An
almighty force for the
Congo and Liberia?
By
Jonathan
Power
July 3, 2003
LONDON - The crisis in the Congo, and to a lesser
extent in Liberia, throws into relief an issue that has
long lain at the doorstep of the United Nations - whether
or not to authorize the use of an almighty force and a
civilian occupying administration.
It is not just the Americans who have shied away from
going all the way. At various times countries from all
the four corners have given it short shrift.
"Peacekeeping" with lightly armed troops was the
compromise, which worked well when both sides arrived at
the point (often after a lot of fighting) when they
wanted a neutral middleman, as in the Middle East or
Cyprus (where it averted a Bosnian type Christian/Muslim
war), but less well where things were still on the boil,
as in the Congo in the early 1960s and Rwanda in
1994.
The question pressed by the widening civil wars in the
Congo and Liberia is will the UN membership be prepared
to vote for something stronger- an almighty force-
perhaps American-led as it was in Korea in 1950, Iraq in
1991 or, on a smaller scale, Australian-led as it was in
East Timor in 1998 and British-led as it was in Sierra
Leone in 2001? This is not quite how the founding fathers
of the UN saw it, but if a big power possesses a
fleet-of-foot military machine is not this a proper way
to make use of it?
A more robust UN has its dangers- it will inevitably
devalue the old time compromise of peacekeeping conceived
by former Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, a tool
fashioned out of necessity when more ambitious plans were
necessarily frozen by the imperatives of the Cold War.
Brian Urquhart, who for many years was the head of UN
peacekeeping, wrote in his autobiography of many of the
tensions in that quite terrifying peace keeping operation
that left Urquhart himself beaten unconscious and
Hammarskjöld killed in an air crash as they sought
to mediate. Many of the soldiers, Urquhart recounts, from
Swedes to Indians to Ethiopians wanted to use force. The
Swedes at one point even took off to start bombing in
retaliation for the murder of an Italian airman, only to
be thwarted by bad weather.
Urquhart and his boss, the American Ralph Bunche,
gradually persuaded them of the virtue of restraint.
"They simply did not want to understand either the
principle involved or the bottomless morass into which
they would sink if they descended from the high ground of
the non-violent international peace keeping force. The
moment the UN starts killing people it becomes part of
the conflict it is supposed to be controlling and
therefore part of the problem. It loses one quality which
distinguishes it from and sets it above people it is
dealing with."
Bold words and a sizeable element of truth, as Bunche
and Urquhart and their successors demonstrated in a large
number of successful and largely forgotten peace keeping
interventions- in the Lebanon, in Sinai, in Cyprus and
Namibia, in El Salvador and Iran/Iraq, in Cambodia and
Macedonia.
Yet even in the Congo the secession of the province of
Katanga, a major cause of the civil war, was finally
ended when U Thant, Hammarskjold's successor, in response
to a series of attacks on UN soldiers, authorized
military action to remove the mercenaries and gendarmes
who guarded the secessionist stronghold of Katanga. There
was a dose of impatient pragmatism here. Once confronted
by the highly profession Indian UN soldiers it took only
a couple of days to send them running.
Of course, deploying armed might can be an easy
option, a substitute for the long-term grind of
preventive action, which many of those who in recent
years who argue for "humanitarian intervention" seem to
give short shrift to. Nevertheless, there are situations-
and the Congo is one and Liberia another- when it is
clearly too late for preventive action, and we compelled
to conclude that something more heavy handed is
immediately needed.
If the UN has on occasion to be a force it also must
seriously consider the need to become a colonizer. Haiti,
Somalia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Liberia and
the Congo present what one historian called a
"caricature" of civilization. The raw truth is that the
only time any of these countries, with the exception of
Afghanistan, built up any kind of economic and social
infrastructure was when they were occupied. There's not
much of the Italian and British legacy to be seen in
Somalia these days, but not that long ago Mogadishu was a
city of fine buildings with functioning hospitals and
schools and a judicial system that worked.
Somalia in 1992, when the Americans led a UN
intervention force, quickly in and very quickly out,
showed the weakness of trying to sort out a post-colonial
mess with just a veneer of military might. The British
did not rule India, nor the French Indo-China, nor the
Dutch Indonesia, nor the Japanese Taiwan and Korea with
an armed veneer. They administered the fiefdoms down to
the small town hospital, school and courtroom. One can
cavil about the unjustness of one nation ruling another-
and indeed it had many unpleasant, arrogant and often
racist features, but sometimes it can help propel a
society out of its ruts.
The Americans are learning this lesson in Iraq and
Afghanistan today. That is America's peculiar
post-invasion responsibility. It created the mess and now
it must clear it up. But in the Congo the Europeans share
most of the responsibility. It is time overdue for them
to ask the UN for authorization to do what has to be
done, and can no longer be avoided. What the small French
intervention force has begun a much larger European
military and civilian operation must continue. And in
Liberia it is the Americans too who must carry the
burden.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
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