The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (24 page)
Authors: Adam Roberts,Vaughan Lowe,Jennifer Welsh,Dominik Zaum
The concern about the inadequacy of UN peacekeeping forces in a volatile situation was not confined to the single year of 1994. On 22 April 1995, the killings of large numbers of internally displaced Hutus at Kibeho camp inside Rwanda by forces of the Rwanda Patriotic Army, in the presence of UNAMIR troops, cast yet further doubt on UN responses in situations of extreme communal violence. On this occasion, as before, the problem was not so much the availability of forces, but their lack of authorization (and willingness) to act forcefully in a dangerous situation. Similar concerns became acute in Bosnia 1994–5, when UN forces failed to provide protection for threatened people in the ‘safe areas’.
For the UN, the lessons of the Rwanda catastrophe were complex. They included consideration, not only of the question of standing forces, but also of other related
matters: the quality of decision-making by the Security Council; the need to advance beyond the ad hoc approach which marked all the UN’s decisions over the crisis; the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention, and also of UN peacekeepers responding robustly to attacks on civilians; the question of whether the UN should sometimes simply take sides in a civil war; and the importance of strengthening the role of regional international bodies, so that the UN is not asked to bear a huge range of burdens alone. All these issues arising from the Rwanda tragedy played a part in the debates in subsequent years about the role of the Security Council and of the forces operating under it.
In 1994 a process began whereby existing UN standby arrangements for peacekeeping forces were gradually formalized into what became known as the UN Standby Arrangements System (UNSAS). Because states were still anxious to retain control over the uses to which their forces were put, these revised UN standby arrangements for peacekeeping retained national control over the availability of national units.
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By April 2005 eighty-three states had made conditional commitments to UNSAS. However, the system was, and remains, limited in scope. It is explicitly based on ‘conditional commitments by Member States of specified resources within the agreed response times for UN peacekeeping operations. These resources can be military formations, specialized personnel (civilian and military), services as well as material and equipment.’
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A standby arrangement is not a standing force.
Meanwhile, in the course of 1993 and early 1994, before the disaster in Rwanda, the debate about standing forces had continued, but with distinctly limited results. For example, of the three proposals in
Agenda for Peace
, there had been no progress on the first two – namely Article 43 agreements, and peace enforcement units. Only the last – standby arrangements for peacekeeping forces – had seen the modest
progress outlined above. Moreover, by May 1994, in the wake of disasters in Somalia and elsewhere, the Security Council was becoming more cautious than before about embarking on new peacekeeping missions.
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At the same time, many states were devising restrictive criteria about the circumstances in which they would be prepared to commit forces to UN operations. In May 1994, with the adoption of Presidential Decision Directive 25, the US Government set firm limits regarding the situations in which the US would support the creation of, or be willing to participate in, UN peacekeeping forces.
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Even the Canadian Government proclaimed a degree of caution in this regard.
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Thus, if there was any progress in 1993–4 on standby arrangements and on developing more ambitious ideas for providing forces for UN operations, it was counterbalanced by increasing nervousness about the extent of military involvement that active support of the UN might entail. While the standby arrangements helped in finding forces for many peacekeeping missions, they did not work in the more difficult cases such as Rwanda. This failure led directly to a series of major proposals for standing forces being made in 1995, marking a high-water mark of interest in the subject.
The first was that of Boutros-Ghali, in his January 1995 ‘Supplement to An Agenda for Peace’, which included the suggestion that a rapid-reaction force was needed. Whereas many other proposals envisaged a broader range of tasks, going well beyond peacekeeping, Boutros-Ghali’s proposal was located firmly in the context of the problems of availability of troops and equipment for peacekeeping forces. His proposal immediately followed a reference to the failure of standby arrangements over Rwanda in May 1994:
In these circumstances, I have come to the conclusion that the United Nations does need to give serious thought to the idea of a rapid reaction force. Such a force would be the Security Council’s strategic reserve for deployment when there was an emergency need for peace-keeping troops. It might comprise battalion-sized units from a number of countries. These units would be trained to the same standards, use the same operating procedures, be equipped with integrated communications equipment and take part in joint exercises at regular intervals. They would be stationed in their home countries but maintained at a high state of readiness. The value of this arrangement would of course depend on how far the Security Council could be sure that the force would actually be available in an emergency. This will be a complicated and expensive arrangement, but I believe that the time has come to undertake it.
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At the same time, Boutros-Ghali was clear that a UN standing capacity for enforcement actions, as distinct from peacekeeping, was simply not on the cards:
neither the Security Council nor the Secretary-General at present has the capacity to deploy, direct, command and control operations for this purpose, except perhaps on a very limited scale. I believe that it is desirable in the long term that the United Nations develop such a capacity, but it would be folly to attempt to do so at the present time when the Organization is resource-starved and hard pressed to handle the less demanding peacemaking and peacekeeping responsibilities entrusted to it.
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The Security Council’s response to ‘Supplement to An Agenda for Peace’ suggested that there was no significant support there for the rapid-reaction force proposed by Boutros-Ghali. In its section on peacekeeping it rejected the idea, albeit in diplomatic language:
The Security Council shares the Secretary-General’s concern regarding the availability of troops and equipment for peace-keeping operations. It … reiterates the importance of improving the capacity of the United Nations for rapid deployment and reinforcement of operations. To that end, it encourages the Secretary-General to continue his study of options aimed at improving the capacity for such rapid deployment and reinforcement. The Council believes that the first priority in improving the capacity for rapid deployment should be the further enhancement of the existing stand-by arrangements, covering the full spectrum of resources.
