The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (164 page)
Authors: Adam Roberts,Vaughan Lowe,Jennifer Welsh,Dominik Zaum
19
At the same time, the US has been at pains to discourage overt Taiwanese assertions of independence:
Financial Times
, 15 July 2005, 9.
20
Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, ‘Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths’,
European Journal of Population
21 (2005), 154, 156–7.
21
Elizabeth M. Cousens, ‘Conflict Prevention’, in David Malone (ed.),
The UN Security Council. From the Cold War to the 21st Century
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004), 114–15. Since Cousens wrote this article, the UN has at last become involved in Burundi and Sudan, following ceasefires arranged by others.
22
SC Res. 83 of 27 June 1950; SC Res. 84 of 7 July 1950.
23
GA Res. 498 (v) of 1 Feb. 1951.
24
GA Res. 1000 (ES-1) of 5 Nov. 1956; GA Res. 1001 (ES-1) of 7 Nov. 1956.
25
In 1934–5, the League of Nations deployed an international force to permit the conduct of the Saar plebiscite. Also, some 19th-century Great Power interventions in the Balkans aimed as much at peacekeeping as at peace-enforcing. Thus the 1827 Anglo-French fleet was instructed only to interpose itself between Ibrahim Pasha and the Greeks to establish a de facto armistice, while in 1897–8 warships of the Powers spent many months seeking to mediate a ceasefire and settlement between recalcitrant Turks and Cretans; but in both cases a robust peacekeeping flipped into the forceful destruction of Turkish power in the area.
26
GA Res. 1237 (ES-III) of 21 Aug. 1958.
27
GA Res. 1353 (XIV) of 21 Oct. 1959.
28
GA Res. 1752 (XVII) of 21 Sept. 1962.
29
SC Res. 143 of 14 July 1960.
30
Richard Hiscocks,
The Security Council: A Study in Adolescence
(London: Longman, 1973), 197–294, 242, 273–5, ch. 8. The USSR and France had also taken exception to the Secretary-General’s powers in relation to the UN Cyprus force (UNFICYP).
31
For a list of vetoes cast see
Appendix 5
.
32
The only reference to Berlin in his ‘official’ biography is to his declaration that the idea of a UN force there was ‘basically quite unsound’: Brian Urquhart,
Hammarskjöld
(London: Bodley Head, 1972), 230.
33
Ibid., 256–8.
34
Susan C. Hulton, ‘Council Working Methods and Procedure’, in Malone,
Security Council
, 239.
35
SC Res. 912 of 21 Apr. 1994.
36
See the discussion by Colin Keating, Ibrahim Gambari, Howard Adelman, and Astri Suhrke in Malone,
Security Council
, ch. 32, esp. 506–8, 514–15.
37
Annual Register
(1996), 373–4. For Under-Secretary-General Joseph Connor’s February 1996 report, and other UN financial documents, see Global Policy Forum, UN Finance (
www.globalpolicy.org/finance/index.html
).
38
For the 2006–7 biennium, the regular budget was US$3.79 billion, while the peacekeeping budget for 2006 alone was US$4.72 billion. See GA Res. 60/247 of 1 Feb. 2006, and UN doc. GA/AB/3749.
39
Howard Adelman and Astri Suhrke, ‘Rwanda’, and Ibrahim Gambari, ‘Rwanda: An African Perspective’, in Malone,
Security Council
, 490–1, 518. Similarly, in Feb. 2006, the UN force in southern Sudan numbered only half its intended strength:
Economist
, 11–17 Feb. 2006, 60.
40
Sebastian von Einsiedel and David Malone, ‘Haiti’, in Malone,
Security Council
, 477.
41
James Dobbins et al.,
The UN’s Role in Nation-Building: From the Congo to Iraq
(Santa Monica: RAND, 2005), 243.
42
For example, the 1954 Geneva conference that, though unsuccessful over Korea, temporarily settled Indochina derived not from the UN but from the four Great Powers, who had met from 1945–9 as the ‘Council of Foreign Ministers’ and resumed meeting after Stalin’s death. China attended as a Korean War belligerent. The conference’s chairs, the UK and USSR, reconvened it in 1961–2 to restore Laotian neutrality.
43
Admittedly the precise area of the Tamil region was never mutually agreed and, at the moment of writing, the ceasefire itself seems in grave jeopardy.
44
Keesing’s Record of World Events
, 46775–6.
