Peacekeeping and Collective Security - Essay Example

Running Head: peacekeeping and collective security Using historical examples account for the differences between peacekeeping and collective security. Compare these concepts to those outlined by Boutros Boutros [Name of the writer] [Name of the institution] Using historical examples account for the differences between peacekeeping and collective security. Compare these concepts to those outlined by Boutros Boutros Freedom from its cold-war constraints may have gone a bit to the UN Security Council's head. Charged nearly half a century ago with keeping the international peace, it suddenly finds that it has the chance to do so, embarking on as many peacekeeping jobs in the past four years as in the previous 40. Expectations have never been higher: the UN is now routinely looked to for help to stop horrid things happening: people killing each other, for instance. But Boutros Boutros Ghali, the Egyptian who took over as secretary-general in the new year, is dripping cold water on the excitement. If the UN is to maintain its credibility, he says, it has to conserve its resources--unless its members are prepared to approach peacekeeping in a more serious and generous spirit. On May 13th Mr Boutros Ghali told the Security Council that it was impractical to send UN peacekeepers to Bosnia while the war there was still pursued with such ferocity. If the council members wanted to intervene, they should not try to do so on the cheap; they would have to consider sending in tens of thousands of troops equipped with offensive capability. Even if they opted, at this stage, only for armed escorts to protect the relief convoys, they would have to think along similarly expansive lines; a convoy led by the UN had been brutally ambushed by Muslim militiamen. But the council, ignoring his warning, voted two days later for the provision of armed escorts without going into their military needs. The new secretary-general, who for many years was the eminence grise of Egyptian foreign policy, is not a table-thumper, a politician or even a good speaker. But he is beginning to show a sure touch and may be less worried than his predecessor about making enemies. One sign of this is his readiness to accuse the council of telling him to find people to do difficult and dangerous things without giving them the wherewithal to do them. He believes that when regional groups are strong, as the European Community supposedly is, they should work more consistently to bring about a peace. The UN peacekeeping operation is kept permanently and humiliatingly on the verge of bankruptcy. If the Security Council insists on sending a force into Bosnia without adequate political and military backing, the result on the ground could be a cruel farce. The background to Mr Boutros Ghali's caution is that the newly assertive ambassadors at the Security Council, unlocked from American-Soviet rivalry, are trying to do something exciting, but they are doing it by stealth rather than accepting that there may have to be changes in approach. The argument for stealth is that pragmatism works; attempts to bring the changes into daylight could open a box of troubles. One of the troubles is the membership of the council itself: the five permanent members are the victors of the Second World War. Japan, murmuring from the outside, wants to join the permanent five by the time the UN has its 50th anniversary in 1995. More important, the new peacekeeping operations exploding around the council's head are no longer of the traditional kind and do not necessarily call for traditional answers, let alone traditional fund-raising. That the UN charter makes no mention of peacekeeping'' is handy since it lets members be inventive in stretching the international peace and security'' criterion. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was exceptional in being the type of conflict the charter writers had in mind. Most of the conflicts with which the UN is now involved are civil or ethnic--domestic matters into which the Security Council is not supposed to pry. This raises all kinds of questions about the limits to national sovereignty. Most countries have something they would rather the world did not scrutinise: among the bigger countries, China has Tibet, India Kashmir, Britain Northern Ireland. The Latin American countries tend to be particularly twitchy; they reacted badly when the UN, without even pretending it had anything to do with collective security, helped Haiti run its election. The sovereignty debate is just getting into its stride. As a logical extension of peacekeeping and peace-building, the UN is invited into country after country as the midwife of political transition: supervising elections (Namibia, Nicaragua and Angola, as well as Haiti); creating an impartial police force (El Salvador); rebuilding from scratch (Cambodia). Even when it is not invited, it sometimes gets its foot into an unwelcoming door through humanitarian'' relief. This is what happened in northern Iraq. Relief was sent to the Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein's revenge and 500 guards were sent to protect the relief-givers. The guards, at first mocked as