of the displaced are surviving in camps in-country
and many, particularly women, are vulnerable to a range of violent threats.
The first woman to hold the top police position in a
peacekeeping mission of this magnitude, Ms. Paneras brings to the job over than
30 years of experience in policing. She joined the Police Service of her native
South Africa in December 1978, starting with grassroots level patrol and
detective beats before rising to the officer ranks in 1984. She first worked in
UNAMID as Deputy Police Commissioner for Policy and Planning from July 2010 to
July 2011.
UN News Services spoke to Ms. Paneras after she helped
launch a website for the UN International Network for Female Police Peacekeepers as
part of UN Police’s efforts to meet a goal of 20 per cent women in UN missions
by 2014.
UN News Centre: Can you tell us about UN police
activities in Darfur?
Hester Paneras: Our focus can be summarized under protection of
civilians. The host country has the first responsibility to protect its
civilians, so we assist them in building capacity towards international
standards and for that we are involved with the Government of Sudan police –
training, but also capacity building looking at infrastructure and so
forth. In the beginning of August, we signed the Memorandum of
Understanding with the Government. It is part of the political process,
to get cooperation.
Women have survival skills which can be given to other
women. What I have experienced is that when they see you are a woman, their
faces light up. It’s like they get a connection.
On physical protection, we have formed police units which
conduct patrols and other activities. We also work together with the
military [components of UNAMID] and we have individual police officers who
interact with the communities. They work very closely with the military
observers as well. So there’s the presence of the blue helmets on the
ground to against possible attacks.
The third tier is creating a protective environment
through building the capacity of communities. In that area we provide English
lessons as well as livelihood projects where women are taught how to start
businesses and so forth, as well as help to keep the youth busy with recreation
activities. Remember, a lot of these people are living in internally
displaced persons (IDP) camps, where it sounds very lucrative for children to
go and take up arms as part of the movements or to become part of crime
groups. So we try to give them alternative views on life.
UN News Centre: Do
you think a female peacekeeping police presence is important?
Hester Paneras: It is totally essential. Most of the people are
women and children and, in the instance of a rape case, for instance, the woman
will not talk about it easily in this culture. The culture doesn’t
provide for it to be made known. There is change now; we are doing
capacity-building and community education together with the Government of Sudan
police. But it is much easier if we have women on the ground to deal with these
issues. A woman also has another way of looking at things, and especially
when it comes to the capacity-building and the livelihood projects, women have
survival skills which can be given to other women.
Police Commissioner Hester Paneras greets members of the
UNAMID Police at UNAMID Headquarters in El Fasher, North Darfur in July 2013.
Photo: UNAMID
What I have experienced is that when they see you are a
woman, their faces light up. It’s like they get a connection. They
relate. Unfortunately, when we look at individual police officers, we are
about 16 per cent women in the Mission. And when we look at the formed
police units the number goes down dramatically. We are looking currently
at getting more females from Arabic-speaking countries. Recently, Jordan
started sending women – a few, but we hope they will increase. We
are also in contact with Egypt. It is very important that women be
encouraged to join police units and be strongly supported by their
countries.
It’s not an easy environment, but we started a women’s
network in 2010 to build a support structure and give advice. I told
ladies this past week, for instance, to buy a couple of packs of wet wipes just
to use when there is no water. These are small things that we can assist
each other with, to make it easier. Once women are in those faraway
places and they start interacting with the local community, we get very positive
response from both the women and the community.
UN News Centre: How are civilian protection strategies
divided between police and military in UNAMID?
Hester Paneras: In UNAMID, one has to work in an integrated fashion, but
our formed police units are more focused on crowd control and on smaller
protection and inner perimeter protection, especially in IDP camps where we
have projects going on. Your military on the other hand, is more focussed on
outer perimeter protection. Of course the types of arms that the military
and the formed police units have differ. The military is more focussed on
attacks from outside, the outer environment. Your individual police
officer is more focused on gathering information, identifying a crime situation
and following up, and, on the other hand, coming up with community policing
types of projects. Your military observers are focused on information
gathering. One cannot do one without the other.
