Don’t Paralyze the UN Peacekeepers
By BENJAMIN KAHN
IN South Sudan, which is once again on the verge of descent into war, the new year began with a horrific scene: the corpses of men, women and children lying strewn in the mud, killed by a militia just yards from the gates of a United Nations compound in the town of Pibor. Peacekeepers there did not fire a shot. Tens of thousands of people were displaced, dozens of homes were torched and hundreds, according to some estimates, were murdered.
United Nations officials explained that a lack of helicopters had prevented them from rushing more than 400 troops to Pibor, a force too small to stop a militia of 6,000. Russian choppers serving the mission were grounded weeks before, after Moscow grew concerned about security.
“I was reduced to begging for replacements from neighboring countries and missions,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told an audience in Manhattan last month. “How do we deliver on Security Council mandates,” he asked, “when the very members of the Council do not give us the support we need?”
The next day, the United States Mission to the United Nations boasted that the Obama administration had won savings for American taxpayers by shutting down some peacekeeping missions and restraining spending on others.
These events laid bare a key weakness that continues to haunt peacekeeping operations but that cannot be blamed on the peacekeepers themselves: hampered by inadequate resources and diffuse lines of command and control, their capacity to deploy troops and secure equipment depends on the steadfastness of individual countries in supporting them.
It is wrong to impugn individual countries for insisting on security for their troops or wanting a say in how their assets are deployed. But what happened in Pibor highlights the challenges that peacekeeping missions face. Nations contributing troops may have little in common with one another, and some may have little national interest in the outcome of a peacekeeping effort.
Having served with the United Nations in Sudan from 2006 to 2008, I can tell you the killings in Pibor cry out for strengthening United Nations peacekeeping missions — not weakening them — so they can act fast and succeed.
I learned that violence flares suddenly in Sudan when I flew into Juba six years ago. At first, I was struck by an idyllic view from the dusty tarmac: long-horned cattle grazed quietly in a field of waving grass. But later that day, not far from my makeshift office, a Bangladeshi peacekeeper’s leg was blown off when he stepped on a buried grenade left over from Sudan’s civil war. I rushed out a notice explaining that the blast was an accident, not an attack, so that the people of Juba would not panic and riot.
That is how danger erupts in many places patrolled by United Nations peacekeepers — without warning. Contingency planning is a necessity.
In the last two decades, outrage over the international community’s failures to prevent genocidal massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia led to great strides in one area of reform: strengthening mandates for peacekeeping missions. Thus the peacekeepers’ mandate in Pibor did permit combat to defend civilians. But then a member nation withdrew vital tools at the wrong moment.
United Nations missions enlist contingents of soldiers from different countries. Each reports to the mission’s force commander but also to its own country’s military leaders. The force commander also answers to both his home country and the United Nations. On the ground, the consequences of unwieldy command structures are clear. Critical military assets lie idle; maneuvers that might prevent bloodshed go untried; morale is undermined and confusion reigns.
What can be done? There are many ways to structure sturdier, more unified chains of command and control. Any of them would be an improvement. The most ambitious suggestion often discussed is for a standing United Nations military force. Lesser steps might at least rationalize existing lines of command. The Security Council, meanwhile, must monitor changing threats to a mission, and make sure the force has what it needs to succeed.
But the very architecture of the United Nations — its sovereign members are the ultimate authority — dictates that the most powerful member states hold the keys to any reforms. World leaders must persuade their voters that better peacekeeping is worth the sacrifice of some national control.
Especially in the United States, President Obama must explain to voters that United Nations peacekeeping is more necessary than ever as we shift from a unilateralist military approach to a greater focus on muscular multilateralism. To cut back on support for it is to cave to the worst penny-wise, pound-foolish tendencies of our domestic politics.
If anything, support for the United Nations’ blue-helmeted troops should be increased. They save America untold billions by taking on moral and security imperatives that we cannot manage alone. For the international community to be more than a nice phrase, we must decide it is worth fighting for.
Benjamin Kahn, an adviser to aid organizations, was deputy chief of public information for the United Nations mission in Sudan from 2006 to 2008.
About Post Author
