The United Nations: An Introduction for Students http://cyberschoolbus.un.org/unintro/unintro.asp

The UN logo shows the world held in the “olive branches of peace”.

The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October 1945, when the UN Charter had been ratified by a majority of the original 51 Member States. The day is now celebrated each year around the world as United Nations Day.

The purpose of the United Nations is to bring all nations of the world together to work for peace and development, based on the principles of justice, human dignity and the well-being of all people. It affords the opportunity for countries to balance global interdependence and national interests when addressing international problems.

There are currently 191 Members of the United Nations. They meet in the General Assembly, which is the closest thing to a world parliament. Each country, large or small, rich or poor, has a single vote, however, none of the decisions taken by the Assembly are binding. Nevertheless, the Assembly's decisions become resolutions that carry the weight of world governmental opinion.

The United Nations Headquarters is in New York City but the land and buildings are international territory. The United Nations has its own flag, its own post office and its own postage stamps. Six official languages are used at the United Nations - Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. The UN European Headquarters is in the Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland. It has offices in Vienna, Austria and Economic Commissions in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, Amman in Jordan, Bangkok in Thailand and Santiago in Chile. The senior officer of the United Nations Secretariat is the Secretary-General.

The United Nations: An Introduction for Students

.The Aims of the United Nations:

• To keep peace throughout the world. • To develop friendly relations between nations. • To work together to help people live better lives, to

eliminate poverty, disease and illiteracy in the world, to stop environmental destruction and to encourage respect for each other's rights and freedoms.

• To be a centre for helping nations achieve these aims. Pages of the UN Charter with the signatures of the delegates from the USSR, the UK and the US.

The Principles of the United Nations: • All Member States have sovereign equality. • All Member States must obey the Charter. • Countries must try to settle their differences by peaceful

means. • Countries must avoid using force or threatening to use

force. • The UN may not interfere in the domestic affairs of any

country. • Countries should try to assist the United Nations.

he predecessor: The League of Nations

The League of Nations was founded immediately after the First World War. It originally consisted of 42 countries, 26 of which were non-European. At its largest, 57 countries were members of the League. The League was created because a number of people in France, South Africa, the UK and the US believed that a world organization of nations could keep the peace and prevent a repetition of the horrors of the 1914-18 war in Europe. An effective world body now seemed possible because communications were so much better and there was increasing experience of working together in international organizations. Coordination and cooperation for economic and social progress were becoming important.

The League had two basic aims. Firstly, it sought to preserve the peace through collective action. Disputes would be referred to the League's

Council for arbitration and conciliation. If necessary, economic and then military sanctions could be used. In other words, members undertook to defend other members from aggression. Secondly, the League aimed to promote international cooperation in economic and social affairs.

The Covenant of the League of Nations begins...

“In order to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war, by the prescription of open, just and honourable relations between nations, by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among Governments, and by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organised peoples with one another, Agree to this Covenant of the League of Nations."

The end of the League

As the Second World War unfolded, it became clear that the League had failed in its chief aim of keeping the peace. The League had no military power of its own. It depended on its members' contributions; and its members were not willing to use sanctions, economic or military.Moral authority was insufficient.

Several Big Powers failed to support the League: the United States crucially never joined; Germany was a member for only seven years from 1926 and the USSR for only five years from 1934; Japan and Italy both withdrew in the 30s. The League then depended mainly on Britain and France, who were understandably hesitant to act forcefully. It was indeed difficult for governments long accustomed to operating independently to work through this new organization.

The UN Charter

Even as the Second World War raged, the leaders of Britain, China, the US and the USSR, under intense pressure from the press and public, discussed

the details of a post-war organization. In 1944 representatives of China, the UK, the US and the USSR meeting at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, prepared a blueprint for an international organization. Towards the end of the war representatives of 50 countries gathered in San Francisco between April and June 1945 to hammer out the final text that would lay the foundations of international cooperation. This was the Charter of the United Nations, signed on 26 June by 50 countries. Poland, the 51st country, was not able to send a representative to the San Francisco conference but is considered an original member.

Although the League was abandoned, most of its ideals and some of its structure were kept by the United Nations and outlined in its Charter. The ideals of peace and social and economic progress remained the basic goals of the new world organization. However, these were developed to fit the new and more complex post-war world.

The League's Council was transformed into the Security Council consisting of the five victors of the war as permanent members and ten other countries serving two year terms. The five permanent members - China, France, the UK, the USSR, and the US were also given veto power, which means that decisions taken by the Security Council can be blocked by any of the five permanent members. This is significant firstly because the Security Council is the principle UN organ responsible for ensuring peace, and, secondly, because it is the only body whose decisions are binding on all Member States. Since the creation of the UN the balance of Big Powers has changed and over one hundred new Member States, mainly non-Western, have joined. With these changes have come increasing demands to reform the Security Council.

The brief provision for Social Activities in the League's Covenant was turned into a comprehensive prescription for international economic and social cooperation, with the aim of achieving conditions of stability and well-being recognised as essential for peaceful relations among nations. Under the aegis of a new organ, the Economic and Social Council, the work of existing and anticipated Specialized Agencies in the fields of labour, education, health, agriculture, development and many others would be coordinated within the UN system. Racism and repression demanded that

another, new, people's element should enter emphatically into the Charter, that of rights. Many sorts of rights, from the right to self-determination, which encouraged the independence of colonized peoples, to general human rights, which aimed to protect individuals, are enshrined in the Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and two Covenants which have become major, standard-setting additions to international law.

The UN System

The basic structure of the United Nations is outlined in an organizational chart. What the structure does not show is that decision-making within the UN system is not as easy as in many other organizations. The UN is not an independent, homogeneous organization; it is made up of states, so actions by the UN depend on the will of Member States, to accept, fund or carry them out. Especially in matters of peace-keeping and international politics, it requires a complex, often slow, process of consensus-building that must take into account national sovereignty as well as global needs.

The Specialized Agencies, while part of the UN system, are separate, autonomous intergovernmental organizations which work with the UN and with each other. The agencies carry out work relating to specific fields such as trade, communications, air and maritime transport, agriculture and development. Although they have more autonomy, their work within a country or between countries is always carried out in partnership with those countries. They also depend on funds from Member States to achieve their goals.

Recently, international conferences organised by the UN have gained significance. UN conferences have been held since the 1960s, but with the Conference on Environment and Development, known as the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, they turned into real fora for deciding on national and international policy regarding issues that affect everyone such as the environment, human rights and economic development. Since the Earth Summit, UN conferences have turned into forums in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can voice their concerns alongside those of governments. Such conferences focus world attention on these issues and place them squarely on the global agenda. Yet, once the

international agreements produced by these conferences are signed, it is still up to each individual country to carry them out. With the moral weight of international conferences and the pressures of media and NGOs, Member States are more likely to endorse the agreements and put them into effect.

United Nation’s Peackeeeping Q&A http://www.un.org/Pubs/CyberSchoolBus/index.html

United Nations peacekeeping is facing an extraordinary challenge. The number of operations is reaching a record level, troop deployment is on an upward spiral and the need for more civilian specialists is becoming acute. Early in 2004, the United Nations Security Council was facing the prospect of creating or expanding peacekeeping operations on an unprecedented scale. At that time, the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations was managing 15 field operations, including 14 peacekeeping and one political mission. Adding to this list were potential operations in Burundi, Sudan and Haiti. Planning for potential operations in other areas also required the Department's attention. The United Nations has consistently improved its capacity to support operations and to plan for new ones. However, these ballooning demands will test the UN's peacekeeping capacity as never before and will require substantial additional resources if they are to be met.The following questions and answers describe United Nations peacekeeping in 2004.

What is Peacekeeping?

Peacekeeping is a way to help countries torn by conflict create conditions for sustainable peace. UN peacekeepers—soldiers and military officers, civilian police officers and civilian personnel from many countries—monitor and observe peace processes that emerge in post-conflict situations and assist ex-combatants to implement the peace agreements they have signed. Such assistance comes in many forms, including confidence-building measures, power-sharing arrangements, electoral support, strengthening the rule of law, and economic and social development.The Charter of the United Nations gives the UN Security Council the power and responsibility to take collective action to maintain international peace and security. For this reason, the international community usually looks to the Security Council to authorize peacekeeping operations. Most of these operations are established and implemented by the United Nations itself

with troops serving under UN operational command. In other cases, where direct UN involvement is not considered appropriate or feasible, the Council authorizes regional organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Economic Community of West African States or coalitions of willing countries to implement certain peacekeeping or peace enforcement functions.

How has peacekeeping evolved?

 from traditional peacekeeping …..

United Nations peacekeeping initially developed during the Cold War era as a means to resolve conflicts between States by deploying unarmed or lightly armed military personnel from a number of countries, under UN command, between the armed forces of the former warring parties. Peacekeepers could be called in when the major international powers tasked the UN with bringing closure to conflicts threatening regional stability and international peace and security, including a number of so-called “proxy wars” waged by client States of the superpowers.

Peacekeepers were not expected to fight fire with fire. As a general rule, they were deployed when the ceasefire was in place and the parties to the conflict had given their consent. UN troops observed from the ground and reported impartially on adherence to the ceasefire, troop withdrawal or other elements of the peace agreement.This gave time and breathing space for diplomatic efforts to address the underlying causes of conflict.

…. to multidimensional peacekeeping

The end of the Cold War precipitated a dramatic shift in UN and multilateral peacekeeping. In a new spirit of cooperation, the Security Council established larger and more complex UN peacekeeping missions, often to help implement comprehensive peace agreements between protagonists in intra-State conflicts. Furthermore, peacekeeping came to involve more and more non-military elements to ensure sustainability.The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations was created in 1992 to support this increased demand for complex peacekeeping.

By and large, the new operations were successful. In El Salvador and Mozambique, for example, UN peacekeeping provided ways to achieve self-sustaining peace. Some efforts failed, perhaps as the result of an overly optimistic assessment of what UN peacekeeping could accomplish. While complex missions in Cambodia and Mozambique were ongoing, the Security Council dispatched peacekeepers to conflict zones like Somalia, where neither ceasefires nor the consent of all the parties in conflict had been secured. These operations did not have the manpower, nor were they supported by the political will, to implement their mandates. The failures—most notably the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda—led to a period of retrenchment and selfexamination in UN peacekeeping.

What has the UN done to improve peacekeeping since the 1990s?

In 1999, having decided that a reform of UN peacekeeping was imperative, Secretary-General Kofi Annan undertook a comprehensive assessment of events leading to the fall of Srebrenica and also commissioned an independent inquiry into the actions of the United Nations during the Rwanda genocide of 1994. These assessments highlighted the need to improve the capacity of the UN to conduct peacekeeping operations and in particular to ensure rapid deployment and mandates that met the needs on the ground. UN peacekeeping operations needed clear rules of engagement; better coordination between the UN Secretariat in New York and UN agencies in the planning and deployment of peacekeeping operations; and improved cooperation between the UN and regional organizations. The UN also needed to bolster efforts to protect civilians in conflicts.

Around the same time, demands for UN intervention began to grow again in both size and scope: peacekeeping operations expanded to include rule of law, civil administration, economic development and human rights. In 1999, UN peacekeeping was tasked with setting up an interim administration in East Timor preparing the way towards independence.The same year, UN peacekeeping undertook a transitional administration mission in Kosovo, after NATO air strikes on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had ended. In 1999 and 2000, the Council mandated the establishment of three new

operations in Africa (in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Eritrea and Ethiopia).

The Brahimi Report

In March 2000, the Secretary-General asked a panel of international experts led by his long-time adviser Lakhdar Brahimi (a former Algerian foreign minister) to examine UN peace operations and identify where and when UN peacekeeping could be most effective and how it could be improved.

The Report1 of the Panel on UN Peace Operations—known as the Brahimi report—offered clear advice about minimum requirements for a successful UN peacekeeping mission. These included a clear and specific mandate, consent to the operation by the parties in conflict and adequate resources.

As a result of the report, the United Nations and Member States initiated a number of measures to improve UN peacekeeping. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) was authorized to increase its Headquarters staff to support field missions. DPKO bolstered the military and police advisers’ offices. It added a Peacekeeping Best Practices Unit to analyse lessons learned and advise missions on gender issues; peacekeeper conduct; planning for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programmes; rule of law and other matters. A pre-mandate financing mechanism was established to ensure that a budget would be available for new mission start-ups, and

DPKO’s logistics base in Brindisi (Italy) received funding to acquire strategic deployment stocks. Ongoing training was strengthened to provide additional rapid response capacity. DPKO reorganized the UN Stand-by Arrangements System (UNSAS), a roster of Member States’ specific resources including specialized military and civilian personnel, material and equipment available for UN peacekeeping. The new UNSAS now provides for forces to be made available within the first 30 to 90 days of a new operation. The effort to get clear and realistic mandates from the Security Council has also progressed.

1 A/55/305-S/2000/809

The challenges that face UN peacekeeping in 2004 are immense. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, the UN is supporting a transitional government in a huge country with minimal infrastructure and little national cohesion. It is preparing Kosovo and the parties involved for talks on final status. It is building up its mission in Liberia and managing the downsizing of UN operations in Timor-Leste and Sierra Leone. At the same time, new crises have flared and new peace agreements have been signed. Several of the world’s most capable militaries are heavily committed—mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan—while developing countries, which make up the UN’s top 10 contributors to peacekeeping operations, have limited means.

In early 2004, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations was managing 15 field operations (14 peacekeeping operations and one political mission) and facing the prospects of at least four new or expanded missions. The number of uniformed personnel deployed in peacekeeping operations was expected to grow from 51,000 to some 78,000 with the addition of 25,000 troops, 2,500 civilian police and 1,500 military observers. Some 42 senior officials—civilian, military and police—could be needed to manage these operations on the ground, along with 6,500 civilian personnel (added to some 9,700 already deployed) as well as necessary material resources such as vehicles and office and communications equipment. The peacekeeping budget may nearly double as a result: additional missions could require an estimated $2.38 billion above the currently proposed budget of $2.68 billion for 2004-2005.

The growth in African peacekeeping has been particularly remarkable and could be a sign that decades of major conflict in the continent are coming to an end. In addition to missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the UN was also managing peacekeeping operations in Ethiopia/Eritrea and Western Sahara, deploying a new mission in Côte d’Ivoire and planning for possible operations in Burundi and Sudan.

Somalia as well was moving towards peace agreements that could require UN peacekeeping. Beyond Africa, a new peacekeeping operation was being planned for Haiti.

Key factors

Certain factors are universally critical for the success of any UN peacekeeping operation, regardless of location. The international community must diagnose the problem correctly before prescribing peacekeeping as the treatment; there must be a peace to keep; and all key parties to the conflict must consent to stop fighting and to accept the UN role in helping them resolve their dispute. Members of the Security Council must agree on a clear and achievable mandate and the operation’s desired outcome. In addition, deployment must proceed at the required pace.

The international community has to be prepared to stay the course. Real peace takes time; building national capacities takes time; rebuilding trust takes time. International peacekeepers must perform the tasks with professionalism, competence and integrity.

Some key issues currently facing UN peacekeeping include:• Personnel: Finding troop contingents for burgeoning

peacekeeping operations—and increasing participation by “northern” countries— remains a major concern. However, a larger challenge is meeting demands for the recruitment of thousands of skilled police officers and civilian staff with expertise in justice, civil administration, economic development or other specialized fields. UN peacekeeping must also secure other capabilities such as tactical air support, field medical facilities and movement control operations—resources usually provided by willing Member States.

Ideally, these personnel would have some knowledge of the language, culture and political situation of the country concerned.They must also be available for deployment on short notice. The UN has recently broadened the civilian police eligibility pool to include retired officers. In addition, it has placed a high priority on training and on building rosters of rapidly-deployable, qualified staff.

• The need to restore basic services and government: In the past, international donors have been reluctant to pay for civil service salaries or basic office equipment in local administrations. Currently, however, there is a growing consensus on the need to shore up basic state services, including the judiciary, civil administration and public utilities and to return post-conflict societies to normalcy as quickly as possible.

• Law and order: The UN has included rule of law as a critical part of mission planning and has made considerable progress in establishing a capacity to support activities by police, judiciary and corrections in ongoing operations.

In post-conflict societies, a judicial system—legal frameworks, courts, judges and prosecutors, prisons—must be able to render independent and fair justice at an early stage. If the local police force has lost credibility with the population, it may be necessary to deploy a temporary international force or to undertake a comprehensive retraining programme. The situation may call for a tribunal dedicated to redressing past war crimes, or for a truth and reconciliation commission.

• Elections and restoration of democracy: Several peacekeeping missions have been mandated to conduct elections. Elections are not a quick fix, however, and the UN has learned the importance of creating the right conditions first, including an acceptable level of security, a legal framework, a transparent voter registration process and sometimes even a constitution, with the consensus of all actors involved.

• Security: An insecure environment hinders peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Successful peacekeeping often requires large numbers of troops, particularly in the initial period of the mission. Their presence can provide some stability and security until a credible local police force can be built up.