glorified UN doormen (though most of them are ex-soldiers or ex-policemen), have become the eyes and ears of the Security Council, reporting on what the Iraqis are up to and contributing immeasurably to the safety of what is now, in effect, a UN protectorate. The United Nations hopes to repeat the humanitarian-aid-plus-armed-escorts exercise in Somalia, where the need for relief is even more urgent than it was in Iraq; the UN calculates that 1.5m Somalis could die in the next few weeks if food and medicine do not get in. With the help of 470 locally hired mercenaries (not 10,000 as we incorrectly reported a couple of weeks ago), the UN is getting a little stuff in. But the UN would plainly prefer to be protected by its own men who would not, unlike those in Bosnia, have to be numerous or heavily armed. The UN has had plenty of failures or near-failures. Even some successful operations are accounted failures. It has kept the peace for nearly 30 years in Cyprus. But the two sides are still far from political agreement, and the governments that contribute troops have received no payment from the organisation for the past ten years, so the secretary-general has been suggesting that the peacekeepers should be withdrawn. Peacekeeping needs housekeeping The UN faces internal organisational problems which may make such failures more likely. Council members respond to their people's desire to do something'' but shrink at the cost, which is higher than it used to be; the peacekeeping bill for the next 12 months is put at $2.7 billion. The secretary-general still has work to do sorting out his own organisation, which is ponderous with bureaucracy and shot with pettiness--though he has got rid of many barons and done away, to the dismay of the developing world, with most of the UN's economic side. His secretariat, unlike any country's foreign ministry, is not split on a regional basis; there is no clear way in which he is fed information on what is happening. He depends on improvisation. Last January a Security Council summit stage-managed by Britain asked Mr Boutros Ghali to report within six months on ways of improving peacekeeping, peace-making and the diplomatic prevention of conflicts. The secretary-general says that his report will be pragmatic, eschewing philosophy. This is commendable--new financing arrangements, for instance, are a priority--and it is in line with his members' approach. Yet the secretary-general, at one time in his long life, was an academic; and in these changing days a bit of revolutionary philosophy might not come amiss. Organizing Successful Peacekeeping Operations Peacekeeping may be defined as "the prevention, containment, moderation and termination of hostilities between or within states, through the medium of a peaceful third party intervention organized and directed internationally, using multinational forces of soldiers, police and civilians to restore and maintain peace." (International Peace Academy 1984) The aim, ultimately, is to establish a just and stable peace. From the viewpoint of military commanders, success in creating conditions for such a peace requires as much organizational planning as success in waging war. A principal aim of peacekeeping planning, as in war planning, is to integrate military operations across the tactical, operational, and strategic levels, so that actions on each level are mutually reinforcing. Speaking generally, strategy addresses the distribution and application of all means of fulfilling policy objectives. (Parkinson 1977) United Nations peacekeeping strategy to support international peace and security is developed by the Security Council, the Secretary General, and staff advisors. (Peacekeeper's Handbook) Resources and activities at the tactical and operational level must be integrated to support the strategic aim of de-escalating violence and reconciling communities. That strategy is translated through a force mandate to support peacekeeping operations. At the operational level, the peacekeeping force commander converts strategic guidance into concrete military direction. This direction takes the form of guidelines for employing the force. The commander also coordinates the efforts of the military forces he (or she) commands with the efforts of UN civilian agencies. At the tactical level, contingents of the peacekeeping force carry out day-to-day military operations to fulfil the mandate and the force employment guidelines. They use multiple methods for doing this - the military aspects of which have been documented elsewhere (UN, Training Guidelines) - ranging from manning observation posts to patrolling, from negotiating to showing force. Michael Harbottle offers good examples of these varying organizational levels from his experience with and analysis of UN operations in Cyprus. At the strategic level, in 1964 Galo Plaza was appointed UN mediator to the conflict by the Secretary General. His mandate was to mediate the conflict and to report back to the Security Council. At the operational level, in his capacity as Chief of Staff of UNFICYP in 1968, Brigadier Harbottle arranged intercommunal meetings at which UN officers presided over exchanges of assurances of freedom of movement