Global Policy Forum

By Stuart Jeffries

From Haiti to Rwanda, Somalia to Srebrenica, Dutch writer Linda Polman has witnessed a string of disastrous UN peacekeeping missions. But, she still believes the troops in blue helmets can make a difference.

One night in 1994, Linda Polman was dancing wild polkas with drunken Russian soldiers at a farewell party in Mogadishu. It was a vibrant evening - vodka flowed freely from two-litre bottles and plates were piled high with steaks specially shipped in from Saudi Arabia. Everybody - the Russians, the motley collection of profiteers toasting lucrative reconstruction contracts, ligging journalists such as Polman - was very happy. Apart, that is, from one recently arrived Canadian pilot who asked: "Isn't there supposed to be a famine here? Aren't they starving in Somalia? They always used to be."

Good point. That was the whole reason the UN got involved in Somalia in the first place, to help starving Somalis. Because of civil war, food aid wasn't getting to the people who needed it most, so the Americans set up Operation Restore Hope to sort the thing out. But, following the deaths of 18 US servicemen in a single day (you may have seen Ridley Scott's obscenely one-sided film Black Hawk Down about this incident), the Americans decided to pull out, and other western nations followed suit. No matter that food still wasn't reaching those who needed it most, nor that the civil war was still thriving and that UN peacekeepers had become embroiled in the conflict. Operation Restore Hope was followed by Operation Continue Hope, though it should have been called Operation Abandon Hope. "We're doomed," one Pakistani blue helmet told Polman. "Of course we will fail."

The story, and the dismal circus of blue UN helmets and buck-hungry contractors, was moving on. Polman, had seen one UN debacle and went on to the next, this time in Haiti. The Americans had just invaded the Caribbean state, determined to oust a dictator and reinstall the elected Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide in something called Operation Restore Democracy. Given the state of the Haitian armed forces, this had taken little more than a morning. The second part of the operation would be a bit more tricky: it would involve upholding democracy in a country where democracy had never existed, in a place that had always been poverty-stricken but now was completely bankrupt following three years of economic boycotts. The Americans weren't going to stick around to sort that out, but palmed off Operation Uphold Democracy on the UN.

"Haiti was a little like Iraq," says Polman. "The US wades in, believing it can overthrow a dictatorship, and afterwards the real problems start. How can you establish democracy in those circumstances, particularly when the organisation charged with upholding it, the United Nations, has no money?" She recalls that the UN peacekeepers in Haiti often had to borrow paint to colour their helmets blue, and they had no weapons to fight against Haitian gangs and the remnants of the Ton Ton Macoute.

But this story is one that Polman, a Dutch freelance journalist, has witnessed again and again during the past decade. She has written about it in an impassioned book called We Did Nothing: Why the Truth Doesn't Always Come Out When the UN Goes In. The title might imply that the book is a chronicle of disastrous UN peace missions around the globe: that time when the Dutch peacekeepers stood by and watched the mass slaughter of 7,000 Bosnians by Serbians Muslims in Srebrenica; the Rwandan mission that failed to prevent genocide or protect refugees in Rwanda; that time Boutros Boutros-Ghali visited Mogadishu and was greeted with stones, spitting and a crowd calling him "murderer". But in fact Polman comes to praise the benighted blue helmets rather than to bury them.

"It's true that UN peace missions have failed again and again, and that we have learned to think that the UN is failing all the time," says Polman. "I believed that. I was completely brainwashed into believing that the UN peacekeepers were a bunch of idiots driving around in big cars doing stupid things." Well, aren't they? "No, they are the people who stand by while the fiascos take shape, and do what little they can in desperate circumstances. But who causes the fiascos? It's the members of the UN security council who are the only ones who have the power to decide whether the blue helmets will be dispatched. And it's the member states, especially the rich ones, who fail to fund the UN properly, so these peace missions are under-equipped and often empty shows."