The safety and security of UN field personnel became an issue of great concern within the UN with the unprecedented attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August 2003, causing Secretary-General Kofi Annan to

order a review of the entire United Nations security system. Improvements are ongoing and require further support by Member States.

• Collective action: The United Nations, through the Security Council, has provided a forum for the countries of the world to decide together how to respond to threats to peace and security.The contentious diplomatic prelude to the Iraq war inspired the Secretary-General to appoint a high-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change tasked with examining the major threats and challenges the world faces in the field of peace and security and making recommendations on how to respond effectively through collective action.The Panel’s report is due in late 2004.

 Who decides to dispatch a UN peacekeeping operation and who is in charge?

 

The United Nations Security Council normally creates and defines peacekeeping missions. It does this by providing the mission with a mandate—a description of the mission’s tasks.To establish a new peacekeeping mission, or change the mandate or strength of an existing mission, nine of the Security Council’s 15 member States must vote in favour.

However, if any one of the five permanent members—China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom or the United States—votes against the proposal, it fails.

The Secretary-General directs and manages peacekeeping operations and reports to the Council on their progress. Most large missions are headed by a Special Representative of the Secretary-General. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations assists the Secretary-General in formulating policies and procedures for peacekeeping, making recommendations on the establishment of new missions and in managing ongoing missions.The Department also supports a small number of political missions, such as the UN mission in Afghanistan.

Senior military officers, staff officers and military observers serving on United Nations missions are directly employed by the UN—usually on secondment from their national armed forces. Peacekeeping troops, popularly known as Blue Helmets, participate in UN peacekeeping under terms that are carefully negotiated by their Governments and remain under the authority of those Governments. The troops and their commanders are deployed as national contingents, which report on operational matters to the mission’s Force Commander, and through him to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General.

The authority to send or withdraw peacekeepers remains with the Government that volunteered them, as does responsibility for pay, disciplinary and personnel matters.

Civilian police officers are also contributed by Member States and serve on the same basis as military observers, that is as experts on mission paid by the United Nations.

The Security Council may give its authorization to peacekeeping operations that are carried out by other bodies.Those operations are not under UN command. In 1999, for example, once the NATO bombing campaign was over, the Council authorized NATO to keep the peace in Kosovo. At the same time, the Council set up the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)—a UN peacekeeping operation—and tasked it with administering the territory, ensuring law and order and creating democratic institutions of self-government, including an effective civilian police. The same year, the Council authorized an international force led by Australia to restore security in East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste. That force was replaced the following year by a UN peacekeeping operation. In 2001, the Council authorized an international coalition to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan, while also setting up a UN political mission to support the transitional government.

 How much does it cost?

 

UN peacekeeping is highly cost-effective.The UN spends less per year on peacekeeping worldwide than the City of New York spends on the annual budgets of its fire and police departments. Furthermore, UN peacekeeping is far cheaper than the alternative, which is war. UN peacekeeping cost about $2.6 billion in 2002. In the same year, Governments worldwide spent more than $794 billion on arms— a figure that represents 2.5 per cent of world gross domestic product and shows no sign of decreasing.

In 1993, annual UN peacekeeping costs peaked at some $3.6 billion, reflecting the expense of operations in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia. By 1998, costs had dropped to just under $1 billion. With the resurgence of larger-scale operations, costs for UN peacekeeping rose to $3 billion in 2001.

The proposed peacekeeping budget for the year 2004-2005 is $2.68 billion. With the addition of a possible four new missions, that amount could grow by $2.38 billion.

All Member States are legally obliged to pay their share of peacekeeping costs under a complex formula that they themselves have established. Despite this legal obligation, Member States owed approximately $2.03 billion in current and back peacekeeping dues as of March 2004.

 How are peacekeepers compensated?

 

Peacekeeping soldiers are paid by their own Governments according to their own national rank and salary scale. Countries volunteering uniformed personnel to peacekeeping operations are reimbursed by the UN at a flat rate of a little over $1,000 per soldier per month.The UN also reimburses countries for equipment. Reimbursements have been deferred at times because of cash shortages caused by Member States’ failure to pay their dues on time. Since the great majority of troops in UN peacekeeping operations are contributed by developing countries, this places an additional

financial burden on Member States that can least afford it. Civilian police and other civilian personnel are paid from the peacekeeping budget established for the operation.

 Who contributes personnel?

 

The United Nations Charter stipulates that to assist in maintaining peace and security around the world, all Member States of the UN should make available to the Security Council necessary armed forces and facilities. Since 1948, close to 130 nations have contributed military and civilian police personnel to peace operations. While detailed records of all personnel who have served in peacekeeping missions since 1948 are not available, it is estimated that up to one million soldiers, police officers and civilians have served under the UN flag in the last 56 years.As of March 2004, 94 countries were contributing a total of more than 51,000 uniformed personnel—the highest number since 1995.

Despite the large number of contributors, the greatest burden continues to be borne by a core group of developing countries. The 10 main troop-contributing countries to UN peacekeeping operations as of early 2004 were Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Ghana, Nepal, Uruguay, Jordan, Kenya and Ethiopia. About 10 per cent of the troops and civilian police deployed in UN peacekeeping missions come from the European Union and one per cent from the United States. (see Monthly Summary of Contributors)

The head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Under-Secretary- General Jean-Marie Guéhenno, has reminded Member States that “the provision of well-equipped,well-trained and disciplined military and police personnel to UN peacekeeping operations is a collective responsibility of Member States. Countries from the South should not and must not be expected to shoulder this burden alone”.

As of March 2004, in addition to military and police personnel, more than 3,200 international civilian personnel, 1,200 UN Volunteers and nearly 6,500 local civilian personnel worked in UN peacekeeping missions.

 

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Can UN peacekeepers use force?

 

The concept of traditional UN peacekeeping holds that peacekeepers are unarmed or lightly armed and can use force only in self-defence. In the last few years, however, events have led to debate on how to make UN peacekeepers more effective in dangerous and complex missions, while ensuring their impartiality.

Under-resourced, under-sized peacekeeping operations with weak rules of engagement have proved to be ill-suited to contain armed factions arising in the period following civil wars. In some cases, UN peacekeepers themselves have come under attack and sustained casualties. Increasingly, the Security Council has mandated peacekeeping operations on the basis of Chapter VII2 of the United Nations Charter, allowing peacekeepers to adopt a robust posture with weaponry that creates a deterrent effect. Rules of engagement governing the use of force have been strengthened, allowing peacekeepers in missions where this is warranted “to use all necessary means” to protect civilians in their immediate vicinity and prevent violence against UN staff and personnel. Currently, UN missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Timor-Leste and Côte d’Ivoire operate under “Chapter VII” mandates.

While affirming the Blue Helmets’ right to defend themselves and those they are mandated to protect, the Secretary-General has stressed that this new “doctrine” should not be interpreted as a means of turning the UN into

a warfighting machine, and that the use of force should always be seen as a measure of last resort.

2 Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter is entitled “Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression. Chapter VI deals with the “Pacific Settlements of Dispute.” Chapter VII outlines when the Security Council may authorize armed force to “give effect to its decisions” in threats to peace, breaches of a peace or acts of aggression.

 

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How is the UN cooperating with other peace and security organizations?

 

Beginning in the 1990s, UN peacekeeping has increasingly engaged in partnerships with regional organizations.These partnerships will be all the more crucial in 2004 as UN peacekeeping embarks on new operations that will stretch current capacities.

The UN set up its first operation co-located with a regional peacekeeping force in Liberia in 1993. That force was deployed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). In 1994, the UN operation in Georgia began working with the peacekeeping force of the Commonwealth of Independent States. In the second half of the 1990s, operations such as UNMIBH in Bosnia and Herzegovina and UNMIK in Kosovo worked in tandem with NATO, the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe. In Afghanistan, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force works closely with the UN political support mission.

More recently, other peacekeeping partners have stepped in to assist UN peacekeeping at critical moments to bridge gaps in deployment and strength

and to further develop rapid response capabilities. In July 2003 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Operation Artemis, a French-led European Union force, stabilized the situation in Bunia, Ituri province, where civilians were being targeted by warring factions. Authorized by the Security Council for 90 days, the force stanched the violence, got weapons off the streets and saved thousands of civilians. It also prepared the way for the Ituri Brigade, deployed by MONUC, the UN peacekeeping operation in the Congo, before the EU force withdrew. In October 2003, in Liberia and more recently in Côte d’Ivoire,ECOWAS forces paved the way for the deployment of United Nations troops. In addition, regional brigades are being formed in Africa as part of the African Standby Force—an initiative of the African Union welcomed and supported by the United Nations.

These cooperative arrangements with regional and other international security organizations have improved the international community’s efforts to end conflicts in some areas and helped restore international faith in the utility of UN peacekeeping. They also demonstrate the need for and commitment to continued peacebuilding in post-conflict situations.

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What is being done to address HIV/AIDS in UN peacekeeping?

 

The United Nations bases its current HIV/AIDS policy on non-discrimination and respect for international human rights law. Preventing the transmission of HIV among peacekeepers and host communities is a key priority of the UN, which strongly encourages voluntary confidential testing and counselling of peacekeepers, both before deployment and in the mission area. A standardized training programme has been developed for troop-contributing countries to ensure that all uniformed peacekeepers get complete HIV/AIDS information before they deploy.There are now mission training cells and HIV/AIDS advisers in many peacekeeping operations.

Peacekeepers also carry UNAIDS awareness cards that contain basic facts about the transmission and nature of the disease. In addition, the safety of blood and blood products for transfusion in mission clinics is ensured by using supplies from World Health Organization monitored sources.

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What is being done to address trafficking of persons in peacekeeping operations areas?

 

In many instances, human trafficking is supported by organized crime and by those in a position to manipulate post-conflict vulnerabilities for revenue. The UN is working to prevent peacekeepers from becoming a source of demand that traffickers may target. Sensitization programmes for military and civilian personnel are under way in new and current missions, and specific training materials are also being developed. Other tools include guidance for the detection and identification of these activities and model legislation for national plans of action. Any involvement of peacekeeping personnel in human trafficking or any other form of sexual abuse or exploitation constitutes an act of serious misconduct and results in disciplinary measures.

Efforts are also being made at UN Headquarters and with Member States to strengthen the mechanisms for detection and investigation of discipline problems as well as the conduct of disciplinary proceedings and follow-up in missions.

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What is the UN doing to encourage the participation of women in peacekeeping?

 

In its resolution 1325 of 31 October 2000, the Security Council expressed its willingness to incorporate a gender perspective into peacekeeping operations and urged that a gender component be established in peace missions. Gender offices have been placed in large, multi-dimensional peace missions and gender focal points in small missions. In addition, a number of missions have undertaken measures to promote gender balance in local police forces and to work with newly restructured police forces on issues related to domestic violence and human trafficking.

The need to increase the participation of women in all aspects of peace operations and at all levels, particularly at the highest levels of decision-making, remains a priority concern. The first female Special Representative of the Secretary-General was appointed in 1992 in the United Nations mission in Angola. Now, years later, there are still only two Special Representatives who are women (in UNOMIG, the United Nations Observer Mission in Gergia and in ONUB, the United Nations Operation in Burundi). The Secretary-General has called on Member States to increase the recruitment of women as military observers, peacekeeping troops and civilian police.

Why should countries contribute troops to UN peacekeeping?

 

All Member States agreed under the UN Charter to provide armed forces for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security: peacekeeping is an international collective responsibility. UN peacekeeping is one of the specific and unique tools available to the international community to help resolve conflicts and prevent internal wars from destabilizing regions, when the conditions for its success exist. UN peacekeeping is also cost-effective when compared to the costs of conflict and its toll in lives and economic devastation.

As an investment, UN-led peacekeeping operations—as opposed to those conducted by ad-hoc coalitions—have the distinct advantage of a built-in

mechanism for globally sharing the financial, material and personnel costs. In addition, the time requirement for deployment of start-up resources for new missions has been drastically reduced through the UN’s rapid response capability.

 http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/faq/q14.htm  http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/faq/q16.htm

What are some recent successful UN peacekeeping operations?

 

While the failures of some UN peacekeeping operations have been well-publicized, the success stories have not attracted similar attention. Absence of conflict does not often get the big headlines. Some recent examples of successful peacekeeping are:

Bosnia and Herzegovina

When the United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH) ended operations in December 2002, the most extensive police reform and restructuring project ever undertaken by the UN had been completed. UNMIBH had trained and accredited a 17,000 strong national police force. In addition to maintaining internal security, this force has made progress in curbing smuggling, the narcotics trade and human trafficking.

Timor-Leste

The UN was called in to East Timor (now Timor-Leste) in late 1999 to guide the Timorese towards statehood in the wake of violence and devastation that followed a UN-led consultation on integration with Indonesia. The United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) operated under a multidimensional mandate to provide security and maintain law and order while working with Timorese to lay the foundations of democratic governance.The UN established an effective

administration, enabled refugees to return, helped to develop civil and social services, ensured humanitarian assistance, supported capacity-building for self-governance and helped to establish conditions for sustainable development.

The UN still has a peacekeeping presence in independent Timor-Leste (the United Nations Mission in East Timor, UNMISET) to assist in building administrative structures, developing the police service and maintaining security.

Sierra Leone

The efforts of the international community to end an 11-year civil war and move the country towards peace have enabled Sierra Leone to enter a period of democratic transition and better governance with the assistance of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). Since the May 2002 elections, Sierra Leone has enjoyed a much improved security environment and continues to work towards consolidating the peace. Key milestones include completion of the disarmament and demobilization of some 75,000 combatants, including almost 7,000 children, and destruction of their weapons. UNAMSIL peacekeepers have reconstructed roads; renovated and built schools, houses of worship and clinics; and initiated agricultural projects and welfare programmes. UNAMSIL is expected to withdraw by the end of 2004, pending careful assessments of regional and internal security.

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Progress has also been achieved by the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC). From a small observer mission in 2000, MONUC evolved to become, first, a disengagement and monitoring mission; then an assistance and verification mission for disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, reintegration and resettlement programmes; and now a complex mission tasked with facilitating the transitional process through national elections in 2005. By remaining in contact with all parties of the transitional government, MONUC has helped create an enabling environment for the adoption of key

legislation related to the reform of the army and police and competencies of the various ministries and transitional institutions.

A large portion of the country is now at peace, and steps have been taken towards re-unification: the new national flag flies in territories formerly controlled by belligerents; the Congo River has reopened to traffic; commercial airlines fly between Kinshasa and cities once under rebel control; postal and cellular phone networks have expanded. This has allowed MONUC, which has an authorized strength of 10,800 troops, to deploy contingents to the northeastern district of Ituri, where unrest continued in early 2004.

Liberia

In Liberia, the UN peacekeeping mission, UNMIL, was dispatched in record time to assist in the implementation of a comprehensive peace agreement. Even before UNMIL’s full authorized strength of 15,000 uniformed personnel was reached, the security situation in the country improved dramatically.Violence and ceasefire violations decreased, and UN peacekeepers paved the way for the provision of humanitarian assistance and for the demobilization, disarmament and reintegration of ex-combatants.The ongoing deployment of troops, civilian police and civil affairs personnel during 2004 will continue to facilitate the restoration of civil administration and governance.

 

Why is UN peacekeeping essential?

 

Where inadequate political structures fail to provide for the orderly transfer of power, where dissatisfied and vulnerable populations are manipulated and when competition for scarce resources intensifies the anger and frustration among people trapped in poverty, armed conflict will continue to flare.These elements provide fuel for violence within or between States, and countless numbers of weapons, readily available worldwide, provide the

means. The results are human suffering, often on a massive scale, threats to wider international peace and security, and the destruction of the economic and social life of entire populations.

Many of today's conflicts may seem remote to those not immediately in the line of fire. But the nations of the world must weigh the risks of action against the proven dangers of inaction. Failure by the international community to try to control conflicts and resolve them peacefully may result in wider conflicts, involving more actors. Recent history has shown how quickly civil wars between parties in one country can destabilize neighbouring countries and spread throughout entire regions. Few modern conflicts can be considered truly "local".They often generate a host of problems—such as illegal traffic in arms, terrorism, drug trafficking, refugee flows, and damage to the environment.The repercussions are felt far from the immediate conflict zone. International cooperation is needed to deal with these and other global problems. UN peacekeeping, built on a half-century of experience in the field, is an indispensable tool. Its legitimacy and universality are unique, derived from its character as an action taken on behalf of a global organization comprising 191 Member States. UN peacekeeping operations can open doors which might otherwise remain closed to efforts in peacemaking and peace-building, to secure lasting peace.

 

he United States Should Withdraw From the United Nations by David Holcberg  (May 12, 2001)http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=528

Summary: If America really cares about human rights, the best thing it can do is to take this opportunity and withdraw from the United Nations.

[www.CapitalismMagazine.com] Last week, the US was voted out of the UN Human Rights Commission. Rights violating nations such as Sudan, Libya, and Syria, were voted in. What does this vote tell us about the nature of the UN and of its members?

