U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has asked a panel of international experts to study peacekeeping failures and recommend how the world body can improve its performance in conflict prevention and military intervention.
It will look at mandates, funding, the troop contributions of member states and "what to do if large numbers of civilians are in danger of being massacred," he said.Annan should know. He headed the U.N. peacekeeping department during its two most glaring failures: the 1994 Rwanda genocide and the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica. The United Nations did nothing to stop the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans, even though it had advance warning of the genocide, and allowed Bosnian Serbs to kill 7,000 Muslims in what was supposed to be a "safe haven" under the protection of U.N. peacekeepers.
There have been many studies before this one. Annan's predecessor, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, wrote an "Agenda for Peace" in 1992 and revised it in 1995. Based on the mistakes made in Bosnia and Somalia, he suggested that the United Nations have a standing army of its own, or at least a rapid-reaction force available for instant deployment.
The United States shot that idea down, and most of the U.N.'s 188 members oppose it.
However, the new study will re-examine a more modest proposal in which the Scandinavian countries, Canada and the Netherlands have agreed to keep "high-readiness brigades" on standby for peacekeeping duties.
Former USAID chief Brian Atwood is on the panel, and William Durch of the Washington-based Stimson Center will head a research team. They are expected to complete their work in July so world leaders will have their recommendations in hand at a summit called the "Millennium Assembly" in September.
There are 16 U.N. peacekeeping operations worldwide, ranging from passive cease-fire monitoring in Cyprus to more active nation building in East Timor. But many of these missions are ineffective or in trouble, and it doesn't take any blue-ribbon panel to discern why.
Long committed to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states, the United Nations doesn't like intervening in civil wars and shrinks from an enforcement role. Its concept of peacekeeping is to go in only when invited, after the fighting has stopped, as a truce preserver interposed between two dormant belligerents.
But most of today's conflicts are civil wars, often with more than two sides whose hatreds make their cease-fires so much worthless paper. To be effective, peacekeepers must have enough manpower and firepower to discourage hostilities while helping refugees, organizing elections and rebuilding shattered nations.
The United States and its NATO allies, who are the U.N. Security Council's most powerful members, have the military muscle to be peace enforcers but shy away from long-term commitments in regions where they have no vital interests. All suffer from shrinking defense budgets and a natural reluctance to put their troops in harm's way.
The Europeans remain skeptical of the so-called "Clinton Doctrine" of military intervention for humanitarian purposes, deeply opposed by China and Russia. And the U.N. peacekeeping budget is constantly in arrears.
As a result, U.N. peacekeeping missions tend to be lightly armed, undermanned, underfunded, with mandates so limited as to be virtually worthless.
The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, now 22 years old, has been nothing more than a spectator to the war between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas, with Lebanese civilians caught in between. U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia were equally helpless until NATO intervened.
The U.N. missions in Somalia and Angola were abandoned because no one would stop fighting. U.N. peacekeepers in Sierra Leone are unable enforce a July cease-fire or protect civilians from the depredations of rebels and government soldiers. And the 5,500 U.N. troops that will soon be deployed in the Congo can hardly be expected to take on the armies of six nations and three rebel groups.
Peacekeeping, U.N.-style, only works when there is a peace to keep.
Holger Jensen is international editor of the Denver Rocky Mountain News