UN News Centre: Have
you gone on patrol? If so, what have you seen?
Hester Paneras: Yes. The last time was a long-range patrol from Al Fasher
to Nyala. It took us nearly eight hours to travel 250 kilometres.
There are no developed roads, it’s like a gravel road and one goes very slow;
it’s sandy. One wonders how people survive. People still live very
close to the earth; there is really not a lot of development. When you get
closer to a town you see a little piece of tarred road and a little bit more
development. A lot of women are alone and if you look in the fields, it’s
women mostly doing the work and children are playing where there’s basically
nothing.
When you go into an IDP camp [I wonder] how people can
still smile under the circumstances. If you go into those areas and you
don’t feel a stirring inside then you’re not human. I have a heart for
the children, to see if we can make a better future for them. You see children
laugh, but when you look at their eyes, you see that they have been through a
lot. But still people are trying under those circumstances and they are
surviving.
UN News Centre: You
say you see mainly women on your patrols. Where are the men?
Hester Paneras: Well, as far as we know, a lot of the men have been taken
up in the movements, some in fighting and some have lost their lives. So
it is mostly women left behind in the IDP camps, along with some men, community
leaders and so forth. That is what we know. We are just informed
that most of these women don’t have men. The men passed away.
UN News Centre: What
is the role of community policing in Darfur?
Hester Paneras: We started with community policing structures and
training community volunteers. Around 1,700 volunteers have been trained
all over and we are continuing. We’ve trained some women in IDP camps to
be first-level responders for victims of crime and also to make it easier for
women victims. We are currently in process with the Government of Sudan
police to see how we can further improve the community policing
processes.
In the culture of Darfur and in Sudan as a whole, a lot
of issues are dealt with under customary law. I make a difference between
customary and Shariah law – Shariah law is your real Islamic law, whereas
customary law is the definite ethnic group’s way of dealing with things.
A lot of that is an alternative justice system. In principle, the culture
in Darfur is actually a community-policing-based culture and it is important to
have understanding of the culture in order to utilize it. They have mediation
roles; they have alternative resolutions like blood money and so forth. Where
the alternative process is followed, we also talk to the leaders to see if we
cannot also go through official processes in order to determine what the level
of crime is, even if it’s resolved in an alternative way.
UN News Centre: Is the alternative way of resolving
things acceptable?
Hester Paneras serving as Deputy Police Comissioner in
2010, when she helped establish UNAMID Police Women NetWorking. Albert González
Farran/UNAMID
Hester Paneras: It depends. One cannot say somebody else’s culture
is not correct. For them, yes, it is working, but on the other hand, to get a
real judicial process that is not always working. That is why we are
always looking to see how we can marry the two so that there is a due judicial
process while utilizing the alternative processes. In South Africa we
have gone that way again, where people can be referred to the alternative
process, even though [a crime] is reported in the official manner.
In your customary processes, you don’t always get the statistics.
UN News Centre: So
the records are not kept.
Hester Paneras:
The records are not kept and, for instance, it is possible that you will find
that people who’ll say that there was a stray bullet that came through the roof
that hit a person and it is not then always reported to the police and
investigated, which means that it does leave a loophole to possibly cover up
some crimes. And one cannot always act preventively if one doesn’t have
the total picture.
UN News Centre: Going
back to the participation of women police officers in UN peacekeeping
operations, do you think the UN is on track to achieve the goal of 20 per cent
women police in peacekeeping operations by 2014?
Hester Paneras:
I don’t think we are going to achieve it on time, but recently, there was a UN
women’s peacekeeper forum established. There was also a website launched
last week in South Africa at the International Association of Women Police
conference, where we had the police commissioner of South Africa who is a woman
as well as the Inspectors General of Zambia and Senegal who are women.
They were invited to be honorary members. I also had discussions with
people in the gender office. It will put us on track if we can get senior
women who are leaders in the police from all over the world involved and
provide a common understanding of what the women are exposed to and what role
they can actually play.