Polman says the moment the scales fell from her eyes was when President Clinton reproached the UN for shouldering tasks that were too heavy for it. Shortly after the deaths of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Clinton made a speech to the UN in which he said: "The UN should learn to say 'No' ." "That made me wild," says Polman. "As Boutros Boutros-Ghali [then UN secretary general] said, it isn't the UN that says yes or no, it is the member states. The Americans were the linchpins of the UN mission in Somalia. It was Clinton who said 'Yes'. They were the hypocrites, the liars."

But haven't UN peacekeepers stood by and watched some of the most appalling mass killings take place when they could have done something about them? Couldn't DutchBat (the Dutch UN battalion) have stopped the Srebrenica massacre? Couldn't ZamBat (the Zambia battalion) have done more than look on while 4,000 people died at the hands of Rwandan government soldiers? "No, they couldn't," says Polman. "The UN has strict principles on sovereignty and non-intervention. And in any case, in some of those situations there was nothing they could do."

Polman knows something about this: after she left the UN mission in Haiti, she moved on to the UN mission in Rwanda where she witnessed what happened when 150,000 Hutu refugees were cleared from a camp by Tutsi soldiers. In one of the most affecting pieces of writing about man's inhumanity this side of Primo Levi, Polman described what it was like to be holed up in a school building in Kibeho, Rwanda, surrounded by desperate Hutus, some of whom were shot, others of whom were trampled to death and a few of whom managed to scramble through barbed wire hoping to be treated for ghastly wounds.

As in Somalia, she found herself dining in relative luxury while around her thousands of refugees were standing in their own excrement, or being shot by Tutsi soldiers. She writes: "Through the brick wall of the mess, we can hear Internally Displaced Persons [UN jargon for refugees in their own country] being executed. First comes the shot, then the screams of terrified bystanders. Before we have finished the wine, at least three people outside have been killed."

Why didn't the Zambians stop the killings? "There were 80 of them facing 1,000 much better equipped Rwandan soldiers. And even if they wanted to shoot the soldiers, they would have had to fire through the refugees on the other side."

Polman, 43, has specialised in following these peace missions around the world. "The important thing for me is being there. Not where they decide the resolutions, but where people carry them out." When her book was reviewed in a Belgian newspaper, it was branded the Diary of a UN Hooker, suggesting that Polman had joined the grubby moneymaking circus that follows the blue helmets around the world. Apart from being rude, the charge is unfair. "What I'm trying to do is find out who is responsible for these failures. The answer isn't this body called the UN, because the UN is only its member states. It's our fault that we wade in stupidly, our fault that we don't pay properly for these missions to work. The difficult thing is that once you realise that you have to do something about it. The question then becomes, can you be bothered?"

Her last UN peace mission was in Sierra Leone. "That was one that seems to have worked, partly because it is run by non-whites. The Nigerians know how to deal with the rebels and the Bangladeshis, Indians and Pakistanis are terrific at reconstruction projects."

Polman liked Sierra Leone so much that she stayed. She has now been there for two years, having met and fallen in love with the pan-African karate champion, Victor Amara. "I was trying to do a piece about diamond smuggling and I hitched a ride with this hunk who turned out to be a diamond trader. He's also a sportsman who is responsible for upholding martial arts standards throughout west Africa." She now divides her time between Amsterdam and living with her fiance in the west-African countryside, digging for diamonds and reporting on a country that the rest of the western media seems to have forgotten about. "I love it there. The food is good, the place is beautiful. It's a real jungle adventure. There are monkeys in the trees, antelopes wandering around. Admittedly, there are cannibals and warriors wandering around, too, but otherwise it's wonderful."

She seems surprisingly happy, given all the human misery she has witnessed, I suggest. "I'm an optimist. For me, the world is a much less frightening place than it has ever been," says Polman. But how can it be, given the experiences you've written about? "Because what those experiences taught me is how the world works. It isn't down to God or fate. It's no longer frightening, but very predictable. It's clear how the world works. In Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda I saw how the world's most powerful countries manipulate the UN to fulfil their national interests. And when they can't manipulate it, they bypass it. That's why what happened in Iraq wasn't a surprise to me. And the mess that will follow won't be either."