bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2000) — Summer 2000 // Été 2000, pp. 19–21
Peacekeeping has become an element of Canadian cultural iconography; two generations of schoolchildren have been raised on stories of Canada’s proud peacekeeping record since the days of the United Nations Emergency Force in the Middle East in the 1950s. Canadians see peacekeeping as an important part of what we represent abroad. The image of Canadian soldiers in peacekeeping operations around the world has almost become an element of the Canadian national identity.
We are told, ad infinitum, that the world has changed in the decade since the end of the Cold War, and with it, so has peacekeeping. What are these changes, and are the structures of peacekeeping able to change and adapt?
The traditional image of peacekeeping — military forces acting in an interpositional capacity between the armies of two countries, based on the consent of the parties through a peace agreement — is rapidly becoming obsolete. The conflicts that require a peacekeeping presence are increasingly complex and disorderly, involving irregular armies and other sub-state groups, intervention by neighbouring states through proxies, and the blurring of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. These mainly intra-state conflicts are increasingly motivated not by politics but by ethnic and economic considerations. The result is often the systematic destruction of the economic, political and social infrastructures of states, and often even their basic societies. Consequently, these complex intrastate conflicts require a much more sophisticated set of responses than those that were effective in “traditional” peacekeeping. In what are essentially failed states, peacekeeping operations are now often required to establish the groundwork for the security of civilian populations, in the absence of any alternative functioning mechanism.
The United Nations is making a serious and largely successful effort to address these new realities in the mandates of new operations, but the operational structures with which the UN implements these mandates have not kept pace. The gap in deployment capacity and institutional flexibility has resulted in a real danger of diminishing credibility for future UN peacekeeping commitments. The peacekeeping system needs the right tools — and the resources — to deal with changing circumstances.
In “traditional” conflicts, the bulk, if not the entirety, of a peacekeeping operation is carried out by military forces. As they are acting with the consent of the parties involved, usually through a recognized and reasonably operative political/diplomatic cease-fire agreement, there is little need to stipulate the use of force beyond circumstances of self-defence. The social and political infrastructure of the combatant states generally endures into the post-conflict phase, permitting military peacekeepers to operate within a relatively effective framework and to hand over tasks to established and experienced local authorities.
Though one can debate whether the dramatic shift we have seen toward complex, intra-state conflict over the last decade is cyclical or structural, recent experience has shown that intra-state conflicts bring a much different set of challenges to contemporary peacekeeping.
Traditional inter-state conflicts tend to have political or territorial goals, with conflict serving as a means of attaining those goals. Where negotiation succeeds in resolving these competing objectives, a cessation of hostilities verified by traditional inter-positional peacekeeping is a viable means of ending the needless consumption of military and financial resources.
The new style of largely intra-state conflict more often than not has economic motivations — or, to put it more baldly, has greed at its core. Under these circumstances, conflicts are less susceptible to negotiated political solutions. In fact, a solution to the conflict may not be desirable at all to the protagonists, who find that the power of the gun allows them to profit from protracted fighting. Furthermore, it may be in the interest of the protagonists in these conflicts of greed to dismember any existing state apparatus that might provide a pole for competition against their authority — independent and effective police, judiciary or security structures, for example. With this systematic degradation of the capacity of the State to administer itself and society, peacekeeping forces often find that they are moving into something of a vacuum, where the state’s capacity to recover has been severely diminished.
Peacekeeping missions must therefore undertake more than simply traditional military functions if the State is to have any capacity to cope when the peacekeeping force returns home. In recognition of this challenge, mandates for peace support operations have developed a comprehensive, multidisciplinary character, combining humanitarian assistance, demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration (DD&R), and the protection of civilians and refugees through measures ranging from landmines awareness to health education.
This has led to another significant development in peace support operations – the rapid increase in demand for civilian experts with a broad range of skills, from judicial experts and corrections officials to municipal administrators and sanitation engineers. The make-up of peacekeeping missions reflects the decreasing reliance on military forces and the greater emphasis on police and civilian resources. About a quarter of the personnel committed to UN peacekeeping missions in June 2000 were civilians.
As a result of the broadening of the mandate of these missions, classic peacekeeping missions with a unidimensional focus are becoming increasingly rare. They are largely giving way to peace support operations, requiring for mission success custom-designed mandates incorporating the kinds of complex, non-traditional activities outlined above.
These more sophisticated missions are one of the best tools at the disposal of the United Nations Security Council to meet its mandate to promote international peace and security. One of the challenges to the United Nations, however, is that its operational structures are not keeping pace with the change in peacekeeping needs — notably the requirement for rapid reaction. In several recent high-profile crises, it was not the UN itself, but other bodies (the G-8/NATO in Kosovo; a multinational coalition in the initial stages of East Timor) which filled the vacuum when the UN itself could not or would not act quickly.
The UN has also struggled recently to meet the challenge of missions requiring simultaneous (rather than sequential) initiatives, from military action to relief to reconstruction to development activities. Because peace support operations often find themselves working in what are, in essence, failed states, they must build a basic social, political and economic infrastructure from the outset of their mission in order to operate meaningfully. These missions are extremely complex and are “high maintenance” in terms of planning, conduct and sustainability. They involve, in one way or another, almost every department in the United Nations organization, as well as linkages with other multilateral organizations (e.g., the OSCE or the OAU) and bilateral actors. This requires a high degree of coordination. These missions have also created a need to develop an indigenous capacity to plan, execute and support peace support operations, not just within the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), but within the UN system as a whole.
