Peacekeepers or placeholders: The blue helmets show up — then what?
Thursday, June 5, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
John Metzler
UNITED NATIONS — The Balkans, the Congo, Cyprus, Darfur, Haiti, the Middle East, and West Africa. These are just some of the myriad of places where UN peacekeeping missions are currently deployed. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has dubbed the global military operations as “a flagship enterprise for our Organization, ” where 110,000 men and women are deployed in far-flung conflicts round the world. And given the political perma-crisis in Africa with its spiraling conflicts and humanitarian tragedies, there’s certainly a need for peacekeepers. But can the UN sustain these mandates?
Well, the diplomats can’t say No! When confronted by a spate of regional political and ethnic conflicts, the UN Security Council often votes to send a peacekeeping mission to seemingly solve the situation. So send in the UN Blue helmets, solve the problem, and save the day! While seemingly simple, the follow-up becomes the challenge as member states must be approached for troop contributions and financial support, and governments must accept this infringement in their territory. Getting a UN force into Sudan’s troubled Darfur region took a few years of diplomatic arm-twisting. The Darfur deployment is too little, too late.
Jean-Marie Guehenno, Under-Secretary General for UN Peacekeeping operations warns that it is dangerous to put troops on the ground without a clear strategic vision, strong political backing and sufficient financial support. He bluntly told correspondents that in the current Darfur operation “We don’t have the mobility, we don’t have the firepower that would allow us to do what we are expected to do, and that’s very dangerous for our people..” A year into the deployment in strife-torn Darfur, the UN mission has “only a fraction of its planned full complement.”
Since 1948, the UN has deployed 63 peacekeeping missions, 17 of them in the past decade. Secretary General Ban stresses, “I have seen whole societies moving, with the help of the peacekeepers, from devastation to rejuvenation. In Haiti, in Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Blue Helmets have provided breathing space for a fragile peace to take hold.” This is certainly true, but monitoring cease-fire lines and separating combatants often only addresses the symptoms in the conflict rather than actually solving the root political problems.
Indeed despite the so-called peace divided at the end of the Cold War in 1989, the need for UN peacekeeping actually mushroomed as the political genies long bottled-up by authoritarian states escaped and swirled into a spate of conflicts. Between 1989 and 1994, the Security Council established twenty new operations surging military deployment form 11,000 to 75,000. The breakup of Yugoslavia and a spiraling Balkan crisis, taxed the UN to the limit. Ex-Yugoslavia still sees a deployment in the Kosovo (UNMIK) Mission, but the days of the bloody Bosnian conflict are thankfully past.
Using an alphabet soup of names and acronyms which often sound more like generic drug labels than peacekeeping operations, many of the missions UNMIL, UNAMID, UNTSO, MONUC, UNIFIL have been long-term.
But beyond the Security Council signing off on establishing a myriad of military mandates, who actually staffs and pays for the global operations? Given that the UN thankfully does not have a standing army which to dispatch, the Council must appeal to the member states. Historically in the early years this was largely a Scandinavian and Canadian operation but as the missions mushroomed and the needs expanded, there were appeals to African and South Asian states. Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Ghana, Fiji and Nigeria remain the major contributors. Equally Brazil, Canada, Ireland and France play a significant troop contribution role.
Take the UNFICYP mission on the divided Greco/Turkish island of Cyprus. First deployed in 1964 to stem inter-communal violence, today UNFICYP still patrols the ceasefire Green Line, dividing the communities. Some 872 troops from Britain, Argentina, Hungary and Slovakia serve in the mission.
Who Pays? That’s easy. For the projected $7.2 billion budget this year will come overwhelmingly from the European Union, Japan and the USA.
But keeping the peace can be deadly. More than 2,400 men and women have died in the cause of peace. Realistically the UN forces are often caught in the middle separating opposing forces. The costliest mission has been UNIFIL in Lebanon with 272 fatalities.
The UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) was sent to Israel in 1948, the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to supervise the disputed frontier of post-British India in 1949. Both units remain there! The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was deployed in 1978 and is still there with 12,300 troops. So UNIFIL is interim for the last thirty years!
It’s fair to say that rather than formally solving the problem, the UN effectively “stops the clock” on a conflict allowing the political players the time and the opportunity to negotiate in peace. That’s IF they want to. Whether peace would hold if the UN phases out remains highly problematic in many places.
Commemorating 60 years in the field, UN Peacekeeping , like the Energizer bunny, is still going strong. Sadly the dogs of war are equally spirited.