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Fighting For Peace

 

Peacekeeping in the 21^st Century

 

 

 

Peacekeeping seems to always be on the international agenda nowadays, most recently in Afghanistan.  Although it was the September 11th attacks on America that drew western countries into that benighted country, there is a definite trend in recent times to intervene in conflicts that would previously have been regarded as ‘internal’. This trend is normally regarded as uncontroversial but it amounts to a fundamental re-evaluation of the role of peacekeeping. This new approach means that we need to think hard about how best to respond to conflict.

 

Traditional peacekeeping was developed at the United Nations in the 1950’s. The idea was that peacekeepers would only be deployed with the consent of the warring parties. They should be, and be seen to be, non-threatening and impartial. They would only use force in very restricted circumstances, relying on moral authority rather than military power.

 

They would deploy in a war zone after the participants had decided to end hostilities. The immediate function of a peacekeeping force was to defuse a situation. They were to separate the belligerents, aid the withdrawal of troops from combat zones and discourage further military action. After the initial intervention, they would stay on and help to maintain calm and resolve further disputes. Finally, and importantly, it would only be deployed with the agreement of all parties to the dispute

 

The golden rule for a traditional peacekeeping force was that the one thing it did not do was fight. Minimum force would be used in self defence and that was it. They would not ‘make’ peace. That is simply not the role that was envisaged.

 

Rather, they can prevent incidents between bellicose and trigger happy troops which could otherwise escalate easily into a full scale resumption of hostilities. When such incidents do take place, they can help to cool tempers. They assist with reducing anxiety arising from the possibility of falling victim to a surprise attack. And they change the political calculation about the desirability of a return to war because crossing a ceasefire line that is policed by an international force involves upsetting a lot of people other than just the enemy.

 

Peacekeeping, then, can play an invaluable role in facilitating a disposition among conflicting parties to live in peace.

 

The mandate of the long standing UN mission to Cyprus (UNFICYP) states that the force should, “use its best efforts to prevent an recurrence of fighting, in the interest of preserving international peace and security and, as necessary, to contribute to the maintenance of law and order and a return to normal conditions.” The force was established in 1964 after the UN Security Council adopted resolution 186 which recommended the creation of such a force, with the consent of the Government of Cyprus, as the civil war on that island threatened to draw in Greece and Turkey. The resolution specifically noted the threat to international peace as justifying UN involvement.

 

The Secretary-General published ‘guiding principals’ for the peacekeepers on the basis of experience gained in the first six months of the deployment. On the question of the use of force, he emphasised that, “the United Nations force was dispatched to Cyprus to try to save lives by preventing a recurrence of fighting. It would be incongruous, even a little insane, for that Force to set about killing Cypriots...to prevent them from killing each other.”

 

There was heavy emphasis on impartiality. UNFICYP would do all it could to prevent a resurgence of hostilities, but it would not try to force either side act in ways that it chose.

 

On 15th July 1974,  the National Guard, under the direction of Greek officers, staged a coup d’etat against the Cypriot government. In response, Turkey staged an invasion and occupied the Turkish Cypriot areas of Northern Cyprus. The peacekeepers were faced with a situation which had not been foreseen in their mandate. They had been constituted to deal with intercommunal violence in Cyprus, not large scale hostilities. The peacekeepers were unable to stop the effective partitioning of the island.

 

So this approach to peacekeeping meant that UNFICYP could not keep the peace beyond the point where the parties to the conflict resolved to use violence. This is not to accuse them of a lack of resolve. It is only to acknowledge that all the fundamental decisions about peace and war in any theatre of conflict will be taken by the major actors. Which is why developments in the past fifteen years are so important. Behind them lies the assumption that it is possible, desirable and even imperative, for democratic Western states to clamber on to the stage and  rewrite the script.                                                                                   

 

This change of attitude began to be made at the end of the 1980s. After the Cold War, the superpowers were more willing to see the UN adopt a more active role in world affairs. The UN, meanwhile, was experimenting with a new kind of operation, much more complex, varied and ambitious than previously , notably in Namibia and Cambodia. 

 

The military component of the Namibian operation did all the traditional things but also had a large civilian component to assist with national reconciliation, election oversight and supervision of the police. The success of this mission in particular was a huge boost to the UN’s confidence. The then Secretary General, Boutros Boutros Ghali’s wrote in An Agenda For Peace,  about a whole range of ways in which the UN would resolve conflicts in the future. They would be involved in confidence building, factfinding, preventative deployment and early warning. If war broke out, there would be mediation, economic sanctions and military intervention. After fighting had ceased, he saw a role for the UN in post-conflict peace building.

 

Peacekeeping would do more and it would do it in a more forceful way. It would shift from policing a ceasefire, relying on the goodwill of the parties to the conflict, to making and the peace.  The age of Peace Enforcement had arrived

 

Subsequent events demonstrate that the question of what can be achieved by such interventions is not a simple one to answer.  The fundamental precondition for a traditional peacekeeping deployment was the impartiality of the peacekeepers. This is important because of the psychology of conflict. There is an assumption in our culture that war is crazy, a result of communication breakdowns or lack of understanding. Or we think that they happen when an elite manipulates the people for its own ends. We assume that a peacekeeping intervention must necessarily be a good thing - war is hell so who wouldn’t welcome peacekeepers?

