The
expanding might of
UN peacekeeping
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments directly
to JonatPower@aol.com
August 30, 2006
LONDON - Despite the rhetoric
emanating from Washington, London and Tel Aviv the fact
is the situation in the Lebanon is being allowed to
return to the status quo ante - as it was before the
recent war. All that is being changed is that the UN
force is being enlarged dramatically. But there is going
to be no mandate for it to disarm Hezbollah.
No big change for the Lebanon or
for Israel, but a big one for the UN. The UN is now back
in favor as everyone's favourite peacekeeper, having
recovered from the setbacks of the early 1990s when for
different reasons it fell on its face in Rwanda, Bosnia
and Somalia. Now Washington happily pays much of its
bills. The Chinese contribute more military and civilian
policemen than any of the other Security Council member.
The big powers airlift its troops to the field and send
their navies to give offshore logistical support. The UN
will soon field an army only second in size to that of
the U.S..
Perhaps events are leading the
Security Council by the nose back to the promises of the
UN Charter. Article 42 says, "the Security
Council…may take such action by air, sea or land
forces as may be necessary to restore international peace
and security." In 1947, the UN's Military Staff Committee
prepared a proposal which the Big Five agreed to, on the
size of a UN force: Air force: 700 bombers, 500 fighters.
Naval force: 3 battleships, 6 carriers, 12 cruisers, 33
destroyers, 64 frigates, 24 minesweepers and 14
submarines. Army: 15 divisions, 450,000 men. Not enough
for a world war, but certainly enough for a Saddam
Hussein.
We can ponder what the world would
have looked like if the Cold War had not intervened and
this forward thinking had not been rapidly shelved. Would
there have been a Suez crisis? The post-independence
Congolese civil war. The Vietnam War? Numerous Middle
Eastern wars. The Yugoslavian wars?
UN peacekeeping at the command and
control level is now becoming much more flexible. In the
Lebanon the local actors have insisted it be under the
direct command of New York and not run by Paris or Rome
as Washington would have preferred. But in recent years
the U.S. was mandated by the Security Council to lead the
UN intervention force in Haiti in 1994, the Australians
in East Timor in 1999 (and now they are there again) and
the British in Sierra Leone in 2000.
The UN operation in Sierra Leone is
rightly considered a model of success. It arrived in a
situation of total anarchy with child soldiers roaming
the streets. It got off to a bad start with 500
peacekeepers captured and held hostage. But at the end of
its six year mandate in 2005 the mission had successfully
disarmed, demobilized and reintegrated more than 70,000
former combatants, restored government authority
throughout the country, organized both local and national
elections, rebuilt the local security forces and
repatriated nearly 30,000 refugees.
A more robust UN has its dangers -
it will inevitably devalue the old time peacekeeping
devised by Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, a
tool fashioned out of necessity when more ambitious plans
were necessarily frozen by the imperatives of the Cold
War. TFF
Associate Brian Urquhart,
who for many years was head of UN peacekeeping and ran
the UN campaign in the Congo in the early 1960s, wrote in
his autobiography of the many tensions implicit in that
quite terrifying 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, 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 the one quality
which distinguishes it from and sets it above the people
it is dealing with."
Wise words. As the UN expands both
in numbers and muscle it shouldn't lose sight of them.
The Security Council has made the right decision - it is
not the job of the UN force to disarm Hezbollah. That is
the job of the politicians and cannot happen until there
is peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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