Global Policy Forum

By Patrick Jackson

In the second of our series on peacekeeping, we look at Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where the readiness of Blue Helmets to impose peace using lethal force marks a departure from the more passive missions of the 1990s - sometimes with worrying effect.

"Both sides were using very heavy machine-guns and a bullet can go through three houses, it can break through two or three walls for sure," says Fabio Pompetti, head of the international medical aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres mission in Haiti. "Last year we had a bullet hit the hospital and it went through two big walls, boom boom." He is talking about fighting which raged when UN peacekeepers cracked down on armed gangs in the Port-au-Prince slum of Cite Soleil, home to nearly 250,000 people, where his team runs the St Catherine Hospital. Between 22 December and 9 February, the hospital received 58 people injured by bullets and six who died after arrival. The bodies of an unknown number of other fatalities, at least some of them gunmen, were not brought in. Two of the dead were women aged 18 and 20, and the wounded included six women and two children under the age of 12. "I cannot say whose bullets hurt these people but what I can say is that all of these people were hit during fighting and clashes between the UN and the armed groups," Mr Pompetti told the BBC News website. A former commander of the UN mission (Minustah), Gen Augusto Heleno Ribeiro, testified before the Brazilian parliament in December 2004 that he had been under "extreme pressure from the international community to use violence". In January 2006, MSF denounced Minustah for referring to civilian casualties as "collateral damage", saying it was "inexcusable for so many lives to be torn apart every day in the crossfire". Since then, and notwithstanding the civilian casualties received at St Catherine's, Minustah has been "much more careful to avoid killing civilians", says Mr Pompetti.

'Impartial, not neutral'

Maj Gen Patrick Cammaert knows more than most about the challenge of enforcing peace. The Dutch marine has commanded UN peacekeepers in Cambodia (1992-93) and the Horn of Africa (2000-02), and has also served as military adviser to the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York. In early 2005, he took command of the 15,000-strong UN (Monuc) forces in eastern DRC, leading them back from what he calls the "very low point" of Bukavu in 2004, when rebel soldiers overran the town and committed atrocities. "Monuc had threatened them... but did not live up to their threats," he recalls, speaking to the BBC News website after completing his DRC posting in February. While neither Monuc's mission nor its rules of engagement changed substantially, Gen Cammaert set about enforcing the mandate on his principle that "UN forces are impartial and not neutral". "Being neutral means that you stand there and you say 'Well, I have nothing to do with it', while being impartial means that you stand there, you judge the situation as it is and you take charge," he explains. Equipped with attack helicopters and special forces, his Eastern Division took action in some of the region's most troubled areas. In the spring of 2005, for example, Monuc troops killed 50 militia fighters in a high-profile offensive in Ituri after losing nine of its own soldiers in an ambush. But Monuc was, the general says, nonetheless "extremely careful in not applying too much force".

Dubious allies?

Monuc's tough enforcement policy was "reasonably successful", the general believes, helping safeguard elections in 2006 and strengthening security in the east. But human rights campaigners, who initially lamented Monuc inaction and demanded robust enforcement of its mandate to protect civilians, are concerned about how the tougher approach may be evolving. While not accusing Monuc troops themselves of harming civilians, Human Rights Watch (HRW) is investigating whether the UN's local ally, the new DRC army, may have committed war crimes during joint operations against rebels in the east. HRW senior researcher Anneke van Woudenberg, who last year visited Ituri, told the BBC News website that the army is viewed by some as "the worst human rights abusers in the DRC".

Combat instinct

Taking the long view of peacekeeping, Gen Cammaert believes the UN has "really come a long way" since the crises in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. He says Monuc's Eastern Division "can really match any peacekeeping operation of Nato or the EU". Dr Paul Higate, politics lecturer at Bristol University, has studied peacekeeping in DR Congo and Sierra Leone and sees a "tension between peacekeeping as traditionally defined in terms of impartiality, neutrality etc, and more obviously pro-active, military action". "Most peacekeeping troops are combat-trained and many do find peacekeeping somewhat frustrating, making little or no use of their military skills," he says Hence there is a risk that more pro-active operations might be seen as having greater status. At the same time, Dr Higate adds, the amount of risk peacekeepers are willing to take may be determined by a commander's fear that losing a soldier on a peacekeeping operation "might be seen to be something of a failure".