The challenges to the UN system occasioned by complex missions fall into three broad categorles:
a) coordination: Within the UN system, the new demands of peace support operations generate a coordination requirement, the response to which has proven a recurring institutional weakness at the strategic, operational and tactical levels of the UN. As a result, DPKO faces the additional burden that it does not have the capacity to deploy more than one peace support operation at a time. b) rapid reaction: There has been movement in improving the capacity of the UN to react to crises in a timely manner. The February 2000 session of the UN Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations produced recommendations on rapid reaction that were particularly encouraging, but further work needs to be done. For example, recent experience has reinforced the need for a rapidly deployable mission headquarters. Where UN missions have been able to build on existing operations (such as in the Central African Republic), the establishment of a peace support operation has been swift. In situations where no previous structure exists, deployments have been slow. An example is Sierra Leone. In October 1999, the Security Council made a strong commitment to Sierra Leone, but because of the slow pace of deployment, the mission remained vulnerable — as the events of May 2000 showed. In February 2000, the Council authorized a modest mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a deployment time frame of over four months. The situation there subsequently deteriorated seriously.
20 bout de papier Vol. c) matching mandates and resources: The international community has made great strides in addressing the problem of inappropriate or weak mandates for peace support operations. It was an inappropriate mandate — insufficiently clear mission goals — that led to the failure of the UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia. It was a weak mandate — inadequately protecting civilians — which led to the tragedies in Srebrenica and Rwanda. The lesson of the need for robust mandates in operations where civilian populations face imminent danger has now been learned, and indeed has been put into practice in the mandates of such recent peace support operations as those in Sierra Leone, East Timor and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But in many cases, the long term viability and success of these missions is compromised by the less than optimal resources provided to them, making it difficult for them to fulfill the broad mandates they have been given. The DD&R programme in Sierra Leone, for example, had been moving slowly because it was under-resourced, allowing armed groups to cite overcrowded demobilization camps as an excuse for not laying down their arms. Its success, however, in attracting rebel combatants was a major motivating factor behind the attacks on the UN peacekeeping force in May, 2000. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, concerns were expressed that the modest size of the second phase of the peacekeeping operation would severely limit the ability of military observers to verify the Lusaka Agreement, the basis of the cease-fire, thereby reducing confidence in the Agreement and increasing the potential of violations or even the breakdown of the peace process.
These continuing challenges have shaped Canadian policy on peacekeeping and have led to the emergence of a number of key pillars: a) The primacy of the role of the United
Nations is recognized. With its near-universal membership, the United Nations has the international legal and moral authority to commission peace support missions. This is particularly significant in the context of increasingly robust Chapter VII mandates. Though some tasks, particularly those involving quick mobilization for which the UN is now under-equipped (such as at the outset of the East Timor situation), might be devolved to multinational “coalitions of the willing”, this is an alternative which is second best. From a political standpoint, there can be perceptions of accountability and legitimacy problems without the flag of the United Nations, which are exacerbated by the unrepresentative composition of such coalitions. From a financial perspective, the entire cost is borne by national contingents, rather than being shared through the global community, in whose collective interest these peace support operations are being mounted.
b) UN Peace Support Missions are an appropriate setting for peace enforcement. There is a view expressed by such countries as the United States that the UN can do peacekeeping, but not peace enforcement, and that the latter is best left to regional organizations or “coalitions of the willing”. The United Nations does not, and emphatically should not, possess a war-fighting capacity. But the UN is more than capable of conducting robust peace support operations in support of the UN mandate to maintain international peace and stability. Regional capacity is often lacking, and regional players may be perceived as having a conflict of interest.
c) The United Nations requires and deserves strengthened capacity to plan, deploy and support peace support operations. The United Nations should have the personnel and the financial resources to undertake all phases of a peace support operation from beginning to end. This requires more than just the support of member countries: it requires stronger coordination within the United Nations system, and efficient use of the resources it has on hand. The United Nations system is done no favours when it is forced to relinquish peacekeeping expertise provided gratis by members in the interest of geographical equity of job distribution, as was done in 1998-1999. Members also have a responsibility to ensure continuity and stability in the conduct of complex missions by providing funding from assessed contributions. The growing insistence by certain members for voluntary funding mechanisms such as trust funds treats essential elements of missions as add-ons, and undermines the effectiveness of UN response. The delinquency of these same members in the payment of outstanding dues merely reinforces the pressure being placed on the number and scope of missions which are nevertheless necessary.
d) Effective peacekeeping requires a rapid reaction capacity. Peace Support Operations often have a very narrow window of opportunity to establish themselves with credibility, and to prevent a fluid situation from solidifying in a negative way. In some cases, this may make the difference in preventing the massive victimization of civilians. For this reason, it is vital that the UN system possesses a rapid reaction capacity.
e) Mandates must match resources. A peace support operation will not fulfill its goals if mandates are inappropriately limited, or if missions do not have the resources to fulfill those mandates. Success of a mission hinges on its credibility. In order to be credible, mandates must be realistic and achievable, and the mission must be provided the resources to succeed. †) Peace support operations require a multidisciplinary approach. The complex challenges of providing basic security for individuals when local state and social infrastructures are impaired or non-existent requires a multidisciplinary approach by peace support operations. This is true both in terms of composition of peace support missions (e.g., the appropriate mix of military, police, civilian deployments, and others), and in terms of tasks (e.g., protection of civilians, security sector reform, etc.).
Members of the United Nations system share an obligation to ensure that the UN has the capacity to deploy promptly adequate numbers of the appropriate personnel (military and civilian) in support of a strong mandate. Permanent members are particularly duty bound, in that they are responsible for assuring continuity in UN response capacity and policy. The primary role of the United Nations is to ensure global peace and security, and one of its primary tools is the use of peace support operations. These operations need the mandates and resources to work effectively, and it is vital that the members of the United Nations work to ensure that the lack of peacekeeping capacity never again makes the international community a mere witness to unfolding tragedy.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2000) — Summer 2000 // Été 2000, pp. 19–21. Read the rest of this issue →