Well, it clearly tells us that most of the UN’s members don’t care for human rights. If they did, they would not have elected savage dictatorships and terrorist sponsors to oversee and protect human rights in the world. Nobody that really cared about hens would put the foxes in charge of the hen-house. According to the UN itself, Sudan’s government is directly responsible for “displacement, starvation, and killing of civilians, looting and burning of villages, abductions and rape.” Libya and Syria have been known sponsors of international terrorism for over three decades. Sierra Leone, another country voted in, has been recently denounced by the UN for committing “abuses of human rights … with impunity, in particular atrocities against civilians …including executions, mutilations, abductions, arbitrary detention, forced labor, looting, [and] killings of journalists.” [For modern examples of slavery in Africa see Walter Williams' article "Black Slavery is Alive in 2001"--Editor]

But we shouldn’t really be surprised with the vote’s outcome. After all, Russia has been in the UN Human Rights Commission since its creation, in 1947, despite having been a totalitarian state where human rights were non-existent for most of that time. How then could the commission have had any credibility at all?

The answer is that the presence of the US gave the UN Human Rights Commission credibility. Now that the US is gone, it has none.

Americans should realize this fact and start asking themselves a couple of questions. For instance: Should the US have been sitting in the commission with communist Russia for almost half a century? And more importantly, should the US still be a member in the UN alongside dozens of dictatorships that have no respect for human rights? Why should the US grant these nations the legitimacy that they do not deserve?

The reason why the US accepts these dictatorial nations is because America has partially fallen for the false ideologies of self-determination and multiculturalism. Self-determination holds that every nation has the right to determine its own form of government, regardless of how brutal or unjust that form might be. Multiculturalism holds that all nations and cultures are equally moral and should be treated with respect regardless of their particular nature. But in reality, not all forms of government are equally just and not all nations are morally equal. Most nations, in fact, are hopelessly unjust and immoral, and should not be granted any recognition or respect, but only strict condemnation.

The US should stop financing and supporting an organization choke-full of dictatorships like the UN. The US presence in the UN serves only to legitimize these tyrannies’ existence and their continuous abuse of human rights. To sanction evil is as impractical as it is immoral. The US cannot hope to protect human rights by associating itself with human rights violators.

Of course, the US should continue to pursue a foreign policy that supports human rights, but should do so on its own, or in alliance with other nations that actually share its values. If America really cares about human rights, the best thing it can do is to take this opportunity and withdraw from the UN. Then the world may get the message that human rights are more important that membership in a corrupt and morally bankrupt organization.

Related website: The United Nations is Evil

About the Author: David Holcberg, a former civil engineer and businessman, is now a writer living in Southern California. He is also a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. You can contact him at davidholcberg@hotmail.com

HE NEW MANDATE FOR UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING

by Beth K. Lamont November 25, 2000

THE nightmare of human disaster in Rwanda in 1994, after UN Peacekeeping Forces withdrew, shocked us into questioning the whole concept of peacekeeping. What's a peacekeeper to do when there is no peace to keep? What good are peacekeepers if they can't protect people? The mandate to treat opposing parties with impartiality is ludicrous when one party is clearly the aggressor and the other is clearly the victim. The mandate itself is flawed. How could a witness stand by and remain impartial? It would amount to stifling one's own sense of moral outrage, and in effect, condoning the killing. How absurd to consider expressing impartiality. Would we urge the aggressors to stop killing and urge the victims to stop dying? Insanity! Aggression is aggression is aggression!

There's no getting around this fact, no matter how strongly felt one's cause is, or how justified one's actions are believed to be, those actions must stop short of violence! Long standing human struggles against oppressors around the world, and smoldering enmities that are whipped into flame, are tests of endurance and restraint. Wisdom is perhaps the most essential value, as expressed in these brave and discerning words: "There are many just causes for which I would die, but not a single one for which I would kill."

With all of our blunders and lapses, NATO bombings, for instance, or cruel economic sanctions against the powerless, or by ignoring besieged populations, sad experience has taught us that the essential mandate for effective peacemaking or for peacekeeping must ultimately become zero tolerance for the harming of human beings! A new vision for a permanent UN Peacekeeping Force is long overdue, and is being debated at this time. Perhaps with the new millennium's dedication to new beginnings, a more respectful and humanistic peacekeeping mandate will emerge and be etched in stone for all time.

ALTHOUGH the UN was dedicated after World War II to preventing future wars, it has failed miserably in its dual and conflicting mandate: that of

acting in the best interests of We the Peoples of Earth, while respecting the absolute sovereignty of nations. The UN Security Council, with disproportionate and unbalanced power assumed by its permanent Member States, has dominated UN actions. Peacekeeping operations, initiated in the UN Security Council, have tried over the years to meet the needs in numerous crises, but have had little continuity or oversight. The Council has not shown an evenhandedness in choosing or refusing to commit to a situation, nor has it afforded open information exchange from affected parties or nations, nor has it ever been assured of a commitment from every nation for funding or troops and personnel for a peacekeeping operation.

In a November, 2000 New York Times news article UN Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed doubts that a Palestinian request for UN Peacekeeping forces to provide safety and security for the Palestinian people in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967 will even be honored. There must first be agreement by Israel, according to Kofi Annan, but Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, has ruled out such a mission. The article further states that while diplomats are divided, it is certain that the US will support Israel, and that Russia and China will not favor intervention, considering Chechnya and Tibet.

After the 1994 Rwanda genocide, Kofi Annan, himself, was criticized for having failed to heed warnings of impending disaster, and for withdrawing the UN peacekeeping troops at the very moment they were most needed. Moving to protect the peacekeepers themselves seemed a justly humane priority inasmuch as they were without any means of enforcing the peacekeeping or even a mandate for them to protect one segment of society from the other. What a tragedy it took to bring focus upon the painfully flawed mandate itself. But even then, the tragedy was not adequately dealt with, since a subsequent report on the Rwanda genocide, commissioned by the Organization of African Unity, was not even accepted to be placed on the agenda of the UN Security Council, nor was any move made by Council Member States to discuss it, much less address the question of mandate.

The sites of human suffering with need for UN help seem to be endless: Ethiopia-Eritrea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Bosnia, and so many places under-reported, which we

learned of years too late, such as Cambodia. As a result of this, and other tragedies like East Timor, the UN Secretary General ordered:

"a comprehensive review of the whole question of peacekeeping operations in all their aspects," also "a clear set of specific, concrete and practical recommendations to assist the United Nations in conducting such activities better in the future."

A PANEL of eminent personalities from around the world, with a wide-range of experience in the fields of peacekeeping, peace-building, as well as in the fields of development and humanitarian assistance, was assembled. The Chair was Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Foreign Minister of Algeria, who after a seven-month investigation, examining tons of documents and taking testimony from hundreds of sources, analyzed the data, and created an extensive set of recommendations. The Brahimi Report, as it is known, can be found in its 74-page entirety on the UN Web site at http://www.un.org/peace/reports/peace_operations/.

On August 21st, 2000, the Brahimi Report was submitted to both the General Assembly and the Security Council with an introduction from Secretary General Kofi Annan, in which he asks for support from both entities, "...in converting into reality the far-reaching agenda laid out in the report." And stating that "The expeditious implementation of the Panel's recommendations, in my view, is essential to make the United Nations truly credible as a force for peace."

Lakhdar Brahimi presents the Report to Kofi Annan

UN/DPI Photo by Eskinder Debebe

The Executive Summary of the Brahimi Report begins with an historical perspective, and contains extensive recommendations for change. Excerpts are presented here as follows:

"The United Nations was founded, in the words of its Charter, in order 'to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.' Meeting this challenge is the most important function of the Organization, and to a very

significant degree it is the yardstick with which the Organization is judged by the peoples it exists to serve. Over the last decade, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge, and it can do no better today."

In a next paragraph, entitled Experience of the past, Brahimi states: "It should have come as no surprise to anyone that some of the missions of the past decade would be particularly hard to accomplish: They tended to deploy where conflict had not resulted in victory for any side, where a military stalemate or international pressure or both had brought fighting to a halt, but at least some of the parties to the conflict were not seriously committed to ending the confrontation. United Nations operations thus did not deploy into post-conflict situations but tried to create them."

He goes on to describe in a further paragraph entitled "Implications for peacekeeping: the need for robust doctrine and realistic mandates," "...where one party to a peace agreement clearly and incontrovertibly is violating its terms, continued equal treatment of all parties by the United Nations can in the best case result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil. No failure did more to damage the standing and credibility of the United Nations peacekeeping in the 1990s than its reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor." "...mandates should specify an operation's authority to use force...and afford the field intelligence and other capabilities needed to mount an effective defense against violent challengers. Moreover, United Nations peacekeepers---troops or police---who witness violence against civilians should be presumed to be authorized to stop it, within their means, in support of basic United Nations principles."

The entire Brahimi Report's analysis and recommendations are contained in 70 different sections detailing the need for preventive initiatives, for sound peace-building strategy, for promoting international human rights instruments, for maintaining high standards of performance with built-in accountability, for rapid deployment of forces, and for on-call expertise. These experts would be available to advise on all aspects of peacekeeping considerations, such as logistics, international law, military and civilian police, human rights, refugees, basic resources, communications,

democracy-building and electoral support, along with dozens of other important areas of expertise.

Perhaps the most important suggestion of all is that peacekeeping be treated as a core activity of the United Nations, and that expanded operations and efforts be consolidated within a single branch directly under the Secretary General which would then be directly responsible for establishing strategy and policy, rather than having it emanate piecemeal from various offices and entities. The Brahimi Report especially advocates the use of up-to-the-moment Information Technology for use in intelligence gathering, and for the wide dissemination of information, especially among strategy and policy planners, and for improving field communications during peacekeeping operations.

Essential also is a continuing long-range historical and political analysis of complex regional situations to advise the peacekeeping office of potential problems, and sending fact-finding missions in support of short-term crisis-prevention action, rather than waiting and only then deciding whether or not to respond to a request or a need for peacekeeping after a crisis is full blown. Only in this context will the creation of a coherent mission plan with an achievable exit target ever be possible. An interesting suggested feature is for a Lessons Learned Department to provide feedback and a constant review of ongoing operations to guard against making the same mistake twice, which often happens without this kind of review and overview, and without a constant sharing of information.

The Brahimi Report concludes by applauding a Security Council delegation that flew to Jakarta and Dili in the wake of the East Timor crisis in 1999, (tactfully omitting the fact that the delegation was only ten years late) citing it as an example of action at its best, not just words. It calls upon the leaders of the world assembled at the Millennium Summit:

"to commit to strengthen the capacity of the United Nations to fully accomplish the mission which is, indeed, its very raison d'etre: to help communities engulfed in strife to maintain or restore peace." The closing statement ends with a vision of giving "the people of a country the opportunity to build and to hold onto peace, to find reconciliation, to

strengthen democracy, to secure human rights. We see, above all, a United Nations that has not only the will but also the ability to fulfill its great promise, and to justify the confidence and trust placed in it by the overwhelming majority of humankind."

Thereafter follows the balance of 74 pages of detailed specifics of the report which can be found on the UN Web site.

OPEN SESSIONS in the usually secretive UN Security Council have allowed NGO observers to witness the response of Nations to the Brahimi Report. At a meeting focused on exit strategy, almost every speaker insisted that a more important consideration was the entrance strategy. What were to be the goals? What would be the criteria for determining when they were met? Many cautioned that conflict would resume upon the departure of the peacekeeping force if it left too soon, amounting to abandonment of a fragile peace.

Some speakers insisted that no exit date should ever be set, but set only exit conditions. Elections should be only one among many goals for a peaceful transition. Governance systems must be in place and functioning. Establishment of the rule of law, maintenance of social and physical infrastructure, even operation of public utilities, creation and operation of a banking system and of tax collection are goals that experience has shown to be vital.

The term mission-creep was heard, describing the expanded role that peacekeepers have been drawn into during their operations, but this was not seen as a problem so much as a short-sighted vision and an inadequate anticipation of the sometimes inevitable long-range problems. Sometimes this seemed more to indicate impatience, reflecting the UN's precarious funding, and its need to terminate quickly so as to cut off the draining expense and the commitment of forces to a prolonged peacekeeping operation which has no far-sighted and clearly defined exit strategy. The new recommendations suggest a budget of about $150 million, considerably more than has ever been allocated in the past. Additional staffing and the reassignment of experienced UN personnel is another recommendation.

The need for robust rules of engagement was another concept discussed, with agreement that a UN peacekeeping force must be capable of defending itself against those who renege on their commitments to a peace accord, or otherwise seek to undermine the peacekeeping force by violence. Many speakers suggested the assignment of a massive and multifaceted peacekeeping force, as a psychological deterrent against challenge.

The difficulties of delivering humanitarian supplies were described. War lords who are disputing their claim to a territory want to seize and control distribution of goods so as to enhance their status with their own followers. This presents a clash of purposes that puts peacekeepers in jeopardy. Confiscation of weapons is another dangerous dilemma. The problems range from the philosophical to the practical, with no easy solutions in sight. Perhaps the Lessons Learned Department will become one of the UN's best resources.

In all the days of UN Security Council testimony in response to the Brahimi Report not one disapproving comment was heard. The general theme was Yes, Yes, Yes, Let's get on with it! Many hazards were described, and continuing difficulties were pointed out as being problems which still must be addressed, but in this relatively short time recommendations for the new peacekeeping mandate already appear to have overwhelming support.

We seem to be coming closer to the public health model; that is, for intervention in the best interests of the many, quarantining if necessary, attempting to prevent an epidemic by intercepting the spread of a dangerous organism, locating and treating those affected, while at the same time, trying to determine the root cause and eliminate the source. It has occurred to many of us that a source of much misery on the face of this earth is caused by dangerous and contagious commodities, bought and sold on the open market, those which exacerbate and promote fear, revenge, power and the accompanying implements of war.

With news of this new effort now at work within the UN to modernize and expand its peacekeeping mandate to allow a new kind of intervention in order to protect threatened peoples from crimes against humanity, most of the world community will joyfully applaud! On August 23, 2000, the US

State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, responded affirmatively stating:

"The UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) needs more staff, strengthened planning capacity, streamlined logistical structure, more flexible financing and the ability to move resources into the field in real time."

and

"Our initial perception is the report accurately reflects our main concerns about UN peacekeeping operations. We intend to work closely with the UN Secretariat and other Member States in the coming months to review the report's recommendations and develop specific plans for implementation."

It's reassuring to know that most of the nations, as well as the US State Department, will be supportive of these long-needed changes and will be willing to work toward implementing them. However, the US has been accumulating a peacekeeping debt since the mid-1990s by paying approximately 25 percent rather than the assessed 30 percent. This does not bode well for plans to even further increase UN peacekeeping spending. US Ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrook, points out that the US is generous in its voluntary contributions to UN programs and UN agencies, estimating the US contribution in the 2001 fiscal year to be over $2.5 billion. This is certainly commendable.

An article by UN reporter Barbara Crossette in The New York Times of November 23, 2000 describes Holbrook as worried that if no action is taken by the UN before the year ends, on the US request for budget reforms and reduction of US payments, "...that the recently improving attitude in Washington, marked by the larger allocation of money, could quickly reverse," reducing again the money for the UN. Holbrook hadn't mentioned that the threat of losing our seat on the Security Council for unpaid bills was a motivating factor for the attitude adjustment.

The US insists that other nations which have become richer since the UN assessments were originally allocated should pay a larger share, but at the

UN this "...is viewed as the spectacle of the world's richest country seeking to avoid paying assessments commensurate with its share of world economic output."

If a new mandate for UN peacekeeping is ever to be implemented there are still many hurdles to cross, and herein lies the most worrisome factor.

The adoption and implementation of any changes in the UN peacekeeping mandate will be fought tooth-and-nail (or verse-and-chapter) by a few US right-wing patriots who have a strangle-hold on our very own US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and who continue to embarrass the US by withholding our fare-share amount of UN dues. Already paranoid about UN black helicopters invading to usurp our sovereignty, they may go completely apoplectic at the idea of our most powerful nation status being nibbled at!

On the other hand, considering that there's always hope that we humans can be better than we have been, and that actually we are all on a learning curve, perhaps we, the most powerful nation on earth, might be persuaded to supply the bulk of the peacekeeping forces and supplies. If not instead of, at least in addition to, our relentless, wasteful and mysterious preparations for war.

Well, why not? Sure it's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it! Besides, we've already designated ourselves as the world's policeman. The image of a policeman doesn't necessarily have to be the monstrous Darth Vader figure with helmet and shield. There's the friendly cop-on-the-beat who knows just about everybody in the neighborhood and even helps old people cross the street.

We could even think of it in terms of full employment, and goodness knows, our jobs are going elsewhere, so we may as well follow. Perhaps a new recruitment slogan might be coined: Join the UN Peacekeepers-Visit foreign lands-Meet new people and HELP them! One wonders how the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee would view this effort? Oh, Jesse Helms, are you paying attention? This is a new Millennium challenge!

To get a glimpse of the reaction of the reactionaries to the Brahimi Report visit the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research at http://www.aei.org/ra/rajrb000909.htm. This article describes the Brahimi Report as being intellectually muddled and dishonest, and so badly flawed on doctrine that it amounts to waging war, not peacekeeping. The article further warns that the proposals must be viewed with skepticism, and assures that the US Congress will view them with skepticism as well. Well, well, we shall see....