If we want to make the world a better place we have to
assist each other. We cannot stay in our own little corners and expect the world
to change. So to make a difference for the women elsewhere in the world
it’s important. And I think if we can have the involvement of these
women, and to look and to have an influence on police contributing countries in
order to start understanding what it is about, I think if we understand these
things then the support can be there and then we can look at deploying more
women. Currently we are looking at the possibility of even keeping women
a little bit longer in the Mission so that there’s more of an overlap to have
more women at a time than their male counterparts, but we cannot do that if we
don’t have the support of the contributing countries.
UN News Centre: What
other challenges are preventing more women from participating in peacekeeping
operations?
Hester Paneras: I think women in policing is relatively young in the
whole world. Countries themselves are not always in the position to get
to the relevant numbers. We are looking, in my country, at 30 per
cent women. We’re getting there, but is it sufficient? Currently,
nations are also trying to retain their women to deal with issues in-country
but I think if deployment from 18 months to two years could be possible they
will get enriched women back, because they will be exposed to things that will
make them stronger and give them more experience which they can then plough
back into their countries -- with the understanding that when these women go
back they’re optimally utilized. So what is in it for the country itself
has to be very clear as well, because this is a capacity-building process for
them that costs them very little.
UN News Centre: What
inspired you to become a police officer, when you first applied in South
Africa?
Hester Paneras: I was twelve years old. This was 1972, the year that
women were first admitted into the police in South Africa. Since I was a
kid I always played “police and crooks” with the boys and I was always
interested in topics like drugs, different crime issues. In school
debates, I would always choose a topic in that regard. I was twelve when
I told my parents that I wanted to go into the police. I didn’t have a
second alternative even in mind. When I finished school, in my final
year, I applied. At that stage they only took in 96 women in the country at a
time – three platoons. At that stage it was also only white women. Coloured –
Indian, African women – only came in starting in 1982. When I applied, women
had to go through a complex process. We were 12 on the day that I went to
the interview and two were selected. I was lucky to go to the college at the
beginning of 1979.
So I always wanted to be a police officer. If they
didn’t take me I don’t know what I what have done.
UN News Centre: What
are some of the challenges you have had to overcome in your career?
UNAMID police women march to celebrate the launching of
an expanded Police Women Network in El Fasher, North Darfur in 2012. UN
Photo/Albert González Farran
Hester Paneras: I did my Master’s thesis on the disparity of gender
representation in the police in South Africa. I found out things that I
didn’t even realize. When women first joined in 1972, they were appointed
to the same structure as men and they wrote the same exams. Then in 1976,
a telex said that women at an alarming rate were passing the exams, and if this
was allowed to continue women would take over the most senior positions, which
could not be allowed, because women did not have the capacity physically and
mentally to take charge of men. And then women were put on a separate
structure, allocating a number of posts for them. In 1984, when I went on
the officer’s course, we could not be immediately promoted, because there were
no posts for women.
Women also had to get special permission to get
married. If they were not happy with the person you married, or if a
woman got pregnant, even if the father was a police officer, the woman was
dismissed. Women were also not allowed to be in charge of men. Men
were also discriminated against, because if a woman worked a night shift in the
70s or 80s, you had to be picked up at your home, which was a privilege that
men didn’t have. In 1989, however, the first woman was appointed as a station
commander and in 1992 the male and female structures became one again. I
was lucky, because they put us back where our rank should have been. In
1995, affirmative action processes started kicking in.
UN News Centre: In
your perspective what are some of the key elements to protecting civilians in
conflict areas like Darfur?
Hester Paneras: One really has to look at the cultural undertones, and
I’m not talking culture in a sense of necessarily ethnicity, I’m talking about
the culture that was created by the conflict. In a lot of instances, one
will find a situation where women were so abused that they started accepting it
as the way of life. This is they way it is. One of the things is to
start working with that mindset to get into a mode where they are willing to
stand up for themselves. There is a male issue as well; it’s not only
about the females. One has to start changing perceptions and then build
on that. Part of it is capacity building. A good example where a
country has gone from conflict into good community police and protection of
women is Rwanda. I think in South Africa we’ve also done quite well.
Opening up to alternative approaches is very important,
but the most important is to show that it doesn’t have to be like that.
You can get out of it.