Global Policy Forum

By Yasushi Akashi

Many people believe that during the Cold War era the United Nations was incompetent and unable to take action when required. It is true that the U.N. Security Council was frequently locked in stalemate, with the United States and the Soviet Union frequently wielding their veto power. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the council played an active role in settling crises during the Cold War days in regions such as Kashmir, the Middle East and Cyprus.

Even when the Security Council was facing an impasse, the U.N. General Assembly played a significant role in dispatching U.N. Security Forces (UNSF) to West New Guinea and the first U.N. Emergency Forces (UNEF) to the Middle East. The General Assembly also addressed a series of problems, ranging from the independence of colonies, North-South problems, human rights issues, environmental conservation and other tasks facing humanity.

Although the United Nations was not as successful as its founders had hoped, it was not as powerless as advocates of power politics believed. The United Nations has managed to retain its vigor on the strength of its creative interpretation of the U.N. Charter and its flexible methods of implementation. Outstanding U.N. secretaries general, such as Dag Hammarskjold, Javier Perez De Cuellar and Boutros Boutros Ghali, played central roles in developing the world body.

U.N. peacekeeping operations (PKOs) were a product of their creativity and the demands of the times. Although the U.N. Charter includes no clear-cut reference to peacekeeping operations, it is generally believed that PKOs were in line with the spirit of Chapter 6 of the Charter, which stipulates the peaceful settlement of disputes.

Since the dispatch of the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) teams to the Middle East in 1948, a total of 53 PKOs have been performed. Their purpose has been to defuse tensions and prevent the continuance of armed conflict by stationing unarmed or lightly armed soldiers along borders or ceasefire lines of countries involved in conflict.

3 PKO principles

PKOs are designed to temporarily freeze a conflict situation, rather than establish lasting peace. Therefore, the stability brought about by PKOs, in many cases, proved temporary unless they were followed by serious peacemaking efforts. In other words, U.N.-brokered PKOs are never a panacea for problems in international relations. If there is no strong will and clear policy to have the period of the temporary stability brought by PKOs followed by comprehensive and long-lasting peace, PKOs will end up being extremely limited diplomatic measures.

It also should be noted that PKOs are activities of psychological and moral significance that symbolize the international community's concerns over peace. Therefore, as long as those involved in a conflict are fully aware of this, peacekeeping troops do not have to be a powerful military force. Although military officers play central roles in PKOs, their actual tasks are closer to those of diplomats and police officers. PKOs proved their usefulness in conflicts in such regions as southern Lebanon, Kashmir, the Golan Heights and the Iraq-Kuwait border.

The classical type of PKOs, which aims to disengage conflicts and prevent continued fighting, are known as first-generation PKOs. They are based on three principles--agreement between parties involved in a conflict to accept the deployment of PKO troops; the impartiality of the United Nations; and limiting the use of weapons by PKO troops solely to self-defense purposes.

Because of their neutral and symbolic nature, it was believed that PKO forces would not be involved in fighting and therefore would not need advanced equipment and combat training.

Post-Cold War missions

With the end of the Cold War, however, PKOs, whose major task had been limited to monitoring ceasefires, faced new challenges to transform their nature. In their missions in Cambodia, Namibia, Mozambique and other countries, U.N. peacekeeping forces were given wide-ranging authority during the transition period from war to peace in such nations.

They performed a variety of tasks, including the monitoring of governmental administration, protection of human rights, the return of refugees, supervision of elections and postwar restoration. These missions turned out to involve not only military officers, but also a large number of civilian experts and police officers. These activities, which include complex and diversified responsibilities, are known as second-generation PKOs.

Despite their multifaceted tasks, second-generation PKOs are based on the same philosophy as the first generation type and have as their pillars the same three principles.

In the early 1990s, we saw the emergence of the concept of coercive peace, or "peace enforcement" against the backdrop of rising expectations for the world body to adopt a conflict-resolution role. This concept was put into practice in Somalia in June 1994. The peacekeepers in Somalia were given the authority to forcibly disarm warring parties, and thus the Somalia operation could be regarded as a third-generation PKO.

After military clashes between peacekeepers and the largest local faction, however, 24 Pakistani peacekeepers were killed. In addition, 18 U.S. soldiers, who were working in conjunction with the U.N. peacekeepers, also were killed, forcing the U.S. government to announce a total withdrawal from Somalia. The failure of peace enforcement in Somalia also meant an end to the third-generation PKO experiment.

Succession of failures

It had become clear that U.N. peacekeeping troops, which were hastily assembled from among various countries, were weak in terms of equipment, military training, intelligence capability and command systems, and it was evident that such troops could never engage in real battles. At almost the same time as the peacekeeping operation in Somalia, the largest-ever U.N. peacekeeping operation was being staged in the former Yugoslavia.

Given the fierce battles and humanitarian disasters in that region, the tone of U.N. Security Council resolutions had escalated unilaterally. As a result, the use of force under the name of the United Nations against warring parties spurred the warring parties' antagonism toward the United Nations, which made it impossible to continue the original U.N. ceasefire monitoring and humanitarian assistance missions.

Air strikes by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries caused hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers to be taken hostage in the former Yugoslav conflict. The United States was dissatisfied with the United Nations since those involved in the peacekeeping operation in the former Yugoslavia were cautious about using armed forces because of their experience in Somalia.

In between the peacekeeping operations in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia--where the U.N. peacekeepers failed to produce substantial results and the high-minded tone of Security Council resolutions were beginning to sound hollow--about 800,000 Tutsi people were slaughtered by the Hutu tribespeople in Rwanda.