The irony of a report on the successful UN peacekeeping electoral assistance operation in Bosnia-Hertzigovina, which had observed that Nation's unmarred voting November 7th, the same day as the Presidential Election in the US, was not lost on those of us assembled in the UN Security Council Chamber. Perhaps we need such an electoral assistance force in this country. It seems quite a humiliating comeuppance for the world's greatest touter of democracy. But then, practicing democracy may mean that someday we'll get it right!

Doubly ironic is a report, also by the US State Department's Richard Boucher, on November 2nd, (remember, just five days before the US Presidential election) in which he expresses disappointment that the October 29 Presidential election in Kyrgyzstan was flawed because only six candidates appeared on the ballot, "...but regrets that fourteen other candidates were excluded from the campaign for what appear to be political reasons. In our view, the overall conduct of these elections denied the people of Kyrgyzstan the right to exercise their vote in a free and fair political contest. The United States reaffirms its support for the people of Kyrgyzstan as they continue the difficult task of building a democratic society."

After the American people have spoken out to set right those many crucial domestic matters, newly brought on stage, which question our democracy: matters of uniformity of ballots and of access to the polls; matters of multi-party access to nation-wide debates, and of campaign finance reform, reminding themselves that the "airwaves" purchased by candidates have belonged to the people since 1934; and then, the matter of the horse-and-buggy days electoral college; they may begin to feel powerful enough to

take on Jesse Helms in the matter of foreign relations, and that of a wise and proper leadership role for the strongest nation, reminding that it is only one among the many nations on this earth.

~ ~ ~

Beth K. Lamont is the AHA's NGO Representative to the UN. Beth is presently an Executive Board member of and a Program Director for the Humanist Society of Metropolitan New York, the Corliss Lamont Chapter of the AHA, and is an initiator of the AHA's Humanist Advocate Program. She was Chair of AHA's Chapter Assembly, and has been involved with matters Humanistic for most of her years.

A version of this article appeared in the January/February 2001 (Volume 61, Number 1) issue of The Humanist magazine (ISSN 0018-7399), published by the American Humanist Association, 1777 T Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20009-7125 USA.

Clinton Diverted Billions From Pentagon to U.N. Peacekeeping Lawrence Morahan, CNSNews.comTuesday, Feb. 12, 2002 CNSNews.com -- A draft report by the General Accounting Office reveals that former President Clinton contributed over $24 billion for U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world between 1995 and 2001, money that wasn't officially credited to the U.S. account by the United Nations.

The report shows that America's "debt" to the United Nations was more than compensated for by extra peacekeeping assistance that the world organization never gave the United States credit for, U.N. critics said.

"This new GAO report makes it absolutely clear that the U.S. debt to the U.N. was a complete fraud," said Cliff Kincaid, a journalist and president of America's Survival, who released a copy of the draft report.

"And remember that this report only covers the fiscal years 1996 - 2001," Kincaid added. "If the complete years of the Clinton administration were taken into account, the figure could rise by several more billions."

The Clinton era saw an explosion in the number of U.N.-sponsored peacekeeping missions carried out by U.S. forces that were not necessarily supported by Congress.

Those peacekeeping operations were the cause of heated disagreements over dues, including debates on whether the United States had accumulated sufficient back dues to be voted out of the U.N. General Assembly.

Between fiscal years 1996 and 2001, the United States directly contributed an estimated $3.45 billion to support U.N. peacekeeping, the report states.

During the same period, however, U.S. indirect contributions to U.N. peacekeeping amounted to $24.2 billion.

Of the $24.2 billion figure, the GAO found that the largest indirect contribution - about $21.8 billion - was for U.S. military operations and

services. This meant military personnel and equipment had to be diverted from Pentagon operations to the United Nations.

The GAO defined indirect contributions as "U.S. programs and activities that are located in the same area as an ongoing U.N. peacekeeping operation, have objectives that help the peacekeeping operation achieve its mandated objectives, and are not an official part of the U.N. operation."

For example, estimated U.S. indirect contributions to U.N. operations in Kosovo and East Timor, which involved nation building and the training of local government agencies, "amounted to over $5.1 billion and included military operations to help provide a secure environment and programs to provide food and shelter for refugees and train police and court officials."

Congress Limits U.S. Contribution

The United Nations assesses member states a percentage share of the total cost of peacekeeping operations. The U.S. assessed share has historically been over 30 percent of total peacekeeping costs.

In November 1994, Congress limited the amount the United States could pay to 25 percent of peacekeeping costs, beginning in fiscal year 1996, the report noted. However, the United Nations continued to bill the United States at its historically 30 percent of total costs, leading to U.S. arrears.

In 2000, U.N. member states agreed to change the assessment formula and to drop the U.S. share of the peacekeeping budget over a three-year period to 27 percent, the report said.

Between fiscal years 1996, which began October 1995, and June 30, 2001, the United Nations conducted 33 peacekeeping operations in 28 countries, according to the report. As of January 2002, 15 of these operations were still ongoing in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, involving over 47,000 military personnel, civilian police, and observers.

"When you're spending American taxpayer dollars you need accountability for American taxpayer dollars, and the procedure that the U.N. has of

requesting donations and the practice of the Clinton administration to categorize expenditures as donations removes that accountability," said a senior official familiar with the GAO report.

Speaking at Heritage Foundation in Washington, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte said of U.S. involvement in peacekeeping operations: "If there is a threat to international peace and security out there, and it needs to be dealt with, it is better that we do it where possible with other partners who are picking up part of the cost."

He added: "So I would say that while we always want to be careful about the costs and we always want to be careful about where it is that we decide to undertake U.N. peacekeeping operations, there are demonstrable benefits for the United States."http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/12/55935.shtmlCopyright CNSNews.com

Africa Needs a Decisive United Nations

By Richard HolbrookeInternational Herald Tribune August 24, 2000

It would be a mistake to see the tragedy of Sierra Leone as a metaphor for all of Africa or for the failure of all United Nations peacekeeping. Parts of Africa, including some of the largest countries, have continued to show progress. South Africa, Niger-ia, Botswana, Mozambique, Ghana, Mali and even Algeria are in better shape than they used to be.

But, just as we have seen in Europe and Southeast Asia, a crisis in Africa has emerged out of the vacuum of power in countries whose geographic and ethnic boundaries are in conflict - particularly when vast riches are at stake, as they are in Angola, the Congo and Sierra Leone. These wars, while in part a legacy of the past, must be recognized as resulting to a considerable degree from the behavior of demagogues who represent the forces of greed and darkness. In the case of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, we are talking about genuinely evil people. The tragedy there is immense.

In this sense, I find the situation in the Congo and Sierra Leone very similar to the situation in the Balkans. The Europeans are not a good example for the Africans. They have torn themselves apart over ethnicity and borders time and again during the last century.

The noose is tightening around the necks of those in Africa, like Charles Taylor in Liberia and Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone, whose activities are beyond the civilized realm. The diamond industry is among the most mysterious and least understood on earth. I cannot guarantee that the UN embargo on diamonds from Sierra Leone will work. If it doesn't, the United Nations, in conjunction with the African states, will have to go further, perhaps imposing sanctions and travel bans.

I have no doubt that additional steps will be considered against Liberia and other countries that flout the goals of stability in Africa. President Bill

Clinton will be discussing this with President Olusegun Obasanjo in Nigeria this weekend.The United States has announced plans to train Nigerian troops for peacekeeping in Sierra Leone. There are two goals here. One is to have some units available for deployment in the UN force in Sierra Leone. But this program is not solely for Sierra Leone. It is for strengthening of democracy and a professional army in Nigeria.

The United Nations' peacekeeping efforts have been lamentable in their implementation. The world, therefore, has two fundamental choices. We can give up on the United Nations, in which case situations like Sierra Leone will get worse, spiral out of control and drag in other countries. Or we can try to make the United Nations better.

The American view is clear: We want to reform the United Nations in order to save it. We want to fix it, not abandon it. We need to invest more so that it can succeed, but we need to hold it to much higher standards of performance. The United Nations may be flawed, but it is indispensable. In no part of the world is this clearer than in Africa.

Mr. Holbrooke is the U.S. representative to the United Nations. This comment has been adapted by the International Herald Tribune from an interview distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/peacekpg/general/2000/holbrook.htm

Do We Need UN Peacekeeping Any More?

The arrival in Iraq of what are now the occupation forces of an ad hoc 'coalition of the willing' and in Bunia (Democratic Republic of the Congo) of a French-led force, neither of which is wearing the blue helmets of the United Nations, has inevitably revitalized the question: "Do we need UN peacekeeping forces any more?"

The answer is surely a resounding 'yes'. As John Major commented on radio recently, we may find that it becomes necessary to include some form of UN military presence in Iraq, while the Bunia Emergency Force is only scheduled to remain in the Congo until the end of August, when a larger contingent of Bangladeshi and other troops will arrive to join the UN Force (MONUC) in the country. While the question gets asked increasingly for how long the American-led troops in Iraq will need to stay - current opinion is increasingly suggesting that the length of time may prove to be considerable (possibly, several years) - nevertheless it may be that dented Iraqi pride at this foreign occupation will increasingly spill over into ever fiercer hostility; and the American track record in remaining stuck in when things turn rough can prove volatile, as Somalia showed in 1994, followed by US refusal to see the murderous and wanton killings in Rwanda within two weeks of their withdrawal from Somalia as either genocidal or of sufficient seriousness to demand international intervention.

For UN peacekeeping to thrive, there needs to be a sufficient level of consensus within the UN Security Council, not least among the five permanent members. Other influential UN member states within the UN - even if not sitting on the Council - can also bring pressures to bear on Council decisions. See, for example, India's reluctance to have the Council become more involved in Kashmir, despite a somewhat different approach by the Pakistanis.

The Brahimi Report, published in the second half of 2000 and looking at ways to enhance the capacity and competence of UN peacekeeping, may, to some extent, have restated what was already known but it had the merit of doing so explicitly and of reconfirming that UN peacekeeping is something which the member states wish to see continue, even if it was not mentioned

in the UN Charter of 1945 and has never been added into it since. It is clear that peacekeeping is now accepted as a legitimate UN activity - not the case during the Cold War.

Among the primary needs for the UN peacekeeping programme are• frankness in Secretariat reports to the Security Council -

i.e. telling the members what they need to hear rather than what they would like to;

• the agreeing by the Council of implementable mandates and the allocating of adequate resources to be able effectively to fulfil them;

• retaining the Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) at an adequate level of staff members and related resources. (It is now around 600 strong, serving some 40-50,000 troops at any point in time. The staff thus constitute about 1% of the total personnel.) This increase in personnel has enabled the DPKO to face issues on a more professional basis. There are pre-purchased (or donated) stocks of equipment in a major store in Brindisi (Italy) and enhanced troop availability is under serious discussion;

• finding solutions when (for example) resources for a particular mission prove to be inadequate for meeting the mandate's needs;

• resolving issues of mixed forces and their compatibility, be they cultural, linguistic, based on what pre-training they have received and so on. In the longer term, mixed forces are seen as the ideal; but, if an enforcement mandate has been authorized, it tends to be true that a somewhat ad hoc coalition of the willing - duly authorized by the Security Council - can prove the most effective way ahead. The current force in Bunia, with a stronger mandate than that of the UN Force there, is one example. In Sierra Leone, the British military presence (outside the mandate of the UN Force, UNAMSIL) played a key role which helped to strengthen the capacity of UNAMSIL. In East Timor, there was an initial UN-authorized force which was later transformed into a blue helmet presence, with some of the personnel from the former being integrated into the latter, operating as part of the UN Transitional Authority in East Timor.

For many victims of violence in countries in conflict or failed states, the presence of a genuinely international force, especially if it is operating within a UN operation, can bring very real encouragement that the world

has not forgotten them - the very reverse to the UN Security Council's utterly shameful behaviour in Rwanda in 1994.

For many members of UNA-UK, there is a certain anger that key UN member states (including the five permanent members of the Security Council and many NATO countries) have fallen back in their troop commitments to UN operations. There is, as outlined above, a need for deployments to be as genuinely international as possible, but there are a number of member states - from within NATO, south Asia, Africa (e.g. South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt), Australia and elsewhere - whose active presence, with the extra training, (often) discipline and resources which they enjoy, can considerably enhance the morale of a UN Force and can build in a vital training component for less experienced contingents. Even if the DPKO does not seek a war-time role (which many in UNA regret - they would prefer the UN philosophy to prevail in all international operations), nevertheless many non-war crises are very fraught and sensitive and the jury remains out on the real degree of Security Council commitment to back adequately the current challenging missions which the DPKO has mounted. There is a need for more robust peacekeeping with full Security Council backing. With the US Administration in its current mood, gaining their full support may not be possible, but the United Kingdom could play a key role, with the other three permanent members and others, to secure a strengthened UN peacekeeping role.

One test of the Council's resolve may well come in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A request has been made to increase the size of MONUC from 8,700 to 10,800. This new figure may need to rise if the disarming of rebel groups develops into a key role. With the current emergency force planning to remain in Bunia only till the end of August, it will be vital either for the mandate of MONUC to be strengthened or for its numbers to increase, since numbers present can help to dissuade murderous gangs from doing their evil worst. It may be that a strengthened mandate and more troops will be required. While, for the UN, the Rules of Engagement in Bunia are quite robust - they need to be agreed in order to fit the requirements of each crisis – there is a great need in Bunia for the Emergency Force troops to be able to control any possible escalation of violence. They can call for air force involvement, if required. They can also

operate with no fear of being outgunned which may well persuade the gangs of Lendu and Hema killers to desist for fear of the possible results. The Uruguayan UN troops there had no such capacity. The UN Force must not be allowed to lose ground after the Emergency Force withdraws. Apparently, the US Government is still somewhat hesitant on this crisis which should not be allowed to cause its demise.

The regionalization of peacekeeping operations seems all the rage at the moment. There can be certain advantages (language, culture and the like) in such an approach, but there are also major challenges and sensitivities. In Africa, for example, South Africa sees an African nationalism which should respond to peacekeeping challenges but, for the most part, African member states lack adequate capacity and there are dangers in promoting regionalization too avidly. Some countries in West Africa would not greatly welcome a leading Nigerian role in a regional response and the presence of Asians in UNAMSIL in Sierra Leone was very acceptable. Others would be nervous at a too major and possibly dominant South African presence. And India's major role in regional peacekeeping was severely tested in Sri Lanka some years ago.

When all is said and done, as with everything else in the United Nations, the level of success, capacity and competence to deliver depends on the political will of the member states to ensure that the UN receives the level of both political and practical support that it needs. With the George W Bush Administration veering towards a more aggressive and warlike position, the other UN member states can either meekly follow where the hyper-power leads or they can make ever more determined efforts to seek to ensure that the more measured and, in the long term, vital approach of multilateralism remains alive and well.

There is, for us in UNA-UK, no real choice. But does our Government any longer see it that way or are they now too deeply wrapped within the US mantle? If the latter, then public opinion has a major and urgent role to persuade them to get out of it for the sake of us all - both here in the UK and in the wider world.

July 2003http://www.una-uk.org/UN&C/peacekeepingdoweneed.html

Intervention and state failure

Michael Ignatieff. Dissent. New York:  Winter 2002. Vol. 49, Iss. 1;  pg. 114, 10 pgs AS WE BEGIN a new century, what is most striking about the human rights challenges we face is how different they are from those of the cold war era. Whereas the abuses of the cold war period came from strong tyrannical states, the ones in the post--cold war world chiefly originate in weak or collapsing states. We have not come to terms with this changed situation. Our current debate about humanitarian intervention continues to construe intervening as an act of conscience, when in fact, since the 1990s began, intervening has also become an urgent state interest: to rebuild failed states so that they cease to be national security threats.

To understand how the human rights situation has changed, we need to go back to the end of the Second World War. From 1945 until the end of the cold war, human rights remained subordinate to state sovereignty within the framework of the United Nations Charter. Articles 2.1 and 2.7 of the charter define sovereignty in terms of inviolability and non-interference. The prohibition on internal interference is peremptory, while the language that urges states to promote human rights is permissive. States are encouraged to promote human rights, not commanded to do so.

The UN Charter's bias against intervention reflects the chapter of European history the drafting powers believed they had been lucky to escape. Even in death and defeat, Adolf Hitler remained the ghost at the drafters' feast. Yet it was Hitler the warmonger, not Hitler the architect of European extermination, who preoccupied the drafters. For them, aggressive war across national frontiers was a more salient risk than the extermination of peoples within states. This fact illuminates the degree to which both the Holocaust and the Red Terror existed in suspended animation during the cold war. They were not the all-defining crimes they were to become in the modern moral imagination of the 1970s.

The central problem of the cold war world, from the Western point of view, was to consolidate state order and guarantee that these new states remained in the Western camp. Accordingly, the human rights performance of states

mattered much less to the West than their allegiance to the Western camp. Human rights was also given a subordinate place in the UN system. UN bodies, such as the Human Rights Commission, for example, had no power to investigate member states, and after the successful passage of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1948, no formal human rights conventions were ratified until the 1970s.

