The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (33 page)

Traditionally peacekeepers have maintained impartiality between the parties, without prejudice to the claims and positions of the conflicting parties,
⁹³
in contrast to enforcement operations such as Korea in 1950. UNEF did not take sides in the conflict between Egypt and Israel, the UK, and France, and was not established to remove foreign troops forcefully from Egyptian territory. Instead, it provided France and the UK with a face-saving escape route from their intervention.
⁹⁴
The
emphasis on impartiality was underlined by the rules governing the use of force by UN troops: UNEF could only use force in self-defence, and would not get involved in the internal affairs of Egypt.

In 1960, the impartiality of ONUC was at the heart of the disputes in the Security Council that led to the referral of the Congo question to the General Assembly under a Uniting for Peace resolution. In particular the direct military support of the Soviet Union for the Lumumba government, and the closure of the airports and radio station in Congo by ONUC (the latter at the time in the hands of Lumumba’s supporters), led to increased divisions in the Security Council over ONUC,
⁹⁵
with both the USSR and the US effectively accusing the other of abandoning impartiality.
⁹⁶
Resolution 1474 (ES-IV), passed by the General Assembly after the issue had been referred to it by the deadlocked Security Council, called upon all states to refrain from bilateral military support for any party in the Congo, except on request of the UN,
⁹⁷
which the Secretary-General interpreted as making illegal not just Soviet assistance to Lumumba, but also Belgian assistance to secessionist forces, in particular in Katanga.
⁹⁸
As in the case of UNEF, the importance of impartiality was underlined by the rules of engagement governing the use of force by ONUC troops. In a report to the Security Council, Secretary-General Hammarskjöld emphasized that the soldiers ‘may never take the initiative in the use of armed force, but are entitled to respond with force to an attack with arms’.
⁹⁹
As Jane Boulden has shown, this interpretation of the rules governing the use of force by ONUC was maintained even as the mandate of the mission expanded.
¹⁰⁰
and only clearly changed when the Security Council authorized the use of force to apprehend mercenaries in Katanga fighting against the central government.
¹⁰¹

Since the end of the Cold War, the notion that peacekeepers are impartial has been increasingly undermined, as peacekeeping operations have been deployed in civil conflicts in support of the government and against rebel forces to end a civil conflict, as in the case of the RUF rebels in Sierra Leone, for example. In Bosnia, the establishment of ‘safe havens’ and the extension of UNPROFOR’s mandate to protect them strongly compromised the mission’s impartiality, but failed to give
UNPROFOR the means and the authority to protect the areas effectively, leading to the massacre of almost 7,000 Bosniac men and boys.
¹⁰²

While UN peacekeeping has evolved significantly since the days of UNEF and ONUC, and the principles of consent, collective financing, and impartiality have increasingly been challenged, they have remained central to the majority of peacekeeping operations. The debates initiated by the Uniting for Peace resolutions have significantly shaped the development of these principles, and thereby the evolution of a key practice of the United Nations.

In the 1950s, the Uniting for Peace resolution raised the hope of a more effective United Nations, able to maintain peace unencumbered by the Soviet veto. This account of the use of the resolution highlights that it has failed to strengthen the UN as an instrument of collective security. This, however, does not mean that one should necessarily consider the failure to use the Uniting for Peace procedure more effectively and consistently as a missed opportunity for UN reform. The preceding analysis of the General Assembly’s role does not suggest that greater involvement of the Assembly in issues of international peace and security would be desirable. In light of the deep and acrimonious divisions between the G-77 and Western countries that emerged in the wake of the Iraq war and the 2005 world summit, and the penchant of some of its members for symbolic politics with little consideration for the impact of such politics on the reputation of the UN as a whole, greater involvement by the Assembly would reduce the effectiveness and credibility of the UN rather than strengthen it.

In 2001, the ICISS report identified the Uniting for Peace resolution as one possible important instrument if the Council fails to act to address major human rights violations or humanitarian emergencies.
¹⁰³
While the report acknowledges that the General Assembly cannot authorize the use of force under the Uniting for Peace procedure, it suggests that a General Assembly resolution in favour of intervention would offer a large degree of legitimacy to the use of force by member states.
¹⁰⁴
The report recognizes the challenge of attaining the necessary two-thirds majority in the Assembly for such a resolution, but believes that the possibility of such action might help to encourage the Security Council to act more forcefully.
Leaving aside the question whether a General Assembly resolution would offer sufficient legitimacy for the use of force (a claim about which the British government had important doubts during the Kosovo crisis),
¹⁰⁵
the preceding analysis suggests that the report’s trust in the persuasive power of the General Assembly and the Uniting for Peace resolution is probably misplaced.

Reviewing the use of Uniting for Peace offers a different perspective on some important developments at the United Nations over the last decades. It shows that while the Uniting for Peace resolution failed to strengthen the UN’s collective security role, it helped to frame the original conception of peacekeeping, much of which remains relevant today, even if peacekeeping practice has significantly evolved since the end of the Cold War. This discussion of the Uniting for Peace resolution also offers a different perspective on the declining importance of one of the principal organs of the UN, the General Assembly. The increased use of the resolution by the Assembly, especially with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, can be understood as an attempt to take a stand against the increasing dominance of the UN by the Security Council, in particular the Permanent Members and the major financial contributors, mostly Western states. What started as an attempt to shift power from the Council to the Assembly has turned into a symbol of the powerlessness of the latter.

