The Foreign Ministry’s multilateral affairs director general, Febrian Alphyanto Ruddyard, said that the government supported the United Nation’s call to halt all conflicts and impose a ceasefire so nations can focus on their COVID-19 responses.

“Indonesia wants to ensure that the peacekeeping efforts we have made together with various countries will not erode as a result of the pandemic, [since this] could potentially spark new conflicts or exacerbate existing ones,” Febrian said on Monday.

Febian's statement underline Indonesia’s stance on maintaining global peace, following its peacekeeping focus during its month-long presidency of the UN Security Council in August.

This year marks nearly four decades since the UN General Assembly established the International Day of Peace in 1981. In 2001, the General Assembly unanimously voted to designate the date as a “day of global ceasefire and nonviolence”.

In a video message posted to his Twitter account @antonioguterreson Monday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the annual day was devoted to urging warring parties everywhere to lay down their weapons and work toward harmony, reiterating his earlier call for a ceasefire in March.

He introduced the video with a written message:

 

But even after nearly four decades of commemorating the day of peace, the world still faces a herculean task in establishing global peace.

The 2020 Global Peace Index (GPI) by the Institute for Economics and Peace states that “the level of global peacefulness deteriorated” this year amid the coronavirus crisis, with Middle Eastern countries like Syria and Iraq ranking just before Afghanistan at the very bottom of the list of 163 nations.

The GPI ranks a country on peacefulness, with lower scores indicating greater peace.

“The 2020 GPI reveals a world in which the conflicts and crises that emerged in the past decade have begun to abate, only to be replaced with a new wave of tension and uncertainty as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report says in the Executive Summary.

According to data on "Fatalities by Type of Violence 1989-2019" made available by the conflict data program of Uppsala University in Sweden, the number of battle-related fatalities around the world increased sharply from 2010 to 2014 to peak at over 140,000 people in 2014, excluding the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The figure then fell gradually to around 80,000 people in 2019.

Meanwhile, the data on “Estimated Annual Deaths from Political Violence, 1946-2011” compiled by the Center for Systemic Peace revealed that civilians made up about 87 percent of estimated deaths per year since 2000, “caught up in the existential struggle to survive under challenging circumstances”.

Senior researcher Lina A. Alexandra of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Jakarta said that while calls for a ceasefire were important to reduce civilian casualties, the peace it created was “fragile” because those engaged in a conflict might ignore the call if they felt they could defeat their opponents.

Even so, Lina still urged the global community to take action and pressure nations to settle their disputes, for example by sending peacekeeping troops.

“There needs to be greater attention from the global community [on peacekeeping efforts],” she stressed.

To sustain the peacekeeping effort, the Foreign Ministry’s Febrian said that Indonesia had sent over 2,800 personnel on UN peacekeeping missions, making it the eight largest contributor of peacekeepers among 119 nations since Aug. 30.

Apart from UN peacekeeping missions, Indonesia also played active peacekeeping roles in the regions of its bilateral partners such as Afghanistan, Myanmar and Palestine.

“As we promised when we were elected as a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council, we are committed to being a true partner for peace. We have kept this promise, and have proven it from our active role in responding to various conflicts in the world, both at the UN Security Council and in various other forums,” he said.