However, major countries such as the United States, France and Belgium remained reluctant to take effective steps to end the tragedy in the central African country. African countries were crying out for an increase in the number of U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda, but they had little influence over the final decisions in this regard.

U.N. emergency unit needed

The United Nations, though it has fulfilled its role in settling international conflicts to a certain degree, has yet to formulate general guidelines on how to respond to ethnic conflicts and civil wars that have been occurring frequently in the post-Cold War period.

There are no clear answers to the two conflicting questions: whether the United Nations should aggressively act, as the United States and European nations advocate, to prevent human rights violations and humanitarian tragedies, or whether the world body should side with Russia and China, who hold the view that the United Nations should not interfere in domestic policies by respecting the sovereignty of each nation.

In civil wars, there often are no clear ceasefire lines for U.N. peacekeepers to monitor. There are also cases in which the number of warring parties are more than 10. Sometimes the peacekeepers have to deal with irregulars or child soldiers who are ignorant of international law, or even with members of crime syndicates. Even if peace or ceasefire accords are concluded, warring parties often ignore them.

In some cases U.N. peacekeeping operation units act alone in the countries concerned, but there are also cases in which multinational forces from volunteered countries work in parallel with the U.N. peacekeepers.

In Africa, groups like the Organization of African Unity and a regional community of western African countries sometimes cooperate with the United Nations and share peacekeeping roles with U.N. peacekeepers. In Sierra Leone this year, antigovernment forces, which had signed a peace accord, rebelled and took U.N. peacekeepers hostage. The peacekeepers were later rescued by troops sent by Britain. The incident, however, drove home for me the keen need for the United Nations to have a rapid reaction force, armed with the latest equipment, to back up peacekeeping operations.

The first- and second-generation peacekeeping operations have been relatively successful, while the third-generation peacekeeping operation in Somalia ended in tragedy. Based on these experiences, the current dominant view in the international community is that the United Nations should stick to classical peacekeeping operations and all other missions should be entrusted to multinational forces or regional organizations like NATO.

Even if this division of labor is officially recognized, problems will remain. If U.N. peacekeeping operation forces are poorly equipped and their troops are insufficiently trained, they cannot have an effective impact on warring parties, who often do not respect U.N. authority. It is also true there are groups who could not care less even if the Security Council imposes sanctions on them.

4th-generation PKO in sight

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan recently remarked that the United Nations should now "reconsider" its conventional principles of action.

This means that U.N. peacekeeping operations will need troops equipped with much more powerful weapons than past peacekeepers have had, even if they do not carry out peace enforcement.

Such a new breed of peacekeepers should act far more effectively than conventional peacekeepers, even as their actions should be clearly distinct from the enforcement of peace processes. Namely, we can say that the vexed struggle to realize a fourth-generation peacekeeping operation has just started.

What troubles me at this point in the fast-changing development of the United Nations' perspective is the attitude of the Japanese government, which has remained averse to playing an active role in peacekeeping operations.

It would be better if Japan could at least fully participate in classical peacekeeping operations. However, under the U.N. Peacekeeping Cooperation Law, the freeze on Japan's participation in the main PKO role--namely, peacekeeping forces--has not been lifted. Logistical support remains the only possible peacekeeping area in which Japan can participate. The law also puts unreasonable restraints on the use of weapons for self-defense in peacekeeping activities.

Forty-five countries, including 13 Asian nations, are participating in the peacekeeping operations now under way in East Timor. Nonetheless, not a single Self-Defense Force member or Japanese civilian police officer is to be found among them.

At the time of the peacekeeping operation in Cambodia in 1992, Japan sent one battalion, while Germany cooperated by setting up field hospitals. Subsequently, Japan sent only a few SDF members in charge of logistical support to Mozambique and the Golan Heights, and some humanitarian assistance to Goma.

Meanwhile, Germany has been participating in various U.N. peacekeeping operations and wider NATO activities worldwide, based on a 1994 ruling in favor of such actions at the Constitutional Court.

Japan lags behind Germany

We should refrain from making any simplistic comparison between Japan and Germany. Nonetheless, German political leaders repeatedly have made serious reflections on the nation's past, enabling younger generations to learn the hard historical facts of their country's past. Germany has thus built a solid relationship of trust with its neighbors.

Asia has no regional framework with the high integrity of a European Union or a NATO. There is a ray of hope that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum (ARF) could become such a high-integrity organization in the future, but it is still in its early infancy. Such circumstances are behind the fact that Japan has lagged far behind Germany in terms of international cooperation efforts, though the two countries were at the same level just eight years ago.

Since joining the United Nations in 1956, Japan has placed diplomatic priority on the cause of contributing to the world body, staging more or less successfully Japan's own "peace diplomacy." While making efforts to assist disarmament and defuse tensions worldwide, Japan has been leading other industrialized countries in extending assistance to developing countries.

Except for its financial contributions, Japan's participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations--a mainstay for bringing about peace--compares unfavorably with that of other countries.

Japan must step up reconciliation and cooperation efforts with other Asian countries in a steady, constant manner. At the same time, the nation has to overcome its tendency toward timidity that governs its external activities because of its adherence to unreasonably high safety standards that do not exist anywhere else.

The idea of a PKO training center, which was proposed years ago, would obviously help build confidence in the Asian region. Why then has the idea been left to gather dust?

Yasushi Akashi has served as U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, head of the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia and special representative of the U.N. secretary general to the former Yugoslavia. He currently is chairman of the Japan Center for Preventive Diplomacy.