United Nations and peacekeeping

The first UN peacekeeping operation was undertaken during the Suez crisis (1956) at the suggestion of Canada's Lester Pearson to send an international force large enough to keep peace in the area until a settlement could be worked out between the parties. The UNGA took his advice and the UN's first peacekeeping force was born. This, however, was possible due to convergence of policies of both the US and the USSR on the Suez crisis. While Nikita Khruschchev threatened to use long-range rockets in support of the Egyptian army who were fighting the Anglo-French-Israeli forces, the US government vowed to stop all further oil shipments from South America to Europe. Finally, a strongly worded cease-fire resolution passed by the UNSC forced the aggressors to withdraw their forces and agree to the deployment of the UN peacekeeping force. The Suez crisis finally contributed to ending the short-lived Prime Ministership of Anthony Eden (1955-57) as his decision to attack Egypt caused wide spread controversy.

The UNSC authorises the deployment of peacekeeping forces and determines its mandate. Such decisions require nine votes in favour including those of all permanent members. The Secretary General recommends how the operation is to be launched and carried out and reports on its progress. The guidelines for the peacekeeping force established by Dag Hammarskjold so many years ago still remain valid. Under the guidelines, the UN forces may only initiate peacekeeping activities if the parties to the conflict agree to their presence; the troops may not use violence but only negotiation to accomplish their mission; the troops must serve under the exclusive command of the UNSC; all member nations must financially support the peace operations; and the peacekeeping force can only fire in self-defence.

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Since UN peacekeeping operations can only be undertaken with the authorisation of the UNSC, its effectiveness during the Cold War period was dictated more by super power interests than by the needs at the flash points where more often than not "fire" was extinguished by unilateral actions by one or the other superpower. The following figures will be illuminating. Between 1948 and 1987, only 13 UN peacekeeping operations were started as compared to 25 in between 1988 and 1995. In 1994 alone UN peacekeeping operations involved eighty thousand military personnel. The end of the Cold War has resulted in greater international appreciation of lack of peace and need for conflict resolution as an important agenda in world politics.

Increase in global violence has partly been due to the disintegration of the USSR and the consequent disappearance of support so long enjoyed by incoherent and structurally violent states. Some of these erstwhile subalterns who had been asphyxiated during the communist regime began their quest for western political models and to ingest western libertarian values. Often this quest caused intra-state friction due to opposition from the hitherto ruling class and the existential structural inequities in the subaltern's society in the form of ethnic, tribal, or religious differences. The post-industrial societies partly put to shame by their own people after seeing on their television screen graphic pictures of unspeakable human rights abuses, and partly to defend themselves from refugee onslaught on their soil, became more willing than before to opt for UN/regional organisation-supported peacekeeping operations.

Paradoxically, the states that would have benefited from international humanitarian operations were often the ones opposing these operations. The recommendation for enhanced UN capacities for peacekeeping in the Brahimi Report, produced by the UN panel set up after UN inaction resulting in massacre at Srebenica and genocide at Rwanda, was seen by some of the Southern governments as a Trojan horse for rampant intervention by the North. Even though the Brahimi Report was broadly welcomed by the Millennium Summit and endorsed by the UNSC Summit (2000), its critics saw the attention given to peacekeeping as distraction from priority that should have been given to social and economic issues.

Besides the report's suggestion that stronger and more centralised analytical capacity was needed for conflict prevention and management as being potentially intrusive in their domestic affairs worried some Southern governments. This Southern wariness can be explained by their apprehension of greater chances of unanimity among P-5 due to disappearance of Cold War bipolarity; greater awareness of G-8 countries of global interdependence and that democracy deficit in any part of the world if tolerated could fuel conflicts adversely affecting their interests; and increasing possibility of the West by-passing the UN if necessary (as in Kosovo and Iraq). Added to these newly emerging factors was the fact that over several decades UN declarations on strengthening humanitarian assistance had stressed the principle of state sovereignty and the need for consent of the state requiring humanitarian assistance.

Admittedly since the Cold War the inadequacy of peacekeeping force as an effective instrument has been felt in places where civil war is still in progress, where consent for the presence of the peacekeepers is fragile, and they are accused of being partisan. In such cases, the Grotian doctrine justifying forcible intervention to protect people from genocide has been advanced. But such intervention need not be without UN blessings. As UN Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor points out, peacekeeping remains exactly the kind of mission where using the UN has advantages because (a) UN peacekeeping allows burden sharing, (b) UN peacekeeping has brought peace and democracy to Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and East Timor, and eased US burden in Haiti and Afghanistan, and (c) UN peacekeeping is highly cost effective as the UN spends less per year on peacekeeping than New York Fire and Police departments.

Susan Rice, a senior State Department official in the Clinton administration, however, contends that notable, even dangerous weaknesses remain in the UN's capacity to mount and sustain effective peace operations. In particular, according to Susan Rice, the UN continues to fall short in the realm of rapid response to crises -- a weakness which can be overcome through the adoption of early warning and preventive response to conflict; rapid deployment of trained, equipped and capable forces, civilian police and civilians to respond to swiftly unfolding crises; and political will of the UNSC members to respond effectively to crises and to finance peace operations. Susan Rice and Shashi Tharoor appear to be on the same wave length in their assessment that while regional organisations/ individual states may try to mitigate crisis and stabilise conflict zones (Australia in East Timor, Britain in Sierra Leone, and France in Cote D'ivoire), there is no substitute in the long term for the UN.

Difficulties faced in the implementation of the Brahimi Report should not be underestimated. Early warning and preventive action through intelligence gathering, for example, is treated with suspicion by many who are fearful of empowering the UN to "spy" on them and meddle in their internal affairs while members having the capacity to gather significant intelligence are reluctant to share with the UN lest their methods of intelligence gathering and sources are compromised. Even if such difficulty is surmounted lack of political will of P-5 may hinder swift deployment of peace

operatives. A case in point is the quick US response in the case of Haiti to stem the flow of refugees while civil war in Sierra Leone in the mid-90s was allowed to continue. Likewise failure to promptly address the Rwanda conflict resulted in one of the worst genocides in the history of mankind.

The UN still remains the preferred destination for initiation of collective security actions. If that is to be maintained and consequences of the doctrine of preemption, making the UN irrelevant, are to be averted, as happened in the cases of Kosovo and Iraq, then the strengthening of the UN peacekeeping operations will better serve the interest of the developing countries. It is noteworthy that the three South Asian countries -- Bangladesh, Indiaa and Pakistan -- together account for 20 per cent of UN forces stationed in various parts of the world while Zambia alone puts more troops at the UN's disposal than the combined troops contribution by the US, Germany, and Japan. In the ultimate analysis the developing countries, in particular the smaller states, have to be cognisant of the current thinking in the West on methods to respond to humanitarian crisis.

Madeleine Albright feels that traditional UN peacekeepers lack the mandate and the might to succeed where combatants oppose international presence. She finds one possible solution in the UNSC authorisng an appropriate major power to organise a coalition and enforce the world's collective will e.g. US-led intervention in Haiti, the Australian rescue in East Timor, and British action in Sierra Leone. Albright recommends an international system of crisis management that is pragmatic, episodic, and incremental, necessary to deter people with guns by people with more and bigger guns. While such operations may yield results, one has to be vigilant that the P-5 does not hijack the global desire for peace to serve their own political interests.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.