MATS BERDAL

T
HE
habit of dividing history into distinct periods, neatly delineated by dates and supposed ‘turning points’, should always be weighed against the risks inherent in imposing order retrospectively on complex and continuous processes. In particular, assumptions of radical discontinuity between historical epochs can easily lead to a neglect of sources of continuity both in the behaviour of actors and in the workings of the international system. These are truisms that apply to the study of the United Nations and its activities in the security field as much as they do to any other subject of historical enquiry. Yet, they need to be restated, not least as a proviso to much of the writings on UN field operations after the Cold War; writings that, especially in the early and heady days of post-Cold War optimism, tended to ignore or quickly pass over the experience of earlier UN operations and the academic work to which these had given rise. It was a tendency that flowed naturally from the view that the absence of great power unity throughout the Cold War had defined UN experiences to such a degree that those very experiences were now largely irrelevant to an understanding of the ‘post-Cold War’ challenges facing the organization. Closely linked to this was the conviction that the removal of Cold War tensions would
necessarily
result in the restoration of great power unity and, with it, in a revitalized Security Council capable of developing the long-established practices and functions of UN peacekeeping in new and far more ambitious directions.

To question, at the outset, the validity of the assumptions on which the optimism of the late 1980s and early 1990s rested should not be misunderstood: the argument here is
not
that little has changed in the history of UN Weld operations or, by implication, in the attitudes and interests of the Council towards peacekeeping as an instrument at its disposal. Indeed, what originated in the 1950s as a limited, non-coercive form of third-party involvement in conflict, reliant on host-state consent and geared towards defusing and containing violence, has been profoundly affected by changes in political context and member states’ ambition over time. Since the late 1980s in particular, changes in the political landscape and normative climate of international relations have contributed to a dramatic increase in the scale and scope of UN Weld operations; a development reflected in a more direct and continuous pattern of Council involvement in the authorization and management of operations. None of this, however, invalidates the need to place the Council’s engagement in peacekeeping within a wider historical context. There are, as this chapter makes clear, at least two reasons for this.

In the first instance, the emergence of peacekeeping during the Cold War is closely related to the central theme of this book: the Security Council and war. UN peacekeeping evolved, in part, as a device to reduce the likelihood of war between Council members that were locked in a global struggle for political and ideological influence but were nonetheless anxious to avoid direct confrontation. As such, while peacekeeping forces were themselves directly engaged in the mitigation of local violence, their deployment also served as a great power instrument for managing relations and preventing war of a far more catastrophic kind. When, in the latter half of the 1980s and early 1990s, superpower tensions eased and the fear of major war receded, the Council made use of the accumulated experience and established practices of UN peacekeeping to help bring long-running wars to an end: in the Middle East (Iran–Iraq), Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua), and parts of Asia (Afghanistan and Cambodia).

The second reason addresses more directly the subject of continuity and discontinuity raised above. The history of UN Weld operations during the Cold War was richer and saw more variety than the notion of ‘traditional’ or ‘classical’ peacekeeping sometimes suggests. Moreover, important chapters in that history – specifically the UN’s operation in Congo from 1960 to 1964 – raised wider questions about the
inherent
limitations of peacekeeping as a distinctive form of third-party involvement in circumstances that would later be termed ‘state failure’ or ‘state collapse’. These would resurface again in the 1990s to confront the Council with some deeply divisive and difficult choices. Three such questions, all closely connected, stand out and provide also an underlying focus for this chapter:

• What is the appropriate, prudent, and permissible use of force for peacekeepers?

• What is the precise meaning of ‘host-state consent’ to the deployment of UN forces and of ‘impartiality’ as the determinant of operational activity in civil-war
like conditions, where ambient levels of violence are high and the operational environment less than benign?

• How do the political aspirations contained in a formal Security Council mandate translate into realizable military objectives for UN forces on the ground?

The Council’s response to these questions has varied depending on geopolitical context, local circumstances, the interests of the Permanent Five (P5) and of troop-contributing nations. One theme, though it became more acute and proved more fateful as the number and complexity of UN peacekeeping operations exploded in the 1990s, has nonetheless remained constant. It was highlighted by Herbert Nicholas as he sought, writing in 1963, to assess ongoing UN operations in the Middle East and Africa. ‘Nothing in the experience of Suez and the Congo’, he concluded then, ‘suggests that an international force is exempt from the workings of the inexorable rule that he who wills the end must will the means’.
¹
It is a theme that runs through the entire history of the Council’s engagement in UN peacekeeping.

For the purpose of analysis, the chapter identifies three phases in the history of UN field operations. Whilst the element of artificiality involved has been kept in mind, the division is designed to bring out the elements of
continuity
and
break
in the use and attitudes of the Council towards peacekeeping, both as an instrument to address individual conflicts but also as a mechanism for regulating and managing relations among its members.

The first of these phases, the Cold War period from the first UN operations in the Middle East through to the mid-1980s, saw the crystallization of peacekeeping as a distinct form of third-party intervention designed to control violence by means other than enforcement. In writings about the UN, it is a period usually associated with the terms ‘traditional’ or ‘classical’ peacekeeping, with the activities of UN forces governed by the principles of host-state consent, minimum use of force except in self-defence, and impartiality.

The second period, from 1987 through to late 1991, marks a transitional period during which the Council sought and partly succeeded in making more active and constructive use of UN peacekeeping in its efforts to facilitate the settlement of long-standing regional conflicts. It was also a period of notable achievements in the
field. These in turn helped generate new expectations about the future role of the organization, encouraging the view that the instrument of peacekeeping could now – in absence of Cold War competition among the Permanent Members (P5) – be expanded and developed in new, more ambitious ways.