The marginal place of human rights in the institutional order of the cold war also related to the ambiguous light that human rights standards cast on the behavior of superpowers. Universal commitments, even if only rhetorical, can be embarrassing. The Americans had Jim Crow to hide. The Russians' dirty secret was the Gulag. When the Americans and the Russians used the universalistic creed to lecture developing nations, they discovered how easily their own language could be turned against them. Newly emerging nations in Africa and Asia proved adept at using the vocabulary of self-determination to ward off or ignore external scrutiny of their domestic rights records.

What broke this conspiracy of state silence was the emergence of mass-based human rights groups, beginning with Amnesty International in 1961. These organizations transformed human rights into the most powerful critique of the non-interference rule in postwar state relations.

The simultaneous historical rediscovery of the Red Terror and the Holocaust in the 1970s proved important here. The rediscovered memory of these terrible events focused the moral imagination of activists, intellectuals, and foreign policy specialists on sovereignty as an instrument and an alibi for extermination.

ANOTHER FACTOR in the renaissance of human rights in the 1970s was the weakening of the Soviet empire. Until 1968, it was able to counter demands for freedom by sending in the tanks. By the mid1970s, it became dependent for its survival on Western trade and investment. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975, adopted at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, institutionalized the process by which foreign assistance to an ailing empire was made conditional on human rights concessions. Helsinki marked the moment in which the rulers of the Soviet empire conceded that

there were not two human rights languages-one socialist, one capitalist-but one to which all nations, at least in theory, were obliged to conform.

By conceding the right of their own citizens to form human rights organizations-a feature of the Helsinki Act-the Soviets set in train the process that led first to Charter 77 in Prague, Solidarity in Poland, and Memorial in the Soviet Union. The gathering wave of underground civic activism sapped the self-confidence of the Gorbachev-era elite and slowly but surely undermined the empire from within. Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel drew legitimacy away from the regime to the human rights movement, and in doing so, dug the grave of the empire.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, human rights ceased to be subordinate to sovereignty. The new nations that emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet empire wrote rights guarantees into their new constitutions and accepted human rights oversight from Western governments as the price of rejoining Europe and the West. As the cold war order disintegrated, human rights became the condition of entry to the emerging security architecture of NATO and the European Union. Turkey, for example, discovered that it could not hope to gain entry to the EU unless it abolished the death penalty. Peace, combined with the emergence of the EU, diluted the exercise of Westphalian sovereignty in the continent that had been its home. With peace at home, European powers found a new overseas role for themselves promoting human rights abroad. Western aid agencies, international banks, and UN organizations increasingly "mainstreamed" human rights in their aid and lending packages for developing nations. These nations, some of which had depended entirely on Soviet support, now felt obliged to comply.

As this summary suggests, the ascendancy of human rights in the post-cold war world has complex causes. Those who see its rise as the simple story of progress, of an idea whose time finally came, are missing the key political dimensions: the weakness and collapse of the Soviet Union, the emerging salience of governance-and therefore of human rights-as development issues in the states of Africa and Asia, and finally, the pacification of Europe and its search for a new legitimizing ideology. A final feature was the coming to power of the sixties generation, nurtured in anti-Vietnam War

politics, disillusioned with socialism and Marxism, awakening to the moral reality of the Holocaust and the Red Terror, and discovering in human rights a redemptive cause.

Yet, for all this change, states do not accept that their legitimacy-internal or external-is conditional on their human rights performance. The greatest champion of human rights overseas, the United States, is simultaneously an uncompromising defender of a unilateralist definition of its own sovereignty. American leaders of all political stripes regard foreign criticism of its domestic human rights norms-the persistence of capital punishment, for example-as either irrelevant or impudent.

At this point, we are in a halfway house, no longer in the world of 1945, where sovereignty was clearly privileged over human rights, and yet nowhere near the world desired by human rights activists, in which sovereignty is conditional on being good international citizens. We are somewhere in between, negotiating the conflicts between state sovereignty and international human rights as they arise, case by case.

For all their new prestige and power, human rights concerns have not essentially changed the international law governing recognition between states. In the customary practice that governs recognition of new regimes, legitimacy continues to be defined by whether a particular regime has effective control over a given territory. All states have an interest in ensuring that territories remain under the effective control of a government, regardless of its human rights record. Indeed, some states perceive that the promotion of democracy and human rights, especially in fragile, newly emerging states with complex mixtures of minorities and religions, may actually promote secession, fragmenting the international state system still further. This preference for order has been reinforced by the disintegration of multi-ethnic states like the former Yugoslavia. When democracy came to the Balkans, it came in the form of demands for self-determination on ethnic lines, with catastrophic consequences for the state order left behind by Marshal Tito. Wherever democracy means self-determination for the ethnic majority, state formation all too often means "ethnic cleansing" and massacre for the minority.

MENTION OF Yugoslavia brings into focus the chief reason why the conflict between sovereignty and human rights came into the open in the 1990s: the process of state fragmentation convulsed the international system. Triumphant apologists for globalization are usually also prophets of an age beyond sovereignty. These fantasies can be indulged in Europe or in the North American free trade area, but they ring especially hollow in Africa and Asia. There effective sovereignty-- defined as a monopoly over the means of violence and as the capacity to deliver basic needs to a population-is the precondition for any kind of successful entry into the world economy. It is also the precondition for any kind of human rights observance.

Calling the international order of the postcold-war era a "system" obscures the reality that it has broken down altogether in the poorer parts of the world. States that are fighting losing battles against insurgents, states where civil wars have become endemic, or where state authority has broken down altogether, radiate instability around them. Failing states are more than problems for themselves. They create what Myron Weiner memorably called "bad neighborhoods." These bad neighborhoods include

Latin America: Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru

South Balkans: Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo

South Caucasus: Georgia, Ossetia, Azerbaijan, Nagorno, and Karabakh

West Africa: Liberia and Sierra Leone Central Africa: Congo

Southern Africa: Angola

East Africa: Sudan and Somalia

South Asia: Sri Lanka

Central Asia: Pakistan, Afghanistan,

Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan

Some of these-Colombia and Sri Lanka-- are capable states that are fighting a losing battle against insurgents and terror. Others-- Congo, Angola, and Sudan-are resource-rich states whose elites are incapable or unwilling to use resource revenue to develop their countries and end civil wars. Still others-Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sierra Leone-are weak states, with poor resource endowments, and have proved incapable of providing effective governance at all. What all of these have in common, though, is an inability to maintain a monopoly of the internal means of violence. Violence is eating away these societies from within. It would be impossible to assemble all the reasons why this convulsion is underway, but it represents a widening tear in the system of state order, analogous to the tear in the global ozone layer. Historically, this episode of state fragmentation recalls at least four previous periods:

* 1919: The dismantling of the European empires after Versailles

* 1945: The creation of the so-called people's democracies in Eastern Europe

* 1947-1960: The decolonization of Africa and Asia

* 1989-1991: The independence of former Soviet satellites

In these four periods, the dominant process was state formation and the dismantling of defeated empires. In the fifth and current wave, processes of disintegration predominate. In part, these processes represent an attempt to correct the failure of the previous episodes of state formation. Yugoslavia, for example, figures in three of these four previous episodes of state formation. It was a Versailles state after 1919. It re-emerged as a people's democracy after 1945. In the wake of 1991, it was a satellite of the Soviet system whose component parts set out to create a nation on the basis of popular sovereignty. Each time, these efforts failed. Once democracy returned, each dominant ethnic majority set itself the task of abolishing both the Versailles and the Titoist versions of the federal state. Doing so led them to expel, terrorize, and massacre their minorities. This process is still not completed.

Many of the disintegrative state conflicts in Africa-Congo and Angola, for example-- represent the continuing struggle of competing tribal and regional groups to consolidate state authority on the ruins of colonial regimes. Scholars remain divided as to whether state failure is to be blamed on the colonial legacy or on what successor regimes did with that legacy. The Portuguese left behind a weak colonial inheritance, but the Angolan civil war has destroyed what was left of it. In Congo, Belgium left behind little that independent regimes could build upon. In Sierra Leone, however, it could be argued that the British left a decent colonial inheritance, which was then squandered by successor elites. What these examples have in common is state failure, although the extent of the failure differs in each case. Sometimes the state is struggling; sometimes disintegrating; in a few cases-Somalia, for instance-it has collapsed altogether. Sometimes the cause is the colonial legacy; sometimes it is maladministration by an indigenous elite; sometimes, failure is a legacy first of interference by outside powers, and then abandonment. Afghanistan has been devastated both by interference-first by the Soviets, then by the Americans-and then by neglect-the American withdrawal and strategic disinterest after the defeat of the Soviets. Finally, and most important, many failed or failing states are poor and have suffered from the steadily more adverse terms of trade in a globalized economy. An adverse situation is then made worse by corruption, bad planning choices, or ideological dogma. As the developed world has accelerated into the fourth industrial revolution of computers and information technology, sub-Saharan Africa, for example, remains stuck at the bottom of the international division of labor as primary producers.

GIVEN THE unrelenting pressure of poverty-made worse by mismanagement-it is unsurprising that state institutions begin to break down. As the tax revenue base shrinks, ruling elites lose their capacity to buy off or conciliate marginal regions or minorities. When these minorities pass from disobedience to rebellion, the elites lack the resources to quell revolts. As these revolts spread, the central government loses the monopoly of the means of violence. Where state order disintegrates, basic economic infrastructure also begins to collapse and a new economic order begins to take root. Armed ethnic groups, bandits, and guerilla forces take over, using violence to secure the forced allegiance of the local population and to

extract the remaining surplus. As the weakening government struggles to regain control, it engages in more and more egregious attempts to terrorize the population into obedience, and rebel groups use more and more drastic forms of counterterror to demoralize government forces. This process of fission may then spread beyond the borders of the state itself, as refugee populations flee across the border, and as insurgent groups use frontier zones for their base camps. A collapsing state thus has the capacity to metastasize and to spread its problems through the region. These poor neighborhoods present a cluster of human rights catastrophes: forced population displacement, ethnic or religious massacre, genocide, endemic banditry, enslavement, and forced recruitment of child soldiers. All these proceed from the incapacity of a state to secure and maintain order.

This is a different profile of human rights abuse from the ones in the cold war. These were not caused by weak or collapsing states, but by strong, intolerant, and oppressive ones. To be sure, the problem of tyranny remains: China, North Korea, Iraq, and Libya are strong states, not weak ones, and their human rights abuses fit into a more classical pattern: arrest of activists, detention without trial, extra-judicial murder, torture, and disappearances. The Rwandan genocide could not have occurred without the existence of a strong and effective administrative structure-the burgomaster system-left over from the colonial period. Yet even if some strong states remain a menace to their own people, the worst abuse now occurs not where there is too much state power, but too little. The human rights dilemmas of the twenty-first century derive more from anarchy than tyranny.

IF CHAOS RATHER than tyranny is the chief cause of human rights abuse, then activists will have to rethink their traditional suspicion of the state and of the exercise of sovereignty. In the Balkans, as well as west, central, and southwestern Africa, the chief prerequisite for the creation of a basic rights regime for ordinary people is the re-creation of a stable national state capable of giving orders and seeing them carried out throughout the territory, a state with a classic Weberian monopoly on the legitimate means of force. Without the basic institutions of a state, no basic human rights protection is possible. As long as populations are menaced by banditry, civil war, guerrilla campaigns, and counter-insurgency by beleaguered governments, they cannot be secure. In such conditions, international

human rights and humanitarian organizations can do no more than bind up the wounded and protect the most vulnerable. These Hobbesian situations teach the message of the Leviathan itself: that consolidated state power is the very condition for any regime of rights whatever. In this sense, state sovereignty, instead of being the enemy of human rights, has to be seen as their basic precondition. Protecting human rights in zones where state order is embattled or had collapsed has to mean consolidating or re-creating a legitimate state. Nation building thus becomes, for the first time since the Allied occupation of Germany and Japan, a critical instrument for the creation of rights regimes. In Japan and Germany, however, total defeat and unconditional surrender gave the Allies the authority to create new democratic institutions from scratch, while the conditions for modern nation building in states recovering from civil war are much less auspicious.

If state fragmentation and collapse are the chief sources of human rights abuse, the debate over humanitarian intervention needs to be rethought. This debate conceives the challenge of intervention as a response to a series of essentially unrelated moral crises, in which differing populations of civilians in desperate need appeal to us for rescue. But the crises themselves are not unrelated, and they are not just humanitarian or moral in their claim on our attention. A crisis of order in a single state risks creating "bad neighborhoods" in a whole region. Pakistan, for example, has been "Talibanized" by nearby Afghanistan. These bad neighborhoods in turn present direct threats to the national interest of states. For bad neighborhoods harbor terrorists, produce drugs, and generate destabilizing refugee flows. Afghanistan is the best example of a failing state that was perceived as a distant humanitarian crisis, when it ought to have been seen as a clear and present national security threat.

As long as the chief motive for intervention is conscience alone, we can only expect sporadic action from a few responsible actors. Once it is realized that we are looking at a crisis in the international order, a tear in the ozone layer of global governance, states that would otherwise remain uninvolved might understand that their long-term interest in stability and order compel them to commit resources to the problem. Putting national interest criteria into the debate also helps with the problem of triage. There are many failed and failing states. The ones that will actually receive

sustained international attention will be those that directly threaten the national interest and national security of powerful states.

The debate about humanitarian intervention strikes many people from poorer countries as a lurid exercise in emotional self-gratification-an attempt to demonstrate the power of conscience when the real tasks that rich Western nations need to address are much harder: helping states regain a monopoly over the means of violence, increasing the competence of local institutions, conciliating ethnic conflict, and building up a functioning economy.

The way the academy divides up the debate also enfeebles it. The international lawyers who dominate the humanitarian intervention debate spend more time thinking about intervention criteria than how to rebuild failed states once intervention has occurred. The development strategists who do know something about how to set off self-sustaining paths to growth and institutional competence have no place in the debate. The human rights activists who document the increasingly catastrophic rights abuses in failing states often have no strategy other than denunciation and a perfectionist reluctance to use force to end these abuses. All of these divisions further fragment our capacity to craft strategies of intervention that actually succeed.

ANOTHER PROBLEM is the way humanitarian intervention is actually done. Most strategies of humanitarian rescue, particularly UN peacekeeping and conflict mediation, are premised on staying neutral in zones of conflict. In reality, as Bosnia cruelly showed, neutrality can become discreditable as well as counterproductive. Once the decision is taken to introduce humanitarian aid into a war zone, backed up with peacekeepers to aid in its delivery, the aid itself becomes a focus of combat, and its provision-even to unarmed combatants-becomes a way not to damp down the fighting but to keep it going. Neutral humanitarian assistance can have the perverse effect of sustaining the fighting it seeks to reduce.

All victims have some claim to mercy, assistance, and aid from those bystanders who can provide it. But if that is all that bystanders do, they may help to keep civil wars going, by sustaining the capacity of a civilian

population to absorb still more punishment. Moreover, when neutralist mediators impose a cease-fire in an ongoing civil war, they invariably draw the line in such a way as to reward the side that has waged the conflict with the most aggression and the most success. That is why, when peacekeepers are deployed to enforce the cease-fire, they are usually viewed by the party that has lost most in the conflict as colluders in aggression. Such cease-fires rarely hold.

Neutral humanitarianism, when viewed more cynically, is a kind of hedged bet, in which intervening parties salve their consciences while avoiding the difficult political commitments that might actually stop civil war. For the key dilemma in civil wars is which side to back. Unless one side is helped to win, and win quickly, nothing serious can be done to reduce the violence. The basic choice is whether external intervention should be aimed at preserving the existing state or at helping a selfdetermination claim succeed. In Bosnia, Western interveners thought they were intervening to keep warring parties apart. They failed to understand that a recognized member of the UN-Bosnia Herzegovina-was being torn apart by a self-determination claim, aided and abetted by outside powers, chiefly Serbia, but also Croatia. The crisis was seen as an internal affair, when in fact its chief determinants were illicit foreign subversion: the arming and training of insurgents and the provision of safe bases of operation in both Serbia and Croatia. The war within Bosnia was brought to an end only when foreign intervention was directed not at the internal combatants but at the chief external instigator, Serbia. It was only when outside interveners took sides and bombed Serbian installations, forcing the Serb government to exert pressure on its internal proxies, that the civil war stopped. In other words, the international community finally intervened to sustain the unity of a state and to defeat a selfdetermination claim by the Bosnian Serbs.

The case of Afghanistan illustrates the dilemmas of taking sides. Prior to September 11, the dilemma was this: if Western powers recognized the Taliban, they would help consolidate Taliban rule over the entire territory and thus help bring an end to a devastating civil war. Order would prevail, but it would be the despotism of rural Islam at its most obscurantist. In such a situation, Afghan women would pay the price of a Western preference for order over justice. If, on the other hand, Western support continued to reach

the Taliban's opponents, the civil war would continue, and Afghanistan would continue to bleed to death.

