Global Policy Forum

After a year or two in retreat, the United Nations is again in action, called upon to end wars and run disabled countries. It should not take on what it cannot do.

The use of the United Nations as an international police force has, in the space of the past decade, ballooned, shrivelled again when things went wrong, and now, with Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone, once again grown fat. Increasingly, the liberal world's fitful conscience does not want to live with barbarity, and demands that it be checked. Usually, the UN is the only available instrument. But the one constant, throughout those ten troubled years, is that the Security Council, the world's flawed policymaker, continues to instruct its policemen to do what needs to be done without providing them with the means to do it.

A great fuss is made of signing a council resolution. But once that is done, the further business of implementing it is passed lightly over, a matter for the UN bureaucracy rather than for member-governments. A report on peacekeeping, to be published this month by a panel chaired by an experienced UN old-timer, Lakhdar Brahimi, takes a sharp look at this and other UN shortcomings, both in the council and in the secretariat. One of its most important messages to the UN 's secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is that, if told to do the impossible, he should just say no.

For the UN 's first 40 years, peacekeeping usually meant waiting until armies had fought to a standstill, and then interposing monitors between the ex-combatants. An up-to-date version of this sort of peacekeeping is about to occur in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where the UN has agreed to send up to 100 military observers to monitor a ceasefire.

But at the end of the 1980s, the Security Council, over-excited by its release from the cold-war lock, reinvented humanitarian intervention. The council's concerns were extended to "human security": it would rescue people from the savagery of civil and ethnic conflict. But then came Somalia, whose warlords showed none of the respect for international authority of regular armies, and where the Americans were shocked to discover that peacekeeping could be dangerous. This was followed by Bosnia, where expectations of "safe havens" were raised only to crash in tragedy. Its credibility in shreds, the UN dithered unforgivably through Rwanda's genocide.

It would be better, people began to argue, to enlist regional groups—the "coalitions of the willing"—to take on peace-making or peace-building; let the UN stick to uncontroversial peacekeeping. The NATO alliance, after decades of inactivity, swung into action in the Balkans. The Nigerians led a West African force into Sierra Leone.

Regional peace-making sounds good. But few regions, Europe apart, have either the men or the money to mount such an operation. For a start, the costs fall directly on the participating countries, who have to pay for everything. When democracy returned to Nigeria last year, taxpayers wondered, justifiably enough, why they should be paying both in money and men to stop the Sierra Leoneans from slaughtering one another. The costs of UN missions are paid by all UN members, who are assessed on a scale adjusted to their wealth. Or that is the theory: in practice, when big payers such as the United States fall behind with their dues, it takes a while to repay the countries, often among the world's poorest, who have supplied the troops.

There are other reasons why regional intervention cannot always be the answer. Look, for instance, at Congo, where the neighbours are already fighting over the country like hyenas round a corpse. Australia led a successful coalition into East Timor. But it is rare for a threatened third-world country to have a first-world godfather of that sort, with the political will to lead a charge and the capability to succeed.

So the pendulum is swinging back. The UN has taken on Sierra Leone, and may eventually have to take on Congo too. In both countries, its theoretical job is the traditional one of supporting a peace treaty. But both treaties were horribly flawed. In Sierra Leone, the UN is floundering, its original mandate in tatters, its forces not strong enough to succeed in a more ambitious task. Revealing a modicum of common sense, the Security Council has so far held back from ordering Mr Annan to conjure up the 5,000 troops who are supposed to bring order to the vast mayhem in Congo, and protect the handful of UN observers already there.

Congo is an extreme case. But getting peacekeepers together is a constant nightmare for the UN. With the end of the cold war, the governments that traditionally, and generously, supplied well-trained troops—the Nordic countries, Canada, the Netherlands and others—cut their defence budgets and have fewer men available. America, Britain, France, Russia and China, the five permanent members of the Security Council, still have sizeable armed forces but are seldom willing to commit them. Third-world countries tend to have rather large armies, and are usually happy for the UN to employ them. But their soldiers are often ill-trained, and their equipment usually has to be supplied by someone richer.

However desperate the need, the UN is not even allowed to start collecting a peacekeeping force until the council provides its mandate. Supposedly, several countries have troops on stand-by for such emergencies. But when called on, they are almost always unavailable. Supposedly, too, spare UN weapons are stored in Brindisi. But the few arms left in this dump are mostly obsolete.

The UN , in other words, has to fly by the seat of its pants. The result can be seen in the Kafkaesque confusion of Sierra Leone. The Indian general in command was told to support a peace treaty; that treaty was not worth the paper it was written on. Instead he found himself, without new orders, let alone reinforcements, from the council, at war with a bunch of murderous rebels, backed by an almost equally unscrupulous outside power. To help him carry out this operation, he has a motley army including Guineans, who meekly handed their weapons over to the rebels at the first spot of trouble; Zambians, who arrived without even the most basic equipment; and Nigerians, sulky because they are not in command.