and good will between the communities. At the tactical level, interventions by junior soldiers have been important: "Often in United Nations operations serious escalation in violence has been avoided through the mediatory effort of a young non-commissioned officer or a junior commissioned officer. They have been called upon countless times to dissipate potential violence by a tactful and well-judged approach which has required great patience and forbearance." (Harbottle 1980) Harbottle claims that, taken together, interventions on these three levels have "constituted an interrelated effort aimed at improving and creating bridges whereby communication might be established." (Harbottle) That may be true. Yet, using hindsight, it is apparent that these interrelated efforts have not been sufficiently integrated to bring an end to the conflict. There are successes. At the tactical level, senior NCOs and young officers continue to dissipate potential violence, and, at the operational level, there have been occasional successes such as the opposing forces' 1989 withdrawal from parts of Nicosia. But these successes have not been linked with a comprehensive strategy that will push opposing parties towards peace. Stark evidence of the failure adequately to link efforts across organizational levels is found, for example, in the collapse of meetings between Cypriot Turks and Greeks that, from 1968 to 1974, had been presided over by UNFICYP officers. These meetings were an occasion to provide reassurances to both sides. After the partition of 1974, however, the meetings became difficult to hold on the tactical and operational levels, and the impasse was not broken at the strategic one. In other cases, minor setbacks at the tactical level became excuses for delaying or avoiding progress at the operational or strategic levels. In sum, UNFICYP has been successful in de-escalating the conflict from violence to segregation. But, despite a promising start in the 1960s, it has not been successful at promoting a dialogue that would lead to the rintgration of the contending forces. An obvious explanation for this failure is lack of political will for a settlement at the strategic level. But there are two other possibilities that bear examination: is military peacekeeping inherently flawed Or is it hampered by failure to coordinate its efforts in pursuit of achievable strategic goals There is an inherent contradiction in the role of peacekeepers in Cyprus. If their mandate is to maintain a status quo in which forces are segregated, then they are not well placed to assist in building trust and confidence as part of the progress towards a settlement. Fetherston describes this paradox as one in which the military functions of peacekeeping - segregating the belligerents - conflict with the role of a third party in conflict resolution: bringing the parties together. (Fetherston) While Fetherston accurately describes the current situation, peacekeeping need not inevitably impede conflict resolution. It has always been understood that peacekeeping relies on diplomacy to resolve conflict, but it is also true that at the tactical and operational levels, military forces can be vehicles of peaceful change. The military analogy to this situation is the distinction between offence and defence. A peacekeeping force wins the "main defensive battle" when opposing forces stop shooting and moving against each other. "Offensive" operations to transform the conflict include building trust and confidence between the opposing forces, meeting the security needs of each side, and setting up mechanisms that inhibit the use of force at the tactical and operational levels. The seeds for these offensive peacekeeping tactics can be found in current practice and in conflict resolution theory. Whether offensive action is best conducted by military forces or by predominantly civilian task forces will depend, among many other things, on the stage to which a particular conflict has de-escalated. If peacekeeping is not inherently flawed, its limitations can be explained by failures of operational art, doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures. Like Haig at the Somme, peacekeepers today are close to mobilizing new tools and new ideas that will allow peacekeepers - military and civilian - to break through and defeat conflicts decisively. Integrating strategic, operational, and tactical levels of peacekeeping is a crucial step; examples of the interdependence of levels abound in UNFICYP. When decisions leading to violence originate at the strategic level, they cannot be influenced directly by third party intervention at the operational or tactical levels. Either government or political authority in Cyprus can initiate troop movements, new defensive works, or acts of war that violate the cease-fire. Any such decision has to be addressed at the strategic level. Similarly, any progress at the operational and tactical levels requires the acquiescence of decision makers at the strategic level. The following two examples illustrate the point. First, tactically, incidents such as the cocking and pointing of weapons at soldiers of one UN battalion became so numerous that they were undermining