45
Cyrus Vance,
Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 144.
46
Annual Register
(1996), 90–1, 96.
47
Annual Register
(2002), 233–4; (2003), 256–7; (2004), 215–16.
48
The USSR obtained Security Council discussion of the intervention, but could achieve only the dispatch of a diplomatic representative of the UN Secretary-General. See Hiscocks,
Security Council
, 235–9; J. P. D. Dunbabin,
The Post-Imperial Age: The Great Powers and the Wider World
(London: Longman, 1994), 408–9.
49
‘Report of the ECOWAS Workshop: Lessons from ECOWAS Peacekeeping Operations 1990–2004’, Accra, 10–11 Feb. 2005, 15. Available at
www.un.org/unowa/unowa/reports/ecowas110205.pdf
50
African leaders dislike the potential for secession in the north-south settlement in Sudan (one ‘realised through pressure from the US and Europe and against the original will of African nations’). This may well underlie their calls ‘for exclusively African peacekeeping troops’:
Afrol News
, 6 Jan. and 18 May 2005. SC Res. 1556 of 30 July 2004 and subsequent resolutions stressed ‘the leadership of the African Union’ in Darfur and restricted the UN’s role to providing support, in contrast to its activism in southern Sudan.
51
Malone,
Security Council
, 5–6.
52
GA Res. 1514 (XV) of 14 Dec. 1960. Admittedly UN involvement in the conflicts of decolonization was, apart from the special cases of UN Trusteeships, the Congo, and Rhodesia, largely limited to General Assembly resolutions and the gadly activities of its Committee on Colonialism.
53
Henry Kissinger,
Years of Upheaval
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Michael Joseph, 1982), 312–13.
54
SC Res. 1216 of 21 Dec. 1998.
55
Whereas 22 resolutions ‘cited
Chapter VII
, or used its language’ between 1946 and 1989, 1990–9 saw 174
Chapter VII
resolutions: see Mats Berdal, ‘Bosnia’, in Malone,
Security Council
, 459.
56
Annual Register
(1999), 278;(2001), 290–1.
57
Henry L. Stimson Center, ‘UN Mission in Burundi (ONUB)’, available at
www.stimson.org/fopo/?SN=FP20040408637
and SC Res. 1545 of 21 May 2004.
58
ECOWAS,
Lessons from ECOWAS Peacekeeping Operations
, 41.
59
Edward M. Luttwak, ‘Give War a Chance’,
Foreign Affairs
, 78 (July–Aug. 1999), 36–44.
60
Not all clear-cut victories lead to peace in the long run: France’s 1847 defeat of Abd al-Qadir in Algeria, and Russia’s defeat of Shamil in Chechnya in 1859, did not preclude the revival of war many decades later; and, as regards Franco-German relations, the sequels of World Wars I and II were very different. Moreover it was precisely the fact that, thanks to external intervention, Egypt did not lose the 1973 war, as it had that of 1967, which enabled Sadat and his negotiating partners to move to peace in 1979. Part of this movement depended on the interposition between Egyptian and Israeli forces, during a prolonged disengagement, of external peacekeeping troops, first UN, then ‘multinational’. By agreement of the parties, too, the UN had a role, that of supervising Eastern Slavonia’s retro-cession, after the 1995 war in which Croat victories (and ethnic cleansing) probably did create the conditions for a lasting Serbo-Croat peace.
61
Mack,
Human Security Report
2005, 29.
62
Numbers of ‘one-sided killings’ are said to be in decline, but this is not necessarily true of their overall magnitude. Also since most conflicts recently have been in areas of poverty and/or weak state machinery in Africa, and have displaced more people in the 1990s than in previous decades, the fall in ‘battle-deaths’ may not equate to one in the – in Africa far more numerous – ‘war-related’ deaths.
63
Mack,
Human Security Report 2005
, esp. 8–9, overview, and parts 1 and 5. Mack draws on several sources, but chiefly the highly respected Uppsala University-International Peace Research Institute, ‘UCPD/PRIO Armed Conflicts Dataset’ (available at
www.prio.no/cscw/cross/battledeaths
), described in Lacina and Gleditsch, ‘A New Dataset of Battle Deaths’.
64
Mack also notes the 1990s rise in the number of conflicts in former Yugoslavia (where the UN was active) as well as in the former Soviet Union (where it was not): Mack,
Human Security Report 2005
, 24–5.