Until September 11, Western powers placed a two-way bet, supporting the Northern Alliance just enough to keep it in business, while refusing to normalize relations with the Taliban. The United States allowed the Pakistani secret service to funnel support to the Taliban, while at the same time American officials denounced the regime for its treatment of women and the destruction of religious monuments. This double game has now come apart, and in the wake of September 11, it is apparent that it was bound to. Having washed its hands of Afghanistan after the Soviet departure, the United States spent the 1990s conceiving of Afghanistan as a humanitarian or human rights disaster zone, failing to notice that it was rapidly becoming a national security nightmare, a training ground for terror. Nothing enfeebled American policy more in the 1990s than the refusal to notice that untended human rights and humanitarian crises have a way of becoming national security threats. Afghanistan is the most dramatic example of this tendency. Now, finally, the United States and its allies will take sides, but once they defeat the Taliban, the same problem they have avoided-namely how to rebuild a nation state there-will recur.

TAKING SIDES is not the only dilemma. There is also the problem of triage. Given the fact that resources of will power, diplomatic skill, and economic aid are always finite, there have to be criteria to determine which conflicts to take on and which ones to ignore. Intervention occurs, in general, where states are too weak, too friendless, to resist. The Chinese occupation of Tibet goes unsanctioned. The Russians reduce Grozny to rubble with impunity. Yet the Serbs are bombed for seventy-eight days. These inconsistencies mean that intervention in the domestic affairs of states will never rest on unassailable grounds. Yet the fact that we cannot intervene everywhere is not a justification for not intervening where we can.

Nor is the experience of intervention as nation building entirely negative. The UN Mission in Cambodia managed to oversee peaceful elections and the creation of democratic rule in a country ravaged by genocide. NATO, the UN, and the EU have joined forces to put Bosnia into a transitional trusteeship. It is a state in which internal peace and security are guaranteed

by foreign troops. Resettling of refugees and rebuilding are both funded from the outside. The process is costly, but violence has not returned, and peace in Bosnia has hastened democratic transitions in Croatia and Serbia next door. Further south in Kosovo, another trusteeship experiment is underway. A former province of a state is being prepared for substantial autonomy and self-government. The UN administration has written the constitutional rules for a gradual handover of power to elected local elites, and there is even a chance that eventually the Serb minority will take their places at the table. Finally, in East Timor, a transitional UN administration is handing a new country over to its elected leaders. All of these experiences are fraught with difficulty, but all indicate that an inchoate practice of state building, under UN auspices, is emerging. The next obvious candidate for treatment is Afghanistan.

An intervention strategy that takes sides, that uses force, and that sticks around to rebuild is very different from one premised on neutrality, casualty-avoidance, and exit strategies. It is also based on different premises. These premises have been outlined recently in "The Responsibility to Protect," a report sponsored by the Canadian government and delivered to the UN secretary-general in December 2001. Building on ideas of good citizenship and human security, the commission has argued that all states have a responsibility to protect their citizens. In certain limited cases, where states are unwilling or unable to do that, and where the resulting human rights situation is catastrophic, other states have a responsibility to step in and provide the protection instead. The international responsibility to protect is a residual obligation that comes into play only when a domestic state proves incapable or unwilling to act and where the resulting situation is genuinely catastrophic.

The idea of a responsibility to protect also implies a responsibility to prevent and a responsibility to follow through. Action, especially of a coercive kind, lacks legitimacy unless every effort has been made to avert the catastrophe; once action is taken, its legitimacy depends on staying the course until the situation is on the mend. Thus the responsibility to protect is intended to provide a rationale for constructive engagement by rich countries through an intervention continuum that begins with prevention and ends with sustained follow-up.

All of these exercises in nation building represent attempts to invent, for a postimperial, postcolonial era, a form of temporary rule that reproduces the best effects of empire (inward investment, pacification, and impartial administration), without reproducing the worst features (corruption, repression, confiscation of local capacity). Unlike the empires of the past, these UN administrations are designed to serve and enhance the ideal of self-determination rather than suppress it.

Taking responsibility without confiscating it is the balance international administrators have to strike. The trick in nation building is to force responsibility-for security, for co-existence-back to local elites. This is not easy. The spectacle of disgruntled locals, sitting in cafes, watching earnest young internationals speeding around to important meetings in Toyota Land Cruisers has been repeated in every nation-building experiment of the 1990s. The most successful transitional administrations are ones that try to do themselves out of a job. This is not always possible. The legacy of bitterness in places like Kosovo and Bosnia is so intense that international administration has to remain in place, simply in order to protect minorities from vengeance by the victorious yet previously victimized majority. Controlling the culture of vengeance usually takes longer than the time frame dictated by most modern exit strategies. Once Western forces intervene they are usually committed to rebuild or at least patrol post-conflict societies for a long period of time. It takes time to create responsible political dialogue in shattered communities, still longer to create shared institutions of police and justice, and longest of all to create the molecular social trust between warring communities necessary for economic development and community co-existence. The initiative for these developments has to come from the local people. Internationals can provide impartial administration, some inward investment, and some basic security protection, but the work has to be done by the political elites who inherit the intervention. Nation building takes time, and it is not an exercise in social work. Its ultimate purpose is to create the state order that is the precondition for any defensible system of human rights and to create the stability that turns bad neighborhoods into good ones.

THIS SURVEY OF what has happened to the interaction between sovereignty and human rights since 1945, and how the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention has developed in response to the epidemic of state failure since the end of the cold war, necessarily ends with skeptical conclusions. If we survey the interventions of the recent past, the story is decidedly mixed. In Bosnia, intervention prevented the full realization of Serbian war aims, but it did not prevent the deaths of more than three hundred thousand people and the expulsion of nearly a million from their homes. In Kosovo, intervention put a stop to a civil war that, had intervention not occurred, might still be claiming lives. In East Timor, intervention delivered self-determination to the people, but not before more than a thousand people were massacred for seeking their rights. In Iraq, Kurds remain under the protection of Allied air power, but they do not have the resources to become genuinely self-governing. In places like Cambodia and Haiti, democracy has been restored, but power remains in the hands of corrupt elites. In other places, such as Angola, where the UN intervened with high hopes of moving the society out of a civil war, it has now withdrawn altogether. In still other places, ranging from Chechnya to Tibet, no intervention took place, and the failure showed that universal principles still lack consistent enforcement. Worst of all, eight hundred thousand dead Rwandans remain testimony to our incapacity-even when no insurmountable obstacle exists, either in state sovereignty or Security Council veto-to do the right thing. The most that can be said about the emerging practice of intervention is that at its best it prevents the worst from happening; at its worst, it compromises and betrays the very values it purports to defend.

Yet through it all, an inchoate practice of nation building-in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, and Cambodia-is showing that state order can be successfully rebuilt if wealthy and powerful states are prepared to invest the time and money. More generally, this survey seems to demonstrate something important about legitimacy itself. Intervening to defend human rights will never have anything more than conditional legitimacy, even when the cause is just and the authority right. We all aspire to perfect legitimacy. We want to live in a world in which we do the right thing, and know we are doing the right thing, and believe that the whole world will accept that we have done the right thing. There is no such possibility.

Indeed, it is a dangerous utopia. Moral perfectionism is always the enemy of the possible and the practical. Doing the right thing appears to require the tenacity to do it when half the world thinks you are wrong.

[Author Affiliation]

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University He is the author of Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, a trilogy of books on ethnic war and humanitarian intervention, and a biography of the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin. He would like to thank many colleagues at the Kennedy School of Government, especially Monica Toft and Robert Rotberg, for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this essay.

U.N. Peacekeeping: An Uncertain Future

Renner, Michael. Foreign Policy in Focus. Albuquerque:  Sep 2000. Vol. 5, Iss. 22;  pg. 1

U.N. Peacekeeping: An Uncertain Future

United Nations peacekeeping is yet again at a cross roads: it may finally succeed in establishing itself as the preeminent force for conflict prevention and peace, or it could continue operating with a severe mismatch of mandates and resources. Which option will materialize depends on the policies of UN member states, particularly those of the United States.

Following a brief but stellar rise, UN peacekeeping virtually collapsed in the mid-to-late 1990s. Operations undertaken by the "blue helmets" in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda were widely considered to have ended in failure, eclipsing successes in Nicaragua, Mozambique, Namibia, and Eastern Slavonia/Croatia. Right-wing Republicans in the U.S. Congress eagerly heaped blame on the organization and cultivated the view that it was not to be entrusted with challenging missions.

But what seemed like a moribund organization has reemerged as a beehive of activity. In the last two years, the UN has taken on several new challenging missions in different parts of the world. The peacekeeping budgets and the number of people involved in the missions reflect this rollercoaster development. From peak expenditure levels of about $3.5 billion per year in the mid-1990s, expenditures dropped to a low of $838 million in the July 1998-June 1999 budget year. But then, appropriations for July 1999-June 2000 doubled to $1.6 billion and are now projected to top $2.2 billion for July 2000-June 2001. The number of troops, observers, and civilian police peaked at almost 80,000 in the mid-1990s, falling to 12,000 in 1999. Rising again, peacekeepers totaled 37,000 in August 2000 (in addition to about 11,700 civilian personnel).

Four missions initiated in 1999 and 2000 precipitated this latest upswing. They are the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL); the UN Transitional

Administration in East Timor (UNTAET); the UN Observer Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC); and the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). The UN Security Council has authorized 13,000 peacekeepers for Sierra Leone (and Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked for an increase to 20,500 in August 2000), 10,790 in East Timor, 5,537 in the Congo, and 4,756 in Kosovo. (The fragility of a peace accord in the Congo casts doubts on when, if ever, the UN mission will be deployed; only about 260 observers have thus far been dispatched.) Further increases will come as an existing mission in southern Lebanon is bolstered from 5,000 to 8,000 troops and as a new observer force monitoring a cease-fire between Ethiopia and Eritrea grows to an expected strength of about 4,200.

The challenges inherent in these new missions are manifold. For example, UNAMSIL was created in October 1999 to oversee a peace agreement between the weak government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a brutal force that imposes its will through massacres and mutilations. But the agreement was revealed as a sham when RUF forces, unwilling to disarm or relinquish their control over lucrative diamond smuggling operations, ambushed UN peacekeepers in May 2000 and reignited the fighting. The Security Council's preference for "peacekeeping on the cheap" - having dispatched an undersized, ill-equipped, and ill-trained peacekeeping force - nearly resulted in an embarrassing failure. The Council only belatedly moved to reinforce the peacekeeping contingent, and the United States decided to train several thousand West African soldiers to augment the UN mission. It remains to be seen whether these efforts will bear fruit.

In Sierra Leone, as elsewhere, UN peacekeepers face an array of complex tasks that include repatriating refugees, facilitating humanitarian relief, developing plans for effective disarmament and demobilization of combatants, and maintaining public order. In Kosovo and East Timor, the UN has even been asked to administer the territories and prepare the foundations of a democratic order. But intense ethnic and factional hatreds, efforts to sabotage peace agreements, and the persistence of desperate economic conditions could easily confound the UN's efforts and trigger substantial new violence in many of these troubled places.

The challenge posed by these new missions is aggravated both by the continued ad hoc nature of UN peacekeeping and by the organization's financial crisis. When there is success, it is taken for granted. But in the event of setbacks, members of Congress and other UN critics unfailingly rush to condemn the world body as hopelessly ineffective. The UN's revival is tenuous at best.

Problems with Current U.S. Policy

Notwithstanding its earlier multilateralist rhetoric, the Clinton administration chose not to expend any significant political capital in support of the United Nations, even as congressional hostility toward the UN rose to a fever pitch. The United States has for many years shortchanged the UN financially, attached debilitating conditions to reluctant U.S. arrears payments, and failed to provide political backup to the world body.

The U.S. policy of routinely paying its peacekeeping dues late and withholding portions of the money legally owed has weakened the UN. Even though the United States is assessed at 30.4% of total peacekeeping costs, Congress decided in a unilateral move in October 1995 to ignore UN assessments beyond a 25% share. Thus, U.S. payments are automatically falling short each budget year. In exchange for partial payment of its arrears, the United States has demanded that the unpaid balance be written off. But these are notions that other UN members, increasingly irritated with U.S. policy, do not accept without intense U.S. lobbying and arm-twisting.

In 1995, the United States paid only 40 cents of each dollar assessed by the United Nations, and just 70 cents in 1996. From 1997 to 1999, as the United States teetered on the brink of forfeiting its vote in the General Assembly, Congress moved closer to full appropriation of U.S. peacekeeping assessments, paying about 90 cents per dollar assessed.

Full payment of dues remains a distant prospect. In July 2000, for example, the Senate and House appropriations committees cut President Clinton's FY2001 peacekeeping request from $739 million to about $500 million,

though it is clear that even the administration request falls short of covering U.S. assessments for the year. Congress also turned down a supplemental request of $107 million for missions in Kosovo and East Timor.

A substantial amount of U.S. peacekeeping arrears has built up over the years - some $1.36 billion as of July 2000 or two-thirds of the sum owed by all UN members. Conservatives in Congress have sought to wield the outstanding arrears as a weapon to force a series of debilitating "reforms" onto the UN. In November 1999, the Clinton administration accepted the so-called "Helms-Biden package," which stipulates that $926 million in back dues be released over three years. Even though this amount would not repay all U.S. debts, actual disbursement of the money is conditional upon a long list of demands. Among other stipulations, the package bars creation of any standing UN military force, opposes any special agreements earmarking forces to be available for UN call-up (as stipulated in Article 43 of the UN Charter), and requires the election of U.S. candidates to an advisory UN budgetary panel.

Washington has repeatedly blocked efforts to create and dispatch peacekeeping missions in a timely manner, because those who would have benefited did not qualify under the rarefied definition of U.S. "strategic interests." Perhaps the most egregious case occurred in 1994, when the Clinton administration delayed Security Council approval of a UN force that could have stopped the genocide in Rwanda, a policy the president later apologized for during a tour of African countries. More recently, in 1999, the United States opposed a 15,000-strong force for the Congo - requested by many African leaders - consenting only to a mission one-third that size. During the May 2000 Sierra Leone crisis, the UN needed help in dispatching additional peacekeepers. The Pentagon was at first reluctant to make air transport available and only offered it at triple the commercial charter rate.

Washington has been far more willing to initiate operations outside UN purview - so-called "coalitions of the willing." Two NATO-led operations, SFOR in Bosnia and KFOR in Kosovo, fielded more than 88,000 soldiers in 1999 and cost an estimated $11 billion - seven times the total resources available for all UN peacekeeping. But such operations are problematic,

because they are likely to serve the interests of the intervening military alliance more than the interests of humanity as a whole. In Kosovo, KFOR was born of an end-run by the United States and its NATO allies - around the UN Security Council - when NATO initiated a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and forced Yugoslav military forces to withdraw from Kosovo.

Toward a New Foreign Policy

Even though there have been more than 50 individual UN peacekeeping missions since 1948, the organization has repeatedly had to improvise. The chronic lack of funds and the absence of a truly permanent, reliable peacekeeping structure usually result in a severe mismatch between the expectations attached to peacekeeping missions and the actual capacity to fulfill them.

Each time a new peacekeeping mission is authorized, UN officials scramble to find governments willing to commit personnel and equipment. This has proven to be an agonizingly slow, months-long process, even though a speedy dispatch can make all the difference between mission success and failure. Often the contingents offered are poorly trained and equipped, particularly in the areas of transport, logistics, and communications. Additionally, national contingents all too often refuse or second-guess orders from the mission commander.

A supportive U.S. policy could make a vast difference. First and foremost, the United States needs to pay off its legally owed arrears quickly and without the crippling conditions that Congress now routinely attaches. New assessments need to be paid in full and on time. Peacekeeping cannot succeed on a shoestring budget. Even an adequately funded UN peacekeeping system is a bargain compared with annual U.S. military budgets of $300 billion or more.

The United States has long opposed the creation of any permanent UN peacekeeping force, considering it an unwanted appendage. However, experience suggests the need for a robust, versatile system that can be available to accomplish a broad variety of delicate tasks in time to make a

difference. For that purpose, it would be sensible to establish several different well-coordinated tiers or branches within a larger, permanent peacekeeping structure, staffed by well-trained, well-coordinated, and experienced volunteers.

These tiers could cover the range of specialized activities found in most UN peacekeeping missions, which are currently ad hoc in manner. They could include military observers, to help hostile armies disengage and to patrol cease-fire lines; specialists in disarming and demobilizing former combatants; civilian police, to help reestablish order after a civil war ends; a roster of legal and administrative personnel; human rights observers; demining experts; specialists in electoral assistance; and others. The UN also needs better early-warning capacity and a strengthened conflict-prevention capability.

But consideration should eventually be given to a more controversial idea: the establishment of a rapid intervention force that is able to provide protection for civilians under assault, perhaps by setting up "safe zones" secure enough to prevent the mass killings that occurred in the ad hoc safe zones in Bosnia. Such a force could be relatively small (perhaps in the range of 5,000 to 10,000) but should be backed up by specially trained national forces. By prior arrangement, such forces would need to be designated in advance by their governments and quickly released for UN duty, once a Security Council resolution determined a need for them.