 

But the fact is that people don’t fight over nothing. Wars always involve a real conflict of interest.. They don’t happen accidentally, people choose war when they see it as the best way to get what they want, whether that be control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines or sovereignty over the Kosovo or survival itself in the face of genocide in Rwanda.  And they have decided that what they want is important enough  to kill for.

 

A common socio-psychogical phenomenon in conflict is the tendency to see the world in very black-and -white terms. “If you’re not for us, you’re against us.” However, ‘peacekeepers’ who are dispatched to enforce a political settlement  want a particular outcome and are willing to use force to get it. If one of the warring parties decides that this outcome is in conflict with the interests which it had been fighting for, the peacekeepers will find themselves fighting a war.

 

This is what happened to the UN in Somalia and Sierra Leone. The finger of blame tended to be pointed at the quality of the troops involved, heavy handed Americans or unprofessional Indian and Kenyans. The answer is assumed to be more ‘robust’ deployments, an ever increasing willingness to use force and the use of military organisations like NATO instead of the UN. But this is to miss the point. In fact these sorts of problems are inherent in this sort of operation.

 

The UN operation in Sierra Leone, called UNAMSIL, was sent to support the government which was created at peace talks in Lome. Sierra Leone is a former British colony which has fallen victim to a particularly nasty civil war featuring a variety of private armies using the most appalling methods, such as amputation as a terror weapon, to try and control the country. The war started in 1991 when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attempted to overthrow the government. The Sierra Leone Army then staged a coup. When it was persuaded to hold elections in 1996, Dr. Kabbah was elected as President. The RUF continued to prosecute its war, and in 1997 there was a further coup. The new military government joined forces with the RUF and forced Kabbah into exile. The various parties were eventually brought to peace talks at Lome in Nigeria. An agreement was reached under which a new government was formed, led by Kabbah and including members of the military faction which had overthrown him and the RUF.

 

The problems began when the RUF withdrew its support from the accords and attempted yet another attempt to grab control of the country by force. The UN forces had been given a similar mandate and code of conduct as that in Cyprus, despite  the fact that they had been sent to do a different job. As in Cyprus, they found themselves powerless to stop the new fighting. Some were even taken hostage.

 

On this occasion, however, the British Army arrived on the scene with a different mission. They made no attempts to be, or even to appear to be, impartial. They defended Freetown, the capital of the country, fighting off attempted incursions. The RUF leader was captured and the militia have retreated into the north of the country. Britain is now training Sierra Leonian forces to retake the north. It remains to be seen whether this intervention will work.

 

The British were able to intervene decisively when UNAMSIL could not because it did not attempt to be impartial. UNAMSIL acted like a traditional peacekeeping force although its mission, to support the Lome Agreement, placed it in an position where it ceased to be an uninvolved third party. It was there to support the government which was created by the Lome agreement. the RUF was opposed to that agreement. UNAMSIL became the RUF’s enemy. 

 

This raises important question for governments who want to pursue this course in Afghanistan. Once again, they will be intervening in a country with an insecure government which has been patched together from previously warring factions. In this case it even deliberately excludes one of those factions, the Taliban. Any mission which is intended to support the new government against any future rebellion will find itself in the same position as UNAMSIL. Any less ambitious mission will risk getting sucked in to any future conflict as happened in Bosnia where UNPROFOR, which had been given the mission of protecting aid convoys and nothing else, found itself having to stand and watch ethnic cleansing while the western media berated them for not doing more. They found their mission growing steadily, until they were given responsibility for protecting ‘safe havens’ such a Srebrinica. As would happen in Sierra  Leone, they had been given a mission which put them in direct conflict with one of the parties. When the Bosnian Serbs decided to clear Srebrinica, the UN were not prepared to stop them. The massacre which followed was the worst in Europe since the Second World War.

 

So intervening in a conflict to bring peace is not as simple as it appears. Those who would do so have to answer difficult questions. Do they have the will to fight, and to see people kill and be killed, in somebody else’s war? Interventions which involve the likelihood of having to fight will be expensive so who will foot the bill? More to the point, can this sort of intervention play a useful role in the resolution of a conflict, or does it merely complicate things by introducing a new party and a whole range of new elements such as the ‘credibility’ of the intervening body? .

 

And the parties are more likely to be unreconciled to an imposed settlement, or one which they have only agreed to under duress, than one which they have worked out themselves. Conflict Resolution always involves making sacrifices and when people have been forced into making these, or are able to believe that they have been forced, they are less likely to stick to any agreement than if they had made their own choices. Peace Enforcement risks submerging the conflict rather than resolving it, only for it to re-emerge when international resolve weakens and governments turn their attention elsewhere. If this happens, can an outside party ever hope to match the resolve of the original parties to the conflict in the long term.

 

The decision to persue such an intervention involves the sacrifice of impartiality. This means committing troops to fight for something if necessary, not just to hold the ring. There is no middle ground between the two, and this is something which Western governments and populations have failed to appreciate. If military intervention in conflict is to become the central plank of foreign policy then the implications need to be appreciated. We need to decide how far we are willing to go in the name of peace.