65
Malone, ‘Conclusion’, in
Security Council
, 640–1.
66
Land-locked Ethiopia would presumably be vulnerable to tough sanctions, though these would hurt its people before they affected its rulers.
67
The Times
, 8 Dec. 2005, 37; ‘Report of the Secretary-General on Ethiopia and Eritrea’, 3 Jan. 2006; SC Res. 1670 of 13 Apr. 2006; SC Res. 1681 of 31 May 2006;
Keesing’s Record of World Events
, 47240.
68
Malone, ‘Conclusion’, in
Security Council
, 625.
*
I wish to thank Roland Otto, University of Göttingen, and Chun-Kyung Paulus Suh and Marianne Vicari, both University of Munich, for their diligent and competent assistance during the preparation of this chapter.
1
Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff,
Documents on the Laws of War
, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), at 16–17.
2
Ted van Baarda, ‘The Involvement of the Security Council in Maintaining International Humanitarian Law’,
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights
12 (1994), 137–52; see also Christiane Bourloyannis, ‘The Security Council of the United Nations and the Implementation of International Humanitarian Law’,
Denver Journal of International Law and Policy
20 (1992), 335; Stephen Schwebel, ‘The Roles of the Security Council and the International Court of Justice in the Application of International Humanitarian Law’,
NYU Journal of International Law and Policy
27 (1995), 731–59.
3
Van Baarda, ‘The Involvement of the Security Council in Maintaining International Humanitarian Law’, 138–43.
4
Jochen A. Frowein and Nico Krisch in Bruno Simma (ed.),
The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary
, vol. 1, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Introduction,
Chapter VII
, MN 14 and 17–31; Bardo Fassbender,
UN Security Council Reform and the Right to Veto: A Constitutional Perspective
(The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1998), 98 et seq.
5
SC Res. 1502 of 26 Aug. 2003 on the protection of UN personnel, associated personnel, and humanitarian personnel in conflict zones.
6
Cf. SC Res. 808 of 22 Feb. 1993; SC Res. 827 of 25 May 1993, and SC Res. 955 of 8 Nov. 1994 respectively.
7
Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Art. 1 and 9; Statute of the International Tribunal for Rwanda, Art. 1 and 8.
8
Christopher Greenwood, ‘The Impact of Decisions and Resolutions of the Security Council on the International Court of Justice’, in W. P. Heere (ed.),
International Law and The Hague’s 750th Anniversary
(The Hague: T. M. C. Asser Press, 1999), 83.
9
SC Res. 1483 of 22 May 2003, on the situation between Iraq and Kuwait. See Eyal Benvenisti, ‘The Security Council and the Law of Occupation – Resolution 1483 on Iraq in Historical Perspective’,
Israel Defence Forces Law Review
1 (2003), 19–38; Eyal Benvenisti, ‘Future Implications of the Iraq Conflict: Water Conflicts During the Occupation of Iraq’,
American Journal of International Law
97 (2003), 860–72; David Scheffer, Tuture Implications of the Iraq Conflict: Beyond Occupation Law’,
American Journal of International Law
97 (2003), 842–60. See also David Scheffer’s discussion of military occupation in
Chapter 26
.
10
SC Res. 1674 of 28 Apr. 2006, on civilians in armed conflict.
11
See below under Application of norms to facts’.
12
e.g. SC Res. 1493 of 28 July 2003, on the situation concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
13
SC Res. 1662 of 23 Mar. 2006, on the situation in Afghanistan; SC Res. 1637 of 8 Nov. 2005;SC Res. 1509 of 19 Sep. 2003, on the situation in Liberia.
14
SC Res. 1466 of 14 Mar. 2003; SC Res. 1430 of 14 Aug. 2002; SC Res. 1398 of 15 Mar. 2002; SC Res. 1369 of 14 Sep. 2001, on the situation between Ethiopia and Eritrea. See also SC Res. 1566 of 8 Oct. 2004, on threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts; SC Res. 1545 of 21 May 2004, on the situation in Burundi; SC Res. 1535 of 26 Mar. 2004, on threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.
15
SC Res. 1355 of 15 June 2001 and SC Res. 1635 of 28 Oct. 2005, both on the situation concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo; see also SC Res. 1386 of 20 Dec. 2001, on the situation in Afghanistan; SC Res. 1547 of 11 June 2004, on the Report of the Secretary-General on the Sudan (S/2004/453).