Kathmandu, 26 May: The UN Headquarters is observing the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers on today. Secretary-General António Guterres will lay a wreath to honour the nearly 4,200 UN peacekeepers who have lost their lives since 1948 and will preside over a ceremony at which the Dag Hammarskjöld Medal will be awarded posthumously to 117 military, police, and civilian peacekeepers, who lost their life serving under the UN flag last year.

Among the peacekeepers to be honoured posthumously are four from Nepal:  NCE Pitambar Thapa of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL); Private Dipendra Osti, who served with the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS); Police POA Umesh Kumar Mehattar; who served with the UN-AU Mission in Darfur (UNAMID); and  Jhank Nath Regmi who served in a civilian capacity in the UN Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA), according to the UNIC.

Nepal is the 2nd largest contributor of uniformed personnel to UN Peacekeeping.  It currently deploys more than 5,700 military and police personnel to the UN operations in Abyei, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, the Middle East, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, and the Western Sahara.

People's News Monitoring Service