Rocky Road for UN Peacekeeping

It's the best of times and the worst of times for United Nations peacekeeping. With 20 missions and nearly 130,000 authorized military, police and civilian personnel, it is obvious that the UN's "blue helmets" are much in demand; but strangely, there seems to be waning support for peacekeeping in important ways. There seems to be growing reluctance among key States to support operations seen as too politically unsavory or dangerous; and some of the supposed beneficiaries of peacekeeping seem to be not grateful at all.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, warned the General Assembly's Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations yesterday that the faltering support could mean big trouble for UN authorized operations in the Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan and Eritrea.

Even as he spoke, some 700 UN troops from Eritrea were headed home to Jordan and India. Frustrated by the Eritrean government's blockage of fuel and food supplies to UN peacekeepers, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had tried to temporarily relocate them to the Ethiopian side of the disputed border, but finding that effort blocked too, resorted to a complete pull-out. He said in a report to the toothless Security Council that the Eritrean government's obstructions had put peacekeepers in an "untenable position."

Guéhenno, who is reported to be leaving his post because Ban, under pressure from Washington, "reformed" his department by taking away its logistics capabilities and putting it under a new Under-Secretary, warned that a "serious failure in one of our missions would be enough to put at risk the credibility of the whole of peacekeeping, which we have worked so hard to restore over the past few years."

What he meant by "credibility" is a mystery, for UN peacekeeping has a record of grand failures that includes Palestine (where the first UN mission was mandated in 1948), Rwanda (where a force was pulled out even as the 1994 genocide was in progress), and Bosnia (where peacekeepers stood by as the "safe area" the Security Council had declared in Srebrenica was overrun and subjected to mass murder and rape).

In the Sudan, where the savageries of Darfur were not even acknowledged by the Security Council till a solitary UN official quit his job to publicize the Organization's embarrassing inaction, the Kharatoum regime has stalled deployment of a 26,000 UN-African Union force. At present, the Darfur force consists of little more than the 9,000 or so African Union troops who have been there ineffectually for over a year.

In other crisis spots UN peacekeepers have gone into the field never to return: they have been stuck in Cyprus and the India-Pakistan border for decades. Where they have succeeded -- including Liberia. Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and Timor-Leste, all in the last decade -- it is because the outside Powers which sustained conflict (and that includes not just States but mining companies), achieved their ends or decided to call it quits.

In Afghanistan, where the murky geopolitics of resource-rich Central Asia collide with the trade in heroin and "extremist Islam" (represented by the Taliban and rogue elements of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence), "peacekeeping" is hardly the word for what is going on. The UN has subcontracted its pacific role to NATO, which has tried in recent months to overshadow the Karzai government on the grounds that it is politically incompetent and logistically inefficient. The high point of that effort was the unsuccessful effort to place a British spy turned politician in combined charge of the UN, NATO and EU operations in Afghanistan (see February 10 post "Why Karzai Nixed Paddy Ashdown").

The net result of all this is that the moral authority of the United Nations (which it retains mainly by default, there being no other institution to represent the universal hope for peace), is being undermined. That would be undesirable at the best of times; when the world is entering a period of major instability caused by a tectonic shift of economic and political power to asia, it could be disastrous.

The Money Trail From Darfur

The Sunday New York Times story by UN correspondent Warren Hoge was headlined "Intervention, Hailed as a Concept, is Shunned in Practice." The lead summed up its gist: "Three years after the United Nations adopted a groundbreaking resolution to help it intervene to stop genocide, even longtime supporters of the rule acknowledge that it has not helped the organization end the violence in Darfur."

The General Assembly in 2005 had endorsed the "responsibility" of governments to prevent genocide, but the United Nations had been "stymied" in its efforts to stop widespread killings in Darfur by "the failure of major member states to fulfill promises to support action and by the intransigence of the Sudanese government." As a result, only the 6,000-strong African Union component of a planned 26,000 joint AU-UN peacekeeping force had been able to deploy.

Hoge offered no explanation for the inaction of Western governments on Darfur, but seemed to suggest that a set of new non-governmental "advocacy and research centers" would address the issue. If they do, here's a simple bit of advice: don't waste time analyzing the moralities of why governments won't act. Just follow the money trail.