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A ‘rapid-reaction force’ was actually created under UN auspices in 1995, but it was an ad hoc body very different from what had been envisaged in general proposals for standing forces. In Bosnia in summer 1995, on an Anglo-French initiative, a force comprising troops from France, the Netherlands, and UK, equipped with heavy artillery, was established within the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR), and was deployed close to the besieged capital city, Sarajevo. The decision to create it was taken amid much controversy in June, at a time when UNPROFOR personnel in Bosnia were being attacked, detained, and generally frustrated in their mission.
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The decision to create it thus preceded the catastrophic event – the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995 – that proved beyond all doubt the weaknesses of the existing pattern of UN peacekeeping in the
midst of this war. As eventually deployed and used in August-September 1995, this ‘rapid-reaction force’ provided much stronger physical protection for the capital than had been available up to that time, and was a serious threat to the Serb forces besieging the city. On 30 August, at the beginning of NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, the rapid reaction force launched a 600-round barrage from its heavy guns.
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The rapid-reaction force’s role outside Sarajevo was a significant factor in ending the siege, and in the events leading to the end of the Bosnian war later that year. Curiously, the achievements of this force were mentioned very little in the ongoing debate about standing forces.
Meanwhile, influenced mainly by Rwanda, various proposals for standing UN forces gathered momentum in 1995. Already in September 1994 both the Canadian and Dutch foreign ministers had made speeches at the UN General Assembly in which they reported the view, widely held in the UN system, that the presence of a brigade of UN forces in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, in May 1994 might have saved up to half a million lives. In his speech, Hans van Mierlo, the Dutch Foreign Minister, envisaged the establishment of a small international all-volunteer force to enable the UN to save lives in situations such as Rwanda:
If the deployment of a brigade could have prevented the indiscriminate slaughter of many hundreds of thousands, what then prevented us from doing so? Let us face it: the reason for our inaction was neither lack of means nor time. The reason was that under the circumstances no government was prepared to risk the lives of its citizens. The physical danger was considered too high.
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This idea was subsequently developed into a more definite proposal in the April 1995 ‘Netherlands Non-paper’, for a UN Rapid Deployment Brigade. This was along similar lines to the 1993 Urquhart proposal, but in several key respects was more fully developed. The Netherlands document explored ‘the possibilities for creating a permanent, rapidly deployable brigade at the service of the Security Council’, with ‘an immediately deployable strength of between 2,000 and 5,000 men’. It envisaged that the personnel should be recruited on an individual basis, and that its annual running costs might be in the region of US $300 million – or perhaps US $250 million if member states procured equipment, basing, housing, and so on. Its starting point, like Urquhart’s, was a void in the UN peacekeeping system: the time lag between a Security Council decision to deploy peacekeeping forces and their arrival in the area of operations.
The proposed UN Rapid Deployment Brigade, like the force proposed by Urquhart in 1993, was assigned a wide variety of possible tasks, some of which went beyond even an expanded definition of peacekeeping and encompassed forceful intervention. In the final version of the Dutch document, the tasks of the Brigade were envisaged as including preventive deployment on the territory of a party which felt threatened; intervention in some internal conflicts, possibly without the formal consent of the de facto rulers, especially to prevent or stop crimes against humanity, mass murders, and genocide; and acting as an advance party for agencies providing humanitarian relief, or providing them with military protection. Further, the ‘Non-paper’ did not rule out the possibility that the Brigade could be deployed within the wider framework of a multinational enforcement operation, as over Kuwait in 1990–1.
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A critical feature of the UN Rapid Deployment Brigade as proposed in the Dutch document was the limited duration of each operation in which it was engaged:
Deployment of the Brigade will always have to take place at very short notice and be of limited duration. When deployed in a UN peacekeeping operation, the Brigade will have to be the first one in and the first one out of the area of operations. Deployment of the Brigade will therefore always have to be accompanied by simultaneous decision-making and preparations for its replacement by Stand-by Units, an international peacekeeping force composed of national troop contributions, or an integrated multidisciplinary mission, including civil administration, monitoring of elections and human-rights observance, police support, humanitarian expertise, political negotiation and mediation, etc.
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The 1995 Canadian Study on ‘Improving the UN’s Rapid Reaction Capability’ had been announced in the speech of Foreign Minister André Ouellet to the UN General Assembly in September 1994.
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It started from the same problem as other proposals, namely the slow UN response to urgent crises. This Canadian study was not wedded to a single organizational military form (volunteer force v. national contingents), nor was it exclusively tied to a peacekeeping framework. Rather, as a preliminary document stated in early 1995, the study sought to ‘elaborate the component elements of a rapid reaction capability in a generic sense’, of which one important element was ‘the nature of standing forces, options
for their development and a discussion of their potential utility’.
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By its nature, therefore, it involved looking at a wide range of options, including not only a standing UN force of whatever kind, but also the strengthening of UN decision-making and logistic capabilities, trying to make the standby arrangements for peacekeeping forces work better, and examining the role of regional arrangements and individual countries. Much work was done on these matters. A key document produced by the project’s Core Group recognized the limitations of what was being proposed: ‘The chance of immediately initiating a UN standing capability is now seen to be quite remote.’ It envisaged, instead, a cumulative development, and it explored in detail ‘the requirement for a designated UN base; the organization of a static operational headquarters and two mobile mission headquarters; the composition of deployable military and civilian elements; and the modernization of appropriate doctrine and training’.
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The main outcome of the Canadian study, a substantial report presented to the UN in September 1995, was notably cautious in its recommendations. While it did not propose a standing UN military force, it made no less than twenty-six recommendations. All were aimed at strengthening the UN’s preparedness for peace operations, including radical improvements of the Standby Arrangements System.
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