the morale and effectiveness of the contingent and threatening to erupt in violence. Representations at sector level by the battalion commander brought no result and UNFICYP staff was also unable to affect the situation. The issue was not considered serious enough to cause intervention at the political level, partly because it was thought that the belligerents might be close to agreement following an initiative by the Secretary General's Special Representative. An alternative was found when the national government of the contingent whose soldiers were threatened made a protest to the ambassador of the state whose forces were at fault. Within 48 hours, the incidents in that national sector had virtually ceased. But this route to de-escalation can be used only infrequently; on another occasion a similar protest met with a counter-protest from the government in question. The second example illustrates the minefield of conflicting requirements at strategic and operational levels. One of the most tense and dangerous sections of the buffer zone in Cyprus runs through the walled city of Nicosia, where opposing forces face each other across mere meters of ground over which they had fought fiercely in 1964 and again in 1974. UNFICYP had tried repeatedly to increase the physical separation of forces in order to reduce tensions and the danger of renewed fighting. A series of bilateral talks between the force commander (in consultation with UN New York) and the opposing forces came close to an agreement for demilitarizing the old city. Between mid-December 1988 and March 1989, elements of the Greek Cypriot press fanned popular suspicion of the deal, eventually causing a breakdown in the process at the political level.11 In May 1989 a new force commander reopened the process but involved only military commanders. By keeping the discussion at a strictly technical and military level he was able to close the deal in a matter of weeks. However this local success was not extended to areas outside Nicosia as had been originally envisioned, possibly because of lack of political support at the strategic level. An effective peacekeeping mission requires close coordination of all three levels at which forces operate. Both military and civilian elements of a mission act as third parties to the conflict: they segregate opposing forces to reduce violence and work to restore trust, confidence, and normal relations. That peacekeepers should be responsible for both separation and rapprochement of belligerents is not such a strange idea: it is analogous to the dialectic of offensive and defensive action that underpins military operations in war. The peacekeeper works with the opposing forces against the conflict. The first phase of the operation is a defensive manoeuvre designed to segregate the belligerents. But the campaign cannot be won by defensive action alone-there must be a counterattack against the conflict that is swift and uses all available skills and resources. The principal tactics in the counteroffensive are "contact skills": e.g., constabulary intervention, mediation, negotiation, arbitration, conciliation, professional consultation, and problem-solving. References Addington, Larry H., The Patterns of War Since the Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 144-45. Alger, Chadwick F., (2000) Thefuture of the United Nations System,. Allsebrook, Mary, (1986) Prototypes of peacemaking: the first forty years of the United Nations Fetherston, A. B., Toward a Theory of United Nations Peacekeeping, University of Bradford, Department of Peace Studies, Peace Research Report 31, February 1993, p. 85. Fetherston, Theory of Peacekeeping, 77-78. Fixdal, M., (1998) 'Humanitarian Intervention and Just War', Mershon international studies review; Vo1.42, 283-312 Harbottle, "Third Party Interventions," 129. Harbottle, Michael, (1980) "The Strategy of Third Party Interventions in Conflict Resolution," International Journal 35, 1,(1980): 119. Hurrell, A. (1992) 'Collective security and international order revisited', International Relations, vol.xi, no.!, April 1992, p.37-55. International Peace Academy, Peacekeeper's Handbook (New York: IPA and Pergamon Press, 1984), 22. Kupchan, Charles A. (1995) 'The promise of collective security', International Security, vol.20, no. 1 , Summer 1995, p.52-61. Macqueen, Norrie, (1999) The United Nations since 1945 Peacekeeper's Handbook, op. cit., Chapter II, and article I of the Charter of the United Nations. Rivlin, B., 'Regional arrangements and the UN system for collective security and conflict resolution: A new road ahead' International Relations, Roberts, A. (1993) 'The United Nations and international security', Survival, vo1.35, no.2, Summer 1993, p.3-30. Roger Parkinson, Encyclopedia of Modern War (St. Albans: Granada, 1977), 305. Thakur, R. (1993) 'The United Nations in a changing world, Security Dialogue, vo1.24, no.l, United Nations, Training Guidelines for National or Regional Training Programmes, (United Nations, 91-02208); Australian Army Manual of Land Warfare, Part One: The Conduct of Operations, Vol. 3: Low Intensity Operations, Pamphlet No. 3: Peacekeeping. (Department of Defence, Army Office, 2 May 1980) Read More