Greater care is needed in training and preparing peacekeeping personnel for the specific challenges awaiting them. Soldiers trained for combat duty cannot be expected to be proficient in the delicate tasks of defusing conflicts and patrolling tense civilian areas. The UN needs to ensure that peacekeepers can be transported quickly to their deployment areas and that they have ready access to equipment commensurate with their tasks. Last, but not least, the personnel strength, contingency planning capacities, and communications infrastructure at UN headquarters in New York need to be substantially scaled up and supplemented by a mobile command headquarters. Currently, there are only 32 UN officers providing planning and guidance to almost 30,000 troops and only nine UN staff for about 8,600 civilian police in the field.

Some of these ideas exceed what current political realities permit. But for starters, the recommendations issued by an independent "Panel on UN Peace Operations" in August 2000 would help reduce the ad hoc character of UN peacekeeping, eliminate many of the arbitrary limitations of the current system, and give the UN a greater chance at succeeding in complex peace missions. If permitting the UN to establish a permanent peacekeeping structure is more than Washington or other UN members states can currently stomach, then they could at least implement the panel's suggestion to set up national pools of experienced personnel, to be made available at the UN's request. The initial U.S. reaction to the panel's report was positive, though it remains to be seen how much U.S. policy will actually change.

Fundamentally, the United States needs to decide whether it wants multilateral peacekeeping to be a serious option. On the one hand, Washington wants to retain the ability to act unilaterally. On the other hand, it does not want to be dragged into conflicts that it judges insignificant or too messy to resolve, like those in Rwanda, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and the Congo. It wants the UN to be available for such purposes and to serve as a convenient scapegoat when things go wrong.

The broader - and more troubling - context is that Washington does not want to be bound by the very rules governing international conduct that it urges others to respect. U.S. policy toward UN peacekeeping bears the tell-tale signs of an exceptionalism that rejects common, reciprocal obligations. The struggle over peacekeeping policy is also a struggle involving the legitimacy of international law and institutions. Both struggles hinge on cooperatively reconciling the contradictions of national sovereignty in a globalizing world.

Humanitarian Military Intervention

Lobel, Jules, Ratner, Michael. Foreign Policy in Focus. Albuquerque:  Jan 2000. Vol. 5, Iss. 1;  pg. 1

Humanitarian Military Intervention

The 1999 U.S.-led NATO air assault against Yugoslavia undertaken with the avowed aim of stopping human rights abuses in Kosovo has been extolled by some as a new model of humanitarian intervention. President Clinton and others have argued that when a nation is committing gross human rights violations against its citizens, other nations or multilateral coalitions have the right to intervene militarily, without the authority of the UN Security Council, to end those abuses.

However, the United Nations charter clearly prohibits nations from attacking other states for claimed violations of human rights. Article 2(4), the central provision of the charter, prohibits the "threat or use of force against" another state. There are only two exceptions to this prohibition. Article 51 allows a nation to use force in "self-defense if an armed attack occurs against" it or an allied country. The charter also authorizes the Security Council to employ force to counter threats to or breaches of international peace. This has been interpreted to allow individual nations to militarily intervene for humanitarian reasons, but only with the explicit authorization of the Security Council. This has occurred in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Bosnia.

In line with post-World War II international law, most governments and jurists have rejected unilateral humanitarian military intervention because of the potential that powerful states will abuse such a doctrine. The history of humanitarian military intervention is replete with examples of powerful states or coalitions invoking the doctrine to conceal their own geopolitical interests. Professors Thomas Franck and Nigel Rodley examined the historical record of such interventions in the 1973 American Journal of International Law and concluded that "in very few, if any, instances has the right [to humanitarian intervention] been asserted under circumstances that

appear more humanitarian than self-seeking and power seeking." The International Court of Justice concluded in 1949 that the doctrine of forcible intervention in the name of international justice "has, in the past, given rise to most serious abuses... [F]rom the nature of things, it would be reserved for the most powerful states."

Some scholars argue that recent UN practice allows for an exception to Article 2(4)'s prohibition on humanitarian intervention. They assert that the world's interest in countering serious human rights abuses cannot be blocked by the veto of a permanent Security Council member. They would legitimize unilateral military action in instances where the Security Council is silent, where it has condemned the human rights record of the target country; or where the UN is participating in the settlement of the war.

The purported good that might come from allowing countries to intervene unilaterally based upon such arguments is, however, outweighed by the dangers that arise from weakening the international restraints on the use of force. In addition, the UN charter requires that the use of force be a last resort, taken only after all peaceful alternatives have failed. The UN's primary goal is to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." To further this goal, its charter requires that decisions to go to war be made by a deliberative body of states representing a broad range of constituents: i.e., the Security Council.

The Kosovo crisis illustrates the danger of bypassing the Security Council and lends credence to those who argue that intervention was not for humanitarian purposes. Had the United States gone to the Security Council, it is possible that a settlement similar to the one that ended the air war could have been achieved without the use of force. The Security Council might have insisted on more negotiations, a more flexible approach to the Rambouillet proposal, or a less prominent role for NATO and the United States. Moreover, the destructiveness of the war and its aftermath undermine Washington's humanitarian claims and reemphasize the reasons that the charter's framers chose peace as its central tenet.

There may, of course, be certain extreme cases of genocide where one country's veto blocks the Security Council from authorizing the use of

force. In dealing with those cases, it is preferable to recognize that in rare instances (and the factual evidence indicates that Kosovo was not one of these) a nation or group of nations may need to intervene without UN authorization in order to save lives. That is a less dangerous alternative than permitting an "escape clause" on the prohibition of the unilateral use of force, an exception that would likely be widely and dangerously abused.

Problems With Current U.S. Policy

In the aftermath of the Kosovo War, U.S. administration officials have articulated a Clinton doctrine that proclaims that the United States will forcefully intervene to prevent human rights abuses when it can do so without suffering substantial casualties. This doctrine rhetorically suggests a new, assertive U. S. approach to promoting and defending human rights abroad.

However, the Clinton doctrine is highly selective, as indicated by Washington's decision to intervene in Kosovo - where, over the preceding year, an estimated two thousand had been killed - though ignoring the 1994 Rwandan genocide of over one million civilians within the span of a few weeks. Although the U.S. failed to act in Rwanda, a country of little strategic or economic importance, in other instances the Clinton administration has chosen not to intervene to defend human rights precisely because the U.S. has strong strategic or trade interests in a country. For instance, though the State Department recognizes that Turkey, a close ally, has committed flagrant human rights violations against its Kurdish minority, the administration not only fails to intervene to protect the Kurds but actually continues to export arms to Turkey. During his October 1999 visit to Turkey, Clinton went so far as to praise Turkey's progress on establishing democracy and to promote its entry into the European Union. If human rights were of serious concern to the U.S., Washington would at least stop selling guns and helicopters to Turkey.

Another close U.S. ally, Indonesia, which invaded and annexed East Timor, causing the death of over 200,000 Timorese, is one of the world's worst human rights violators. Yet, throughout the incursions into East Timor, the U.S. continued to arm and train the Indonesian military. When, in 1999,

East Timor voted peacefully and overwhelmingly for independence, the U.S. opposed the rapid creation of an armed UN peacekeeping force that could have stopped the forced exile of hundreds of thousands and the slaughter of Timorese civilians by Indonesian-controlled paramilitaries. Today, the U.S. is giving only limited support to the Australian/UN force; it refuses to supply combat troops but is giving some logistical help and a few helicopters.

By acting selectively, the U.S. not only undermines the authority of the United Nations and the rule of international law but belies the claim that it is acting to protect human rights when it does intervene. President Clinton has attempted to explain the obvious inconsistencies in U.S. policy by contending that America cannot be the world's policeman. Yet the United States has failed to promote UN-sanctioned international responses. Experts say that the genocide in Rwanda, for instance, could have been stopped with a few thousand soldiers. The killings in East Timor could have been curbed with even fewer - perhaps merely by the withdrawal of World Bank and International Monetary Fund credits to Indonesia. In Turkey; Washington (and other NATO countries) could still exert pressure to stop human rights abuses by halting U.S. arms flows. That Washington has not done so suggests not a lack of capacity but an unwillingness to raise human rights concerns in countries viewed as important strategic allies.

The Clinton doctrine of humanitarian intervention is simply the latest in a series of pretexts employed by the United States to justify unilateral military intervention. In recent decades, the U.S. has launched military actions under the rubric of overthrowing totalitarian governments and bringing democracy to people (Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Chile, Grenada), preventing terrorism (Sudan and Afghanistan), and stopping drug trafficking (Panama).

For over a year, the U.S., acting virtually alone and supported only by a token British military presence, has bombed the so-called no-fly zone in northern Iraq, which was established ostensibly to protect the Kurdish population. Unlike the war to oust Iraq from Kuwait, which had Security Council approval, Washington is currently bombing without UN backing. U.S. motives in continuing this bombing are related not to protecting the Kurds but to Washington's dispute with Iraq over weapons inspectors. With

the end of the cold war and the struggle against communism, humanitarian intervention to prevent human rights abuses is providing a rationale for selective U.S. or U.S.-led military interventions, outside the framework of the United Nations.

Toward a New Foreign Policy

The challenge for U.S. foreign policy in the twenty-first century is to improve the international regime of human rights without undermining the UN charter's prohibition on the unilateral use of force. The most important step toward this goal would be for the United States to eschew military force for alleged humanitarian reasons without the explicit approval of the UN Security Council. The failure to obtain such approval prior to the war against Yugoslavia and prior to the current and continuous bombing of Iraq seriously weakens the key international restraint against the use of force as embodied in the UN charter.

If the real purpose of U.S. humanitarian military intervention is to protect human rights, then America ought to employ peaceful and more principled methods for protecting those rights before resorting to military action. The U.S., which dominates the UN Security Council, should end its political selectivity and begin to work for a more principled human rights stance within the United Nations itself. Humanitarian intervention to stop grave human rights abuses should only be used after multilateral diplomatic and economic measures have been exhausted. This is not currently the case. The United States played the central role in imposing both the UN sanctions on Libya (finally lifted in 1999) and the prolonged, inhumane embargo on Iraq, while blocking sanctions against Israel, Turkey, and other allies that are serious human rights abusers. If Washington truly cares about furthering human rights, it must do so collectively and in a more evenhanded manner.

Former Amnesty International Secretary-General Ian Martin argues that there is too much "enthusiasm in the human rights movement, and especially in the United States, for military intervention on humanitarian grounds." Although he understands that national sovereignty does not necessarily prevail over the responsibility to prevent mass violations of human rights, he emphasizes that "such international responsibility can be

properly exercised only by a multilateral decision of the international community through the UN." Martin states that the legitimacy of such decisions by the United Nations depends "upon a proper distribution of power within that organization, the application of a set of principled criteria for military intervention which is not politically selective, and the development of the ability of the UN itself to maintain the control of a military operation."

Although the Clinton administration has shown scant willingness to seek UN authority prior to using force, there is a step that the United States could more easily take: end its military support for nations committing serious human rights violations. In 1998, Congress enacted the Leahy amendment, a provision in the foreign assistance legislation prohibiting foreign aid funds, including U.S. loan guarantees, from being used to bolster units of foreign security forces that are committing human rights violations. This legislation needs to be extended, strengthened, and fully implemented.

In the past, such provisions have often led to executive branch assertions that governments supported by the United States were, in fact, improving their human rights records. During the 1980s, for instance, the Reagan administration repeatedly certified El Salvador during years when that government was committing terrible atrocities. Currently, both the Clinton administration and Congress have pumped military hardware, training, and advisors into Colombia's armed forces and police, despite evidence of corruption and human rights abuses.

A positive sign in an otherwise bleak environment was the State Department's use of the Leahy amendment in December 1998 to deny, in part, a defense contractor's request for U.S.-government financing to underwrite Turkey's purchase of armored vehicles. A key test of administration arms policy toward Turkey is still pending; whether it will issue an export license for Turkey's planned acquisition of 145 attack helicopters, which would likely be used for the destruction of Kurdish civilian targets.

Finally, the United States ought to strengthen its own participation in international human rights agreements and support the international

institutions that enforce such agreements. In the long term, stronger international agreements and institutions will save more lives than questionable ad hoc military interventions. The U.S. should sign and ratify the agreement establishing the International Criminal Court. The Senate should remove the reservations added to treaties (such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) that render them non-self-executing or non-enforceable under U.S. law. At present, U.S. courts have been following a double standard of imposing liability against foreign officials accused of committing serious international human rights abuses, while refusing to recognize such claims brought against U. S. officials. To encourage other nations to apply international human rights law in their domestic courts, we must apply it in our courts.

Changing U.S. foreign policy along these lines will not be easy and is unlikely to happen quickly. However, at the close of a century in which scores of millions have been killed in military conflicts and with the rise of new and extreme ethnic, national, and religious conflicts, multilateral cooperation through a more democratic United Nations is more important than ever.

The New Mandate for UN Peacekeeping - international operationsBeth Lamont

Although the United Nations' primary mission, since its founding after World War II, has been to prevent wars, the organization suffers from a dual and conflicting mandate: to act in the best interests of We, the Peoples of Earth, while respecting the absolute sovereignty of individual nations. The UN Security Council, with disproportionate and unbalanced power assumed by its permanent member states, has dominated UN actions. Peacekeeping operations, initiated in the UN Security Council, have tried to meet the needs in numerous crises but have had little continuity or oversight. The council hasn't shown an evenhandedness in choosing or refusing to commit to a situation, nor has it afforded open information exchange from affected parties or nations, nor has it ever been assured of a commitment from every nation for funding or troops and personnel to conduct a peacekeeping operation.

In the November 2000 New York Times, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed doubts that a Palestinian request for UN peacekeeping forces, to provide safety and security for the Palestinian people in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, will even be honored. According to Annan, there must first be agreement by Israel, but Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak has ruled out such a mission. The article further states that, while diplomats are divided, it's certain that the United States will support Israel and that Russia and China won't favor intervention, considering their own strife in Chechnya and Tibet.

After the 1994 Rwanda genocide, Kofi Annan himself was criticized for having failed to heed warnings of impending disaster and for withdrawing the UN peacekeeping troops at the very moment they were most needed. Moving to protect the peacekeepers seemed a humane priority at the time, inasmuch as they were without any means of enforcing peace or even a mandate for them to protect one segment of society from the other. What a tragedy it took to focus attention on the painfully flawed mandate itself.

As a result, Annon ordered "a comprehensive review of the whole question of peacekeeping operations in all their aspects," as well as "a clear set of specific, concrete and practical recommendations to assist the United Nations in conducting such activities better in the future." A panel of luminaries from around the world, with a wide range of experience in the fields of peacekeeping and peace-building, as well as development and humanitarian assistance, was assembled. The chair was Lakhdar Brahimi, the former foreign minister of Algeria, who, after a seven-month investigation examining tons of documents and testimony from hundreds of sources, analyzed the data and outlined an extensive set of recommendations in a seventy-four-page report.

On August 21, 2000, The Brahimi Report was submitted to both the General Assembly and the Security Council with an introduction by Kofi Annan, in which he asked for support from both entities in enacting the far-reaching agenda. According to Annan, "The expeditious implementation of the panel's recommendations ... is essential to make the United Nations truly credible as a force for peace."

The executive summary of the report begins with a historical perspective: The United Nations was founded, in the words of its Charter, in order "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." Meeting this challenge is the most important function of the Organization, and to a very significant degree it is the yardstick with which the Organization is judged by the peoples it exists to serve. Over the last decade, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge, and it can do no better today....

It should have come as no surprise to anyone that some of the missions of the past decade would be particularly hard to accomplish: They tended to deploy where conflict had not resulted in victory for any side, where a military stalemate or international pressure or both had brought fighting to a halt, but at least some of the parties to the conflict were not seriously committed to ending the confrontation. United Nations operations

thus did not deploy into post-conflict situations but tried to create them.

Pointing to failed missions by the UN, the report found: Where one party to a peace agreement clearly and incontrovertibly is violating its terms, continued equal treatment of all parties by the United Nations can in the best case result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil. No failure did more to damage the standing and credibility of the United Nations peacekeeping in the 1990s than its reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor.

Among the conclusions reached, the report calls for a "Robust doctrine and realistic mandates. The report's extensive analysis and recommendations for change are contained in seventy different sections detailing the need for preventative initiatives, sound peace-building strategy, promotion of international human rights instruments, high standards of performance with built-in accountability, rapid deployment of forces, and on-call expertise. These experts would be available to consult on all aspects of peacekeeping considerations, including logistics, international law, military and civilian police, human rights, refugees, basic resources, communications, democracy-building and electoral support, along with dozens of other important areas of expertise.

Perhaps the most important suggestion of all is that peacekeeping be treated as a core activity of the United Nations and that expanded operations and efforts be consolidated within a single branch directly under the UN secretary general. This branch would then be directly responsible for establishing strategy and policy rather than having them emanate piecemeal from various offices and entities. The Brahimi Report especially advocates the use of state-of-the-art information technology for use in intelligence gathering and for the widespread dissemination of information, especially among strategy and policy planners, and for improving field communications during peacekeeping operations.