No national army would take on such a mission, let alone under such conditions. The Sierra Leonean operation has, so far, been saved from catastrophe by the professionalism of some of its peacekeepers: the Gurkha troops, for instance, and the British battalion that was flown out in a hurry to secure the capital, Freetown. The UN is rightly grateful to the British. But why, ask the less grateful, did the battalion have to come, and go, on Britain's terms, not the UN's?

If it is hard for Mr Annan to assemble troops, it is infinitely harder for him to get the judges, policemen, customs officials and other civilian professionals who are needed for the two huge, unprecedented jobs that have recently been landed on the UN : running Kosovo and East Timor. Most countries, even if they do not admit it, have a bit of fat in their armed forces. But few countries have too many policemen, let alone policemen trained to use arms. The British shook their heads sadly, until they remembered the Royal Ulster Constabulary and spared a few.

The UN runs all Kosovo's civilian affairs in parallel with NATO , which handles military matters. In East Timor, a country without any government at all, the UN is in complete control. Although it had a big supervisory role in Cambodia, the UN has never done anything remotely like this before. It is not only training locals to do the job; it is doing the job itself.

Moreover, it is doing it on a wing and a prayer, without any new administrative or institutional provision. The Peacekeeping Department is in charge, though administering a whole country is not something that comes to it naturally, and its resources are stretched to breaking-point. The old vision of the UN as a relaxed and bloated bureaucracy has melted with years of American-enforced zero growth. Although there are still useless people around (and no money to get rid of them, until they retire), the capable are working full-out, under strain.

Should the trusteeship council, presumably under a new name less worrying to the third world, be resurrected to run disabled countries? The counter-argument is that the UN has had only two running-a-country jobs in the past half-century—Kosovo and East Timor—and may not be landed with any more. Perhaps, with its limited resources, it should concentrate on bread-and-butter stuff. It is a hard choice, which the UN may face in its usual way by ignoring it.

To intervene, or not

The larger question is when, or even whether, the UN should intervene in a country's sovereign affairs for humanitarian reasons. Last year, when Mr Annan urged the case for humanitarian intervention, the General Assembly reacted unhappily, subsequently resolving that the UN should intervene only when invited to do so by the government in power. Third-world countries twitch at the notion that it is the first world (plus Russia and China), personified by the Security Council's permanent five, which decides when and how to intervene. Is it, they ask, the right of the powerful to push in, often for their own narrow national interests, or the right of victims to be rescued?

Paradoxes abound. Governments that, in principle, are shrill in defence of national sovereignty, may be the first to call for intervention in individual cases; governments that defend the principle of intervention may be the last to agree to finance or join individual missions. The UN, the sum of its members, is supposed to be impartial, but some now argue that it should openly take sides in a dispute. Others worry that action taken to save lives may result in more being lost as opposing armies use a UN -provided pause to take breath and re-arm.

Third-world anxiety about a first-world-driven UN has a direct effect on peacekeeping. One instance of this was the disappearance of the so-called gratis personnel. In the mid-1990s, the UN, stung by sneers at its military amateurishness, began borrowing pukka military types from willing lenders. The corridors were suddenly abuzz with captains and colonels commanding and controlling as if the secretariat had been transformed into NATO. Unfortunately, that was roughly the way non- NATO countries saw things. Because the officers all came from countries rich enough to lend them, and to continue paying their salaries, the rest of the world scented a conspiracy. The experiment was short-lived.

It was followed by the notion of keeping 12-15 professional officers under permanent UN employment. In an emergency, the officers would be deployed to set up a temporary headquarters. It was a good idea, but Americans thought it smacked of world government. That, too, was abandoned.

Given these limitations, what can the UN do to become a more efficient peacekeeper? For a start, it could improve its intelligence, spotting crises before they arise. There is no excuse these days for being ill-informed; but the UN lacks people to digest and analyse this intelligence, and then to relay it to those who make decisions and policy.

Above all, the secretary-general should be prepared to say no when members of the Security Council ask him to do the impossible. The brutal honesty of the UN's own reports on the Srebrenica and Rwandan tragedies should signal a turning-point. The UN should indeed be prepared to intervene where there is gross cruelty. But when taking on an operation, it must prepare for the worst outcome, not the best. The secretary-general is not in the business of keeping council members happy. Rather, he should tell them as precisely as he can what is needed if a mission is to have any chance of success. And he should refuse to raise their, and the world's, expectations of what the under-equipped UN can do.