The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, will Today lay a wreath at the UN Headquarters to honour UN peacekeepers who have lost their lives since 1948.
He will also preside over a ceremony at which the Dag Hammarskjöld Medal will be presented posthumously to 119 military, police and civilian peacekeepers, who lost their lives in 2018 and early 2019.
Two fallen peacekeepers from Ghana are among the 110 who will posthumously receive the Dag Hammarskjold medal.
They are the late Frank Sammy Kwofie who served with the UN Police in Darfur (UNAMID) and the late Corporal Mercy Adade who served with the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
The Secretary-General will also award the “Captain Mbaye Diagne Medal for Exceptional Courage” posthumously to Private Chancy Chitete of Malawi.
The medal is named after a Senegalese peacekeeper who was killed in Rwanda in 1994 after saving countless civilian lives.
Private Chitete served with the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and was killed last year while saving the life of a fellow peacekeeper from Tanzania who had been badly wounded during an operation against the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).
The operation was aimed to stop attacks on local towns and to prevent the disruption of the Ebola response.
Ghana is the 9th largest contributor of uniformed personnel to UN peacekeeping.