The report also found it essential to maintain long-range historical and political analysis of complex regional situations so as to advise the peacekeeping office of potential problems and to expedite short-term crisis prevention--rather than wait until a crisis is full-blown. Only in this context will the creation of a coherent mission plan with an achievable exit target ever be possible. One interesting suggestion was the establishment of a Lessons Learned Department to provide feedback and constant review of ongoing operations to guard against repeating mistakes.

The Brahimi Report concludes by applauding a Security Council delegation that flew to Jakarta (Indonesia) and Dili (East Timor) in the wake of the East Timor crisis in 1999 (tactfully omitting the fact that the delegation was only ten years late), citing this effort as an example of action at its best--not just utterance of useless words. The report calls upon the leaders of the world assembled at the Millennium Summit (held this past September in New York City) "to commit to strengthen the capacity of the United Nations to fully accomplish the mission ... to help communities engulfed in strife to maintain or restore peace." Lastly, it encourages all nations to commit to build and to hold onto peace, to find reconciliation, to strengthen democracy, to secure human rights. We see, above all, a United Nations that has not only the will but also the ability to fulfill its great promise, and to justify the confidence and trust placed in it by the overwhelming majority of humankind.

Open sessions in the usually secretive UN Security Council have allowed Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) observers to witness international response to The Brahimi Report. At a meeting focused on exit strategy, almost every speaker insisted that a more important consideration was entrance strategy: the establishment of criteria for determining if and when goals are met that would allow for the withdrawal of peacekeepers. Many speakers cautioned that conflict would resume upon the departure of a peacekeeping force if its mission concluded before those goals could be met.

Some speakers insisted that no exit date should ever be set but, rather, exit conditions. Elections should be only one of many goals for a peaceful transition. Additional goals which have proven vital include the placement and functioning of governance systems, establishment of the rule of law, maintenance of social and physical infrastructure, operation of public utilities, and the creation and operation of a banking system and tax collection.

The term mission-creep was used to describe the expanded role peacekeepers have been drawn into during some operations. Most viewed this not so much a problem in itself but a result of short-sighted vision and an inadequate anticipation of certain inevitable long-range issues. Of particular concern were the UN's precarious funding, which can result in the premature termination of operations before a mission is complete. The new recommendations suggest additional staffing and the reassignment of UN personnel and an overall budget of about $150 million--considerably more than has ever been allocated in the past.

The need to establish robust rules of engagement was another concept discussed. General agreement was reached that a UN peacekeeping force must be capable of defending itself against those who renege on their commitments to a peace accord or otherwise seek to undermine the peacekeeping force by violence. Many speakers suggested the assignment of a massive, multifaceted peacekeeping force to act as a psychological deterrent against challenge.

The difficulties in delivering humanitarian supplies were described. Efforts by peacekeepers to distribute these supplies are often thwarted by regional warlords who seek to enhance their status with followers and to intimidate their enemies. This puts peacekeepers in jeopardy and impedes their objective.

In all the days of UN Security Council testimony in response to The Brahimi Report not one disapproving comment was heard and the recommendations already appear to have overwhelming support. The general theme was "Yes, Yes, Yes. Let's get on with it!"

It's reassuring to know that most of the nations, as well as the United States, will be supportive of these long-needed changes and will be willing to work toward implementing them. On August 23, 2000, Richard Boucher of the U.S. State Department said: The UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) needs more staff, strengthened planning capacity, streamlined logistical structure, more flexible financing and the ability to move resources into the field in real time....

Our initial perception is the report accurately reflects our main concerns about UN peacekeeping operations. We intend to work closely with the UN Secretariat and other Member States in the coming months to review the report's recommendations and develop specific plans for implementation.

However, the United States has been accumulating a peacekeeping debt since the mid-1990s by paying approximately 25 percent rather than the assessed 30 percent. This doesn't bode well for plans to further increase UN peacekeeping spending. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrook points out that the United States is generous in its voluntary contributions to UN programs and UN agencies, estimating the U.S. contribution in the 2001 fiscal year to be over $2.5 billion. This is certainly commendable.

According to UN reporter Barbara Crossette in the November 23, 2000, New York Times, Holbrook is worried that, if no action is taken soon by the UN on the U.S. request for budget reforms and a reduction in U.S. payments, "the recently improving attitude in Washington, marked by the larger allocation of money, could quickly reverse," reducing again the money for the United Nations. What Holbrook failed to mentioned is that it took the threat of losing our seat on the Security Council because of unpaid bills to motivate the United States to loosen its purse strings in the first place.

The United States insists that other nations which have become richer since the UN assessments were originally allocated should pay a larger share. But at the UN, other nations see this as the world's richest country seeking to avoid paying assessments commensurate with its share of world economic output.

If a new mandate for UN peacekeeping is ever to be implemented, there are still many hurdles to cross. Perhaps most worrisome is the fact that adoption and implementation of any changes in the UN peacekeeping mandate will be fought tooth and nail by a few U.S. right-wing reactionaries who currently maintain a stranglehold on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Any efforts on their part to keep the United States from paying its fair share of UN dues would surely embarrass the nation internationally.

On the other hand, considering that there's always hope that we humans can be better than we have been, and that actually we are on a learning curve, the United States--the most powerful nation on Earth--might be persuaded to supply the bulk of the peacekeeping forces and supplies. If not instead of, at least in addition to, our relentless, wasteful, and mysterious preparations for war.

Beth K. Lamont is the American Humanist Association's NGO delegate to the United Nations and an executive board member of and a program director for the Humanist Society of Metropolitan New York, the Corliss Lamont Chapter. The full text of The Brahimi Report can be found on the Web at www.un.org/peace/reports/ peace_operations/.

COPYRIGHT 2001 American Humanist Association COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Grouphttp://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_1_61/ai_69202838/print

Remaking U.N. Peacekeeping: U.S. Policy and Real Reform"ECD Releases New Briefing Paper

• Introduction • ECD Recommendations • Response by Charles William Maynes, Editor, Foreign

Policy magazine • Response by Timothy Barner, Executive Director, World

Federalists Association • An executive summary of this report

Introduction

Having served as the principal agent of international peacekeeping for most of its history, the United Nations has stepped off center stage for the moment, in Bosnia. With its severely depleted resources, it had no choice. After 50 years of salvaging peace out of threats of war, U.N. peacekeeping is now in need of a rescue operation of its own. While Congress and the Administration are negotiating a deal to pay the U.S.'s debt to the U.N., the strings attached may tie the hands both of U.S. participation and of the U.N. itself. Whatever the results of these negotiations, they won't be enough to put this embattled institution on a firm footing. Without substantial reform and a strengthened institutional support structure, it is programmed to fail. There is an urgent need to shift the policy discussion beyond the immediate crisis and examine seriously the conditions under which U.N. peacekeeping can actually be expected to succeed. To focus and inform that discussion, ECD commissioned international security expert and Worldwatch Institute senior researcher Michael Renner to write Remaking U.N. Peacekeeping: U.S. Policy and Real Reform. In addition to analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of peacekeeping operations thus far and of U.S. policy toward them, this report provides a comprehensive set of recommendations for short- medium- and long-term reforms that could bridge the gap between the prescriptions for current

crisis management and the vision of a fully capable post-Cold War U.N. peacekeeping system. ECD released the paper on November 29 at a press conference at the National Press Club. It was covered by international press from Germany, Egypt, Canada, S. Korea, for example, as well as news services feeding to the U.S., the third world, and the hispanic world. In examining what has gone wrong (as well as what has gone right) with the peacekeeping effort, the paper looks at the changes in the purpose, magnitude and complexity of peacekeeping operations in the post-Cold War period. It analyzes the problems caused by the lack of adequate financial, material and political support from U.N. members, and by the big powers' use of these operations to jockey for regional influence. It recommends reforms to shore up the foundations of this vital effort and adapt it to changed conditions. These include strategies to regularize funding as well as training for these operations, and to establish the U.N.'s clear political command and control over them. The report critiques the Clinton Administration policy toward peacekeeping, pinpointing the conditions it establishes and the prerogatives for the U.S. it claims "that, if replicated by other U.N. members, would sound the death knell for peacekeeping." It also analyzes the individual tenets and likely results of the broad Congressional attack on peacekeeping. In mapping out an effective peacekeeping system, the paper gives priority to preventive measures, including an early warning system and a mediation board set up by the Security Council in conjunction with regional organizations. It recommends a two-tiered structure of peacekeeping forces: one lightly armed force geared to classical peacekeeping; and another more militarily capable force geared to rapid deployment.

ECD Recommends: A Support Structure for Peacekeeping

Reform of U.N. peacekeeping will be foreordained to fail unless it is undertaken in conjunction with the effort to strengthen other institutions and build new ones to support the peacekeeping effort. These should include:

• an International Inspection Agency, to enhance the inspection capacities of the International Atomic Energy Agency and extend them to cover chemical and conventional as well as nuclear weapons,

thereby enabling the agency to distinguish civilian from military uses of technologies with dual-use potential, and ensure that negotiated disarmament measures will enhance rather than undermine security;

• a Satellite Monitoring Agency to augment the capabilities of the verification agency to monitor undeclared weapons facilities and assist in conflict prevention, peacekeeping and confidence-building measures and economic sanctions;

• an Economic Sanctions Council within the U.N. to systematize this alternative to military action and to deal with the secondary economic and social effects of this action;

• an Electoral Observation Agency that would establish internationally accepted rules for conducting and monitoring elections that are part of national peace and reconciliation accords;

• Strengthening the capacity of the International Court of Justice to adjudicate international disputes and creating a permanent International Criminal Court to investigate serious violations of international humanitarian law during armed conflicts, rather relying on ad hoc efforts.

Constructive action by the U.S. to include ... • Pay off past peacekeeping arrears and pay new dues on

time and in full. Support the creation of a regular annual peacekeeping fund and sufficiently-endowed startup and reserve funds.

• Support the creation of a single commission or a series of panels to assess the positive and negative lessons of the peacekeeping experience to date, to work out guidelines and rules for future peacekeeping, to review the composition of the Security Council, and to make recommendations on providing a reliable source of revenue for the United Nations.

• Instead of insisting on U.S. command over U.S. troops participating in U.N. peacekeeping missions, focus on working out practical rules of operations that ensure greater cohesion among different national contingents.

• Conclude an unambiguous stand-by agreement with the U.N., as some 60 countries have done or are in the process of doing, designating non-combat personnel that would, in effect, be on-call for peacekeeping service.

• Establish training programs for peacekeeping personnel that clearly separate peacekeeping training from traditional military (i.e., combat) training.

• Convert a military base scheduled for closing into a permanent peacekeeping training facility.

• Provide the kind of equipment and services that most other nations are unable to commit--cargo planes, transport ships, satellite and other communications equipment.

Speakers at the press conference responded:Charles William Maynes, Editor, Foreign Policy magazine and former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations:

This is an excellent report on an important subject. The UN is now at a crossroads. Support for it has never been so fragile nor has misunderstanding of the UN been so widespread. Within the Congress, there has been an almost total collapse of support for UN peacekeeping yet this collapse rests on a misunderstanding. Many in Congress believe that the UN was in some inexplicable way responsible for the death of the 18 rangers who were trying to capture General Aidid in Somalia. In fact, the operation was completely under the direction and command of the United States. Events in Bosnia have also had a highly negative impact on the image of UN peacekeeping in the United States. Disguising its own lack of policy toward Bosnia, the administration repeatedly imposed impossible mandates on the UN in Bosnia yet supported the effort to deny the UN the financial and military tools to carry out the mandate. Nevertheless, the US then denounced the UN as incompetent when it failed to perform... The result is that we are at a turning point. Either we restore general support for UN peacekeeping or we will witness damage to it that cannot be undone. In trying to decide our strategy, however, we have to decide what we are aiming to achieve. Are we trying simply to protect the UN against unwarranted or dangerous attacks? Or are we trying to create a better instrument that can improve the security of member states? This report has

chosen the latter course. I believe the second course is more in our interests but it is the most difficult because it will open new questions. The reason to adopt the first approach is that one is concerned about the international reputation of the United States, which has been damaged by our failure to pay our dues. The reason to adopt the second approach is that one believes that there really is an opportunity to manage international relations in a way that offers a greater role for law and process rather than power and influence. The second path is not an easy one for the United States to take. A world in which power and influence rule is not one in which the US will do badly. We are the most powerful and we are the most influential. Our problem or our dilemma is that the otherwise logical choice to prefer a world where might makes right internationally is also one that is in conflict with our ideals and our constitution domestically. As a result there is also a tension in debates about the US role in the world. Some look at the US position internationally and urge us to adopt the practices of powerful states throughout the centuries. Others look at our traditions and insist that we strive for something higher. This report is an effort to suggest an alternative way that is both consistent with our ideals and with our interests. In other words, it projects an international order that would be compatible with our domestic order and that would serve America's international security interests. Is it realistic? Can it work? It is and it can if we understand what is possible and what is not possible in the current international environment. It is not possible for the UN or any other international organization to impose order on every corner of the globe. It is not possible for the UN or any other international organization except a formal military alliance to deter a determined aggressor... The UN cannot order Armenia to stop fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh or impose peace on Afghanistan or Bosnia. Nor can NATO at any price we are likely to want to pay. What the UN can do is to assist nation states in grappling with the security dilemma. Through transparency, mediation, and confidence building measures, the UN can help states that otherwise want peace to maintain it by avoiding misinterpreting the actions and responses of their neighbors as aggressive acts. And here there is an enormous amount that could be done if we only had the common sense to undertake it.

This report outlines a number of steps that would provide that confidence and reassurance. Peacekeeping either of the traditional sort or of the more engaged type represented by Cambodia or Namibia, where the UN helped parties to carry out a negotiated agreement, is one such step. So would the creation of an international verification agency. A criminal court would be another step although it is difficult to see how one could bring an indicted person to justice. For any of these steps to work, the United States must do its share. We are not now doing our share. Defending the United States can be done in different ways. We will always need an army that can protect the United States through force of arms. But today the biggest need is resources for peace-monitors, mediators, observers, negotiators--who can help resolve conflicts that are the result not of deliberate aggression but of poorly based misunderstanding, avoidable fears, and shallowly rooted historical hatreds. These the international community can work on and this report is a solid start in that effort.

Timothy Barner ... Executive Director, World Federalists Association

I'm delighted to call attention to this important collection of proposals for real reform of UN peacekeeping. The President's Monday remarks on the commitment of US forces to Bosnia after a peace settlement mentioned the UN only once, in a negative fashion. It's worthy of note that few of us are surprised. UN refugee and humanitarian aid in Bosnia have been heroic but the UN role in peacekeeping is widely cited as a failure. Michael Renner correctly identifies that what has been attempted is a combination of traditional peacekeeping and more forceful peacemaking actions to protect peacekeepers and ensure the delivery of aid in active war zones. The effect of a confused mandate, minimal resources and continuing war has been a labeling of the UN with failure, a label which critics have used to describe the entire UN organization and then apply as a broad paintbrush to cover this Congress's emasculation of US support for both the UN peacekeeping and general budgets. Michael Renner is direct in asking whether UN forces can or should ever attempt to replace a muscular NATO military role. What is encouraging for

our World Federalist organization, however, is that his two tier approach to peacekeeping is accompanied by building other tangible and achievable components of a common security system in which effective UN peacekeeping is embedded. Satellite monitoring and other intelligence gathering is an important part of investigation and verification capabilities. In just the past few months we have seen satellite information used to investigate mass graves dug following the fall of Srebrenica, and as a negotiating tool in preparing large screen maps allowing every square yard of the Bosnian landscape to be viewed from armchairs in Dayton. Just this week a new agreement to use satellites for intensive monitoring of environmental degradation has been announced. This powerful technology for transmitting detailed information in real time could transform the face of both preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping if skillfully exploited for international peace. Renner's suggestion for creation of volunteer units for assignment to UN peacekeeping duties is timely as Congress prepares to debate putting US forces in harm's way in Bosnia and as a US soldier resists serving under the UN flag in Macedonia. A final word on money! Funds for UN peacekeeping are available. There is money in a global economy that benefits daily from the investment and market opportunities that are afforded by greater common security. Whether the Tobin tax on international financial transactions or another funding stream, the support of corporate leaders, civil society and political leaders will be required. Many of the UN 50th anniversary gatherings around the U.S. this year have demonstrated significant citizen support for comprehensive UN reform and strengthening proposals. Those of us who envision ...an essential and positive role for UN common security institutions must reach out to and mobilize new U.S. constituencies. Michael Renner and the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament have given us an important new tool and we thank them. **Editor's Note: Col Benjamin Orrell teaches the course on advanced peacekeeping at the National War College. His remarks at the press event indicated the challenges of using the U.S. military for international peacekeeping, given their enduring commitment to the mission of

projecting U.S. military power. The next issue will cover his comments and our response.

For the executive summary of this report, Click Herehttp://www.webcom.com/ncecd/remakingun.html