The United Nations has already started to prepare for a post-peacekeeping presence in Haiti, a senior UN official said Tuesday, stressing there are many reasons to be optimistic that the country’s progress towards stability is now irreversible.

“While achieving results should remain our common priority, we have already started to prepare for a transition to a non-peacekeeping presence, based on lessons learned in Haiti and in other contexts,” the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, told the Security Council.

He said that in the com