It's widely known that the Darfur money trail leads to China, which is the major importer of Sudanese oil. But it does not stop there. China needs the oil to keep its manufacturing industries whirring. Those industries produce 80 per cent of the toys imported by the United States and Europe. They produce the cheap clothes and electronics and other knickknacks that fill the shelves of Wall-mart and other major retailers on both sides of the Atlantic.

China does not produce all the goods it exports. It serves as a finishing shop for goods emerging from South East Asian Nations like Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar. In fact, China gets to keep only about 20 per cent of the proceeds from its exports; the rest goes to others in the production chain in South East Asia. Those nations do not get to keep much of the money either; just the pittance their workers earn. The lion's share of profits percolates back to the corporations and banks that have organized and control the production chains of our global economy. And of course, they wouldn't do it unless all of us buy the cheap goods they produce.

Send not to ask who tolls the bells of Darfur. We do.

Tragicomedy Central

The tragicomedy of the UN comes in high and low variants.

The latest Press briefing by the President of the General Assembly, Srgjan Kerim (Macedonia) would be high comedy if we didn't hear Wagnerian notes of doom in the background.

Kerim told journalists he had succeeded in making the 192-nation Assembly more “dynamic” during its fall 2007 session. As evidence of the new dynamism he pointed to "crucial negotiations" on such important issues as climate change, development financing and Security Council reform.

“We have made obvious and tangible progress in improving the working methods of the General Assembly, thus making it very dynamic and vital,” Mr. Kerim said. In fact, the "agenda had been so impressive and cooperation among Member States had been so inspired," he even thought it was unnecessary to adopt the traditional draft resolution on “Assembly revitalization.” And what was the evidence of this new vitality? The new spirit delegations had shown in negotiations on climate change, financing for development, the Millennium Development Goals, countering terrorism, and UN reform, including expansion of the Security Council. "Business as usual” was at an end, Mr. Kerim declared. He had also detected progress on the review of the General Assembly's numerous mandates.

Other examples of vitality: a resolution on “social justice” put forward by Kyrgyzstan, and one on “agricultural technology for development” sponsored by Israel. Yet another example of Assembly vitality was the decision to hold a thematic debate in February (11-12) on the outcome of the Bali conference on climate change last week. There would be "two important panel discussions: on creating synergies and support for the post-Bali negotiating process; and on how United Nations agencies would play a role in that process." The Secretary-General had been asked to report on all UN activities touching on climate change by 25 January.

Also in January, the General Assembly would begin substantive discussions of the review of progress since the 2002 Monterrey International Conference on Financing for Development; the process would culminate in a meeting at Doha, Qatar next November. In April, the Assembly had set a thematic debate on UN reform. A newly established Task Force -- Portugal, Chile and Bangladesh along with the President -- was discussing how and when a paper could be produced on Security Council reform that would be the basis for intergovernmental negotiations on expanding the membership of the Council. Mr. Kerim hoped that if the paper was ready in time the negotiations could begin in February.

To appreciate the comic element in all this, one has to keep in mind that the General Assembly has been vastly productive in declaring standards and laws, but with very little effect on the behavior of States. For instance, the 2002 Monterrey Conference heard firm pledges from rich countries to significantly increase aid to the poor and render more equitable the architecture of international financial relations; but nothing much happened: the increased aid went largely to emergency relief or to pay down debt, while poor countries continued their decades-long export of funds to the rich. In 2006 poor countries exported $667 billion (net) to rich countries, up from $500 billion in 2005.

Similarly, talk of Security Council reform has gone in circles for over a decade, as has UN reform. The "negotiations" on climate have been the worst boondoggle of all, for they have seemed to hold out hope of stopping the planet's inexorable slide towards cataclysmic disasters without having any real impact. (More on all this in later posts).

As for low tragicomedy, it comes from The Analyst of Monrovia, which reports that the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) has refused to examine the penis of a person under trial for treason. A local court had written to the head of UNMIL asking that two medical officers be delegated to examine the prisoner to verify whether he was telling the truth about torture that had left him unable to have sexual relations. UNMIL declined to comply with the court's request on the grounds that its mandate would not allow it.