Global Policy Forum

It's now "a stressed-out operation in way too many places,"
a former official says

By Michael Taylor

U.N. peacekeepers are the unsung soldiers of the world -- troops who clean up after murky conflicts and civil wars in Third World nations, the kind that conjure up images of dismembered children and skulls lined up by the hundreds. It's a job that has changed markedly over the 60 years since the U.N. Charter was signed in San Francisco, an anniversary being celebrated this weekend in the city with a gathering of current and former officials from around the world.

The original mandate for the blue-helmeted peacekeepers was simple: Step between warring countries that have just called a cease-fire and make sure the two sides don't shoot at each other. In recent years, however, peacekeeping has become "a stressed-out operation in way too many places with not enough resources and mixed mandates and very different expectations," said Rick Barton, former U.N. deputy high commissioner for refugees who is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. "We have the people who are running (the U.N. operations) saying, 'Please don't call on us for more because we can't possibly handle it,' " Barton said.

In May, the United Nations had nearly 66,000 deployed peacekeepers, drawn from military units and civilian police around the world. There have been 60 peacekeeping missions since the first in 1948 to watch over an Arab-Israeli cease-fire. Forty-six of those have been launched since 1988, and 16 are still going on. By far the largest is in Congo, where more than 16,000 U.N. peacekeepers are trying to keep warring factions of the Lendu and Hema tribes apart. The U. N. force itself has come under criticism because several troops have been accused of sexually abusing Congolese girls.

Over the past five decades, the report card on these U.N. missions has been mixed, frequently because the peacekeepers find themselves saddled with a task for which they were not prepared.

In the old days, when the U.N. peacekeepers were called in by both sides, the process worked fairly simply, said James Paul, executive director of Global Policy Forum, a Web site that studies U.N. security matters. "India and Pakistan, back in the 1960s, is the more classic case of peacekeeping," Paul said of the dispute over which country should control the region of Kashmir. "You have two sides, they agree to a cease-fire, the U.N. patrols it.

"Here's a third-party observer," Paul said, "and they can say, 'We're right here, and those shells are going right over us, and we'll tell the whole world.' " The threat of calling up the U.N. secretary-general, not to mention the world press, was usually enough to stop the cannon fire, Paul said.

U.N. peacekeepers had their first taste of real change when they were sent to Congo, newly liberated from Belgian rule, to keep peace between warring factions in the early 1960s. This became the first example of a recurring problem -- trying to prevent war between tribes that don't care what the secretary- general or the world press might think about them.

Peter Davies, longtime former U.N. representative of Oxfam International and Saferworld, a British arms control think tank, said U.N. peacekeepers increasingly were being sent to areas where they were almost helpless to act. "The old ways have changed. Instead of having the traditional old-style blue helmet (soldier) patrolling a border," he said, peacekeepers now have to deal with one faction that invited them in and another one that didn't.

The upshot, Davies said, is that not only has "the Security Council been very, very slow to give a mandate to peacekeepers to take action to protect themselves, but also to protect the civilians caught in the middle."

The most notorious example of this new problem, Davies said, was Rwanda, where conflict between two tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis, left as many as 1 million dead in 1994. Canadian Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who headed the U.N. force in Rwanda, "was leading an insufficient force to keep peace between these warring groups," Davies said, and the world body did little to help him out.

It was much the same in Cambodia in the early 1990s, when the peacekeeping force was "supposed to disarm 70 percent of all the fighting factions, but it couldn't be done because the government and the Khmer Rouge wouldn't disarm," said William Durch, co-director of the Future of Peace Operations program at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. "There was no battle plan, they had no reinforcements, and the U.N. commanding general was saying, 'You want me to do this with what resources?' "

Durch said the Security Council had "started to overreach" by the '90s. In addition to quelling violence, peacekeepers were being ordered to rebuild nations from scratch -- the most obvious examples were in the former Yugoslavia and East Timor.

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen William Nash was sent to the Yugoslav province of Kosovo in 1999 as the U.N. civilian administrator. Nash, who is now a conflict prevention specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said his job was to "try to provide services, managing the infrastructure projects, and promote enterprise development."

Nash said it was complicated because "the issues associated with peace- building are so political in nature and the (U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations) are more bureaucrats than politicians. So they can be pretty good at getting the electricity working, but not necessarily at getting the political dynamics right."

Sometimes, though, it works, at least in relative terms.

In August 1999, East Timor, a South Asian territory invaded and occupied by neighboring Indonesia in 1975, won its freedom in a U.N.-sponsored popular referendum. Then came the violence. The United Nations sent in a peacekeeping force, led by Australian officers. Another U.N. mission came in to supervise a combined military, civil administration and humanitarian relief operation, and by 2002 East Timor was recognized by the rest of the world as a full-fledged democracy.

In 2000, a U.N.-commissioned report urged the world body to take on more "robust" peacekeeping -- a euphemism for providing U.N. troops with better arms and training. The study also said peacekeepers should be allowed to discard their neutrality when faced with rebel groups that are slaughtering civilians.

"Where one party to a peace agreement clearly and incontrovertibly is violating its terms, continued equal treatment of all parties by the United Nations can in the best case result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil," said the report led by Lakhdar Brahimi, a U.N. undersecretary-general.

Ultimately, Barton wrote in a recent report, U.N. peacekeepers are a bit like Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology who spent his days pushing a rock uphill, only to have it roll down again. "Half of all peace agreements fail," Barton said, "with a reversion to conflict within five years."

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