Remarks to the Bavarian Police Training Institutions, (unofficial transcript)

Thank you Mr. Minister [Bavarian State Minister of the Interior, Gunther Beckstein] for your very warm words of welcome, and thank you my dear friends for coming here this morning to meet me here. I am always very pleased to meet fellow peacekeepers, and I was extremely pleased to hear there are so many of you have served in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in the essential work of keeping the peace, and to discover that the Minister himself went there seven times to encourage and support the peacekeeping operations.

Peacekeeping is indeed a very difficult task. For those of ymu who have participated in it, it is a task that requires patience, that requires openness, that requires discipline, and that ability to work with so many other people from around the world, from different cultures, with different languages, whereas you yourself are operating in a nation that is often new to you, with a language you don't understand and a culture that you may not be familiar with. But somehow the peacekeepers have to make these things work and in that respect it is perhaps much more challenging than the work we do at home.

And I would also want to thank the Government of Bavaria and Germany for making so many policemen and women available for the task of keeping peace because every community usually likes to hold on to its police. They need their police for their own community, and so it is a real sacrifice and a real sign of solidarity when a government releases the police to go and serve in difficult situations around the world. But without that sacrifice by governments like yours peacekeeping will not be possible, so I want to thank you, Mr. Minister, and the Government for having made that possible and I hope this participation will continue, not only in the Balkans, but in future in other areas where we can apply the experience you have acquired.

And finally, Mr. Minister and my dear Peacekeepers, as one peacekeeper to the other, let me say "Dankeschon".*****