August 27, 2000
The best thing that's happened to the United Nations' peacekeeping mission in the Congo is that it hasn't happened - yet. It is going to happen all right. The mission has been approved by the Security Council. A force of 5,000 troops is ready to go in to provide protection and support for 500 officials who'll observe a cease-fire agreement.
But the green light for action hasn't yet been given at the U.N. headquarters in New York. The reason is that Congo President Laurent Kabila, who two years ago liberated his people from the dictator Mobuto Sese Seko, has himself turned into a dictator little different from his predecessor. He's precipitated a civil war that has raged ever since and drawn in, for and against Kabila, contingents from six neighbouring countries. So far, Kabila hasn't provided the guarantees the U.N. needs to assure its mission of even a minimal chance of success.
Under U.N. pressure, Kabila has backed off his stand that the observers operate only in rebel-held areas. But he's still insisting on re-negotiating the Lome agreement that, while certainly flawed, brought about the present - rough and ready - cease-fire.
This attitude by the U.N. is to be applauded. It expresses a new realism that's taking hold about how that world body should conduct so-called peacekeeping missions.
The kind of genteel peacekeeping invented by the late Lester Pearson almost a half-century ago - lightly armed troops patrolling the line between two armies that had got tired of fighting - has long since vanished into history.
Peacekeeping today is messy, frustrating, inconclusive. Above all, it's dangerous. Commonly, a conflict doesn't involve two governments that can be held to international account but local warlords, ethnic groups, competing tribes, freebooters and organized criminal gangs. Often, it involves actual fighting, first to force all the opposing sides to stop their own fighting, then to preserve the cease-fire. Afterwards, as in East Timor and Kosovo, the U.N. has to try to create a workable state in place of the chaotic violence it inherited.
Successes for the U.N. have been rare. East Timor is the one, fairly bright, star. The chronicle of failures or, at the very least, disappointments is depressingly long. Kosovo, after one year of U.N. rule is a cauldron of criminality (from prostitution to drugs to moving illegal immigrants into Europe) and of violence and racism (Albanians having instantly replaced the violence and racism of the Serbs). In Sierra Leone, 500 U.N. peacekeepers suffered the humiliation of being taken prisoner by raggle-taggle rebel forces and many might have been slaughtered but for the arrival of British marines to impose order in the capital of Freetown. Intervention in Haiti has got bogged down in local corruption and criminality.
Nevertheless, a new realism really is beginning to take hold. It's not the realism of isolationism. For all its inadequacies, the U.N. is the only world government we've got. Either it goes in or, as in Rwanda, genocide rule, or, as in the Sudan, a civil war goes on and on and on.
The caution about sending in peacekeepers to the Congo is one illustration of this new attitude. Even more so is the new report on peacekeeping done for the U.N. by a blue- ribbon panel headed by former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi.
The Brahimi report admits forthrightly that the U.N. has "repeatedly failed" in the past. But then it proposes a host of recommendations ranging from more money (not vast amounts, about $100 million U.S.) to more emphasis on preventing conflicts from happening in the first place, more professionalism and a system for responding more quickly to crises (but not with a standing U. N. army, as has often been proposed but which would be almost impossible to achieve politically).
One of the report's most important recommendations is that the U.N. tells the Security Council "what it needs to know." In the past, the council has too often "got in touch with (U.N. officials) and pressured them not to say this, that or the other," Brahimi explained at a press conference. The U.N. needed to stand up to the politicking of nations on the Security Council, particularly its five, veto-holding, permanent members.
More useful that the specific recommendations, most of which have been made before, was the report's tone. It was balanced, practical and, well, realistic. That realism has to apply both ways. The U.N. has to be more aware of and open about its limitations. So does the public at large. It's easy to cry: "Failure." But the alternative, doing nothing, is unacceptable. The U.N. now deserves a second chance.
