More Force, Less Peacekeeping for UN Troops
30 May 2014
UN Peacekeeping Force Day, on May 29th, salutes those who serve—and have served—in the UN’s policy mechanism of choice for responding to violent local conflicts around the world.
Its story, since the first contingents of blue-helmeted troops from various member nations were deployed in 1948, is a checkered one, with some successes, a few shameful failures, and some recent significant—if risky—shifts in how it operates that could call the “peacekeeping” part into question.
It has also occasionally drawn criticism for prolonging the status quo: for example, in 1964 a UN peacekeeping force was deployed in Cyprus to separate Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots. Fifty years later, the peacekeeping force is still there, allowing the so-called Cyprus question to become—as former UN Under Secretary General Brian Urquhart once said—“a sort of national industry and sport for both sides.”
Last year was something of a watershed for the world organization’s peacekeeping operations, with a radical departure from the longstanding policy of using force only in self-defense and the introduction of a Forward Intervention Brigade, the introduction of conduct and discipline teams to counter sexual abuse and sexual exploitation by UN peacekeepers, and even a damages suit charging that the Nepalese peacekeeping contingent in Haiti was the source of a devastating cholera epidemic in that earthquake-stricken country.
Its defenders will say that’s a narrow perception of an operation involving nearly 112,000 peacekeepers from 122 member states serving in 16 operations around the globe (69 total since 1948), and at $7.06 billion (in 2012) the largest single expenditure in the UN’s annual budget. (In 1992, it was $1.7 billion.) Member states pay into the cost depending on their economic means, with the US as the highest contributor, with 26 percent of the total ($1.83 billion). The US provides money, but hardly any troops because of America’s refusal to allow its military to serve under foreign commanders. The current number of US military personnel serving as peacemakers is around 200.
Over the years the UN peacekeepers’ role has periodically been redefined, acquiring a diversity not foreseen in their original mandate of acting as monitors of a cease-fire between two warring sides. Today, peacekeepers supervise elections, provide police protection for civilian populations, and act as escort for humanitarian operations. A total of 3,215 peacekeepers have died in action, 103 of them last year alone. That unusually high number reflects a more confrontational approach as the UN, frustrated by its failure to make an impact on the brutal and chaotic civil war in Congo, one that has killed more than 5 million people since 1998, formed the Forward Intervention Brigade, a combat unit in support of the Congolese army against the collection of rebel groups that have kept the country in a state of violent upheaval. The massacres in Srebrenica (Bosnia) and Rwanda, in both of which a key factor was the failure to act by UN peacekeepers, also contributed to the realization that in some situations impartiality was neither possible nor desirable.
Every UN peacekeeping operation requires the authorization of the five, veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, which goes some way to explaining why calls for a UN peacekeeping force to separate the combatants in Syria, and more recent requests for UN peacekeepers in the Ukraine, went unmet. Russia would not sign off on either.
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