By John M. Goshko
United Nations—It was a symbol of what many saw as a portent of peace in the post-Cold War era. So there was sadness here when the Security Council acknowledged recently that a decade of United Nations peacekeeping in Angola has failed.
Facing the reality of a renewed civil war, the council decided to withdraw the remnants of a force that once had 6,000 soldiers and that cost $4 billion in the last four years alone. But the retreat was only the latest setback to raise questions about whether the world's leaders still regard U.N. peacekeeping as an important instrument for stability in turbulent regions such as Africa.
Secretary General Kofi Annan, alarmed that another tenacious civil war in neighboring Congo might spill across the continent, has tried for months to get leading U.N. countries to consider an international peacekeeping force to restore order there. But, while the fighting continues unabated in Congo and in other African states such as Sierra Leone, the response from the United Nations' 185 members has been silence.
The luster has faded from the premise that peacekeeping would be one of the most important politico-military developments of the 1990s. The idea was that with the U.S.-Soviet rivalry ended, future threats to peace were likely to arise from regional conflicts that could be dealt with by the United Nations, which invented peacekeeping and honed its techniques over 40 years of successfully defusing global flashpoints. That it has not turned out that way shows what a difference a decade can make. During that time, the thinking of many countries, including the United States, was reshaped drastically by three operations -- in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda -- that saw U.N. peacekeepers powerless to prevent the slaughter of thousands of innocent people.
"The world was under the illusion that the United Nations could do it all," recalls Bernard Miyet, the French diplomat who is under secretary general for peacekeeping. "It was a case of whatever, whenever -- call on the United Nations. It backfired, and the United Nations has been paying the bill ever since." Nowhere was the backfire heard more acutely than in Washington. There, the traumas of Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda caused the Clinton administration to reassess its view of peacekeeping with a skepticism that strikes many U.N. officials diplomats as outright hostility.
U.S. officials deny that characterization. The United States, they note, was principal architect of what is currently the world's most ambitious peacekeeping operation -- enforcing the U.S.-brokered peace agreement in Bosnia -- and now seeks to create a force to oversee a hoped-for peace accord in nearby Kosovo. In both operations, though, the troops and leadership are being supplied not by the United Nations but largely by member countries of NATO -- a situation that many have interpreted as a loss of confidence in the United Nations. "Peacekeeping, in the current day, is a work in progress," said a senior U.S. official, who asked not to be identified. "Mostly today it involves failed states like Somalia and the former Yugoslavia -- places that have come apart internally and where the world community has to see if there is any realistic way of helping to patch them back together. There's no one-size-fits-all jacket that you can apply to them." But within the U.N. system, almost everyone believes the U.S. approach is driven by fears of an angry domestic reaction if American soldiers were to be killed while engaged in peacekeeping. They believe that the administration's attitude means a U.S. policy of avoiding risks except where the most compelling U.S. interests are involved. Other U.N. members also feel peacekeeping is threatened with financial collapse because Congress refuses to pay more than $1 billion in delinquent dues. That deprives the United Nations of the 25 percent of the peacekeeping budget that Washington says it normally would be willing to pay. It also has forced the world body to make up the shortfalls in its regular operating budget -- 25 percent of which is supposed to come from the United States -- by borrowing from its peacekeeping funds.
Over the years, the United Nations became effective at supervising truce lines and cease-fires and generally tamping down tensions between foes. So effective that it seemed logical to assume it could be given the more muscular role of actively deterring would-be belligerents from disturbing the peace -- even though that is a different problem.
"The new conflicts which have erupted since 1991 have been civil ones with the main battle between people who are, or were, citizens of the same state," Annan noted recently. "This involves us in such activities as collecting weapons, disarming and demobilizing militias, supervising elections and monitoring -- sometimes even training -- police forces.
There frequently is a big difference between tnraditional peacekeeping, where U.N. forces act as neutral referees interposed between parties willing to cooperate, and the kind of peace enforcement Annan described, where they might be called on to knock heads to obtain the compliance of reluctant foes. Today's conflicts, like those in Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda, often involve countries that implode into anarchy. If adversaries are unwilling to recognize U.N. authority, the rules under which peacekeeping was carried out for decades cease to work. "We now know that talk of moving the United Nations into peace enforcement was unrealistic," Miyet said. "The members won't allow the United Nations to make war."
That does not mean U.N. peacekeeping has ended. While the numbers are nowhere near the 1995 high of nearly 80,000, the world body, after the impending shutdown of operations in Angola and Macedonia, will have almost 12,000 soldiers staffing 15 peacekeeping missions. Some are perennials such as Cyprus, where 1,268 peacekeepers continue to maintain the uneasy truce between Greek and Turkish Cypriots that the United Nations established in 1964, and southern Lebanon, where 4,445 blue-helmeted soldiers have been trying since 1978 to keep tensions between Israel and Lebanon from escalating into renewed warfare.
Most current U.N. peacekeeping involves very small numbers of personnel serving largely as observers of internal and cross-border conflicts in Africa and some of the newly independent republics of the former Soviet Union. There are, for example, 96 in Georgia, 72 in Tajikistan, 28 in Prevlaka and 56 in Sierra Leone. The observer group in Sierra Leone and a larger force of 1,200 sent last April to keep order in the Central African Republic are the first new missions undertaken by the United Nations within the past four years. During that same period, the Security Council considered but ultimately turned away from proposals to interpose peacekeepers between feuding factions in Congo Brazzaville, to shelter and protect displaced refugees of the Rwandan civil war in Rwanda and Congo and to intervene in Sierra Leone at an earlier stage of that country's ordeal over military dictatorship.
In each of these cases, diplomatic sources say, a major cause of the failure to act was opposition from the United States. "At every stage, you had the United States demanding caution, objecting to the costs and generally repeating a mantra of 'We don't want to get involved,' " recalls one Security Council source. It wasn't always that way. President Clinton took office in 1993 intrigued by proposals from prominent Democrats such as Richard N. Gardner, an international law expert, for giving the United Nations greatly expanded powers to police threats to peace, and the term "multilateralism" became a mantra of the new administration's foreign policy.
However, its enthusiasm chilled as the result of its experiences in Somalia, where Clinton had inherited a U.S.-led military operation to protect delivery by the United Nations of humanitarian supplies to the civilian population. Resistance by local warlords resulted in the horrifying incident of 18 American soldiers being killed and their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
The incident plunged the administration into a rush to get out of Somalia. It also touched off a reevaluation of multilateralism that caused Washington to rebuff European calls for adding American troops to the U.N. force unsuccessfully trying to keep the peace in Bosnia. U.S. policymakers saw there the same circumstances of combatants who threatened constantly to use the peacekeepers as hostages and who might be inclined to regard American soldiers as particularly tempting targets.
The same considerations influenced administration decisions in 1994 when, despite warnings that Hutu militias in Rwanda were planning massacres of the rival Tutsis, the United States pressured and stalled the Security Council from taking any action. The United Nations had to learn "when to say no," Clinton said at the time. And once the massacres had started and the council was preparing to send a small force, Madeleine K. Albright, now the secretary of state but then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, held it up for weeks with arguments about whether the force should be positioned inside Rwanda or outside its borders.
"There is an inevitable built-in tension between national interest and humanitarian concerns," acknowledges a senior U.S. official. "How do you fashion a mission so you can deal with the humanitarian problem and not get American soldiers blown away as happened in Somalia? Does it make sense to try to provide humanitarian assistance smack in the middle of a conflict? Or do you set up shop to provide it on the edges and not get involved in the conflict? These are all issues on which we're still feeling our way toward answers."
