The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (34 page)

The third period, from 1992 through to the present, saw an explosion in the number of UN field operations, more direct involvement by the Council in individual operations, but also major setbacks and failures, most notably in Angola, Somalia, Rwanda, and former Yugoslavia. Against the backdrop of these experiences, the ‘Report of the Panel on UN Peace Operations’ released in 2000, offered not just recommendations for the future but also an analytical stocktaking of UN peacekeeping since the end of the Cold War, and merits therefore special attention in the context of this chapter.
²
The events of ‘9/11’ and their aftermath, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have placed the debate and the practice of UN field operations in a new context. Yet, surprising to some, there has been no drop in demand for UN peacekeeping. If anything, the reverse has happened with the number of UN personnel on mission worldwide soaring to an all-time high by late 2006.
³

While the chapter is concerned with the totality of the UN’s peacekeeping experience, special attention is devoted to three UN operations, one within each of the three phases outlined above: the UN mission to Congo from 1960 to 1964, the UN operation in Namibia from 1988 to 1989, and the operation in Bosnia–Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Although sharply different in geographical setting, political context, and historical background, each case presented the Council – in distinct but related ways – with key questions regarding the use of force and the meaning of consent and impartiality; another way of saying that they presented the Council with fundamental issues of war and peace.

The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s ensured that the post-war role envisaged for the UN by wartime planners would not be realized. For more than
forty years, the workings of the UN in the field of international peace and security would continue to be shaped by ideological hostility and the global competition for influence between the Soviet Union and Western powers. Even so, the early collapse of great power unity did not usher in a complete paralysis of the organization in the security field. Starting in 1948 with small-scale deployments to Palestine and Kashmir but only conceptualized as a distinctive contribution to international order in the late 1950s, the UN soon identified a role for itself in the mitigation and containment of conflicts which, it was feared, would otherwise bring the superpowers into more direct confrontation. That role involved the use of lightly equipped military and civilian personnel, deployed to zones of conflict with the consent of the parties to the dispute, in a practice that came to be known as peacekeeping. In his Annual Report for the 15th General Assembly (1960), the then Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, provided a concise rationale for the emerging practice. Describing peacekeeping as a form of ‘preventive diplomacy’, Hammarskjöld was convinced that the UN’s principal contribution to international peace and security – given the stark geopolitical realities of the day – lay in ‘keeping newly arising conflicts outside the sphere of bloc differences’.
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This function of peacekeeping – to anticipate or pre-empt the rival engagement of major powers into areas of local conflict – was given added urgency in the 1950s and 1960s by the gathering pace of decolonization and the often abrupt retreat from empire by the major European powers.
⁵

The deployment of the first UN Emergency Force to the Middle East (UNEF I) in 1956 is commonly viewed as ‘the first peacekeeping force
per se
’
⁶
and Hammarskjöld’s reflections in the Annual Report of 1960 were strongly influenced by it. The lessons derived from that operation were also distilled in a separate
Summary Study
issued by Hammarskjöld in October 1958.
⁷
In it, he spelled out, in systematic and prescriptive fashion, the ‘basic principles and rules’ of what would later be termed ‘classical’ peacekeeping. Set up to supervise the cessation of hostilities and defuse tensions following the Suez crisis, UNEF I was authorized by a special session of the General Assembly,
not
the Security Council. In this respect, however, it differed from all but one of the other thirteen operations launched by the UN
between 1948 and 1987.
⁸
In authorizing these missions the Council did not invoke
Chapter VI
of the UN Charter, nor could peacekeeping easily be accommodated within
Chapter VII
. Instead, as Hammarskjöld put it, peacekeeping belonged to an imaginary ‘Chapter 61/2’ category, that is, somewhere between the non-coercive measures ranging from negotiation to judicial settlement and set out in
Chapter VI
, and the enforcement provisions spelt out in
Chapter VII
.
⁹
Peacekeeping, then, did not arise out of a specific Charter mandate but represented instead a functional adjustment by the organization to an international political system shaped by deep-seated rivalry and overshadowed by the threat of wider war.

As an innovation in UN practice, the guidelines issued in 1973 by Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim for the Second UN Emergency Force to the Middle East (UNEF II) – set up to supervise the redeployment of Israeli and Egyptian forces following the Yom Kippur War – came closest to a formal codification of UN peacekeeping’s essential features. Echoing Hammarskjöld’s
Summary Study
before the Congo debacle of the early 1960s, these were adherence to the principles of consent; the non-use of force except in self-defence; continuous support from the Council as the mandating authority; and the commitment of member states to provide military personnel as well as financial and logistical support for operations.
¹⁰
A further customary rule governing UN peacekeeping throughout the Cold War years, reflecting its origins in the desire to insulate local conflicts from great power rivalry, was the exclusion of the P5 members from participating with troops on the ground.
¹¹
In the field, these principles translated into light military commitments, consisting mainly of infantry units possessing limited defensive capabilities, lacking in mobility, and with only a first line of logistics support. In short, as a military force, peacekeepers were exposed and vulnerable. This, however, was partly the intention. As with the self-denying ordinance that kept P5 members away from direct involvement in operations and the ‘prohibition against any
initiative
in the use of armed force’,
¹²
the effect was to reinforce the neutral, confidence-building, and non-coercive character of UN deployments. When the strategic interests of permanent Council members permitted, it was a posture that enabled peacekeepers to undertake a variety of tasks, mostly involving their
interposition
between adversaries
following
a period of hostilities. Chief among these were the monitoring of ceasefire agreements, the supervision of the disengagement of forces from the battlefield, and the creation and active patrolling of buffer zones.

The requirement of consent ensured that UN troops were, in most cases, inserted into stable and ‘permissive’ operational environments, though there was greater variation among Cold War operations than is often supposed. Still, the
essence
of UN peacekeeping as a class of operations remained its dependence ‘in respect of both its origin and its success, on the wishes and policies of others’.
¹³
The claims and ambitions of peacekeeping were therefore both modest and limited. This did not necessarily prevent innovation and experimentation from taking place as even during the Cold War, UN peacekeepers – albeit then only as an ancillary function to the main tasks of interposition – engaged in fact-finding, local mediation, and humanitarian relief and assistance activities.
¹⁴
Faced with a determined effort to withdraw consent and the prospect of renewed war, however, the UN’s room for manoeuvre would always be severely limited. When Egypt formally requested the withdrawal of UNEF from the Sinai in May 1967, U Thant had little choice but to comply, though he was heavily criticized for doing so at the time.
¹⁵
The Secretary-General, it was argued by critics of the decision, could at the very least have done more to persuade President Nasser to change his mind about the withdrawal of UNEF and thus help slow down the momentum towards war. Bringing effective pressure to bear on Egypt, however, would, for one, have required a unity of purpose in the Security Council which was manifestly lacking at the time.

But there are also important exceptions to this pattern of UN Cold War operations. The most significant of these – the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC) from July 1960 until June 1964 – was also by far the largest UN operation during the Cold War, peaking in strength in mid-1961 when some 20,000 troops, drawn from nearly 30 countries, were deployed in the fields.
¹⁶
It was also, as Norrie Macqueen has observed, an operation in which the UN ‘confronted a fragile central
state beset by internal division, ethnic tensions and secessionist pressures’ ; aspects that would also prove to be the ‘defining circumstances of later interventions’.
¹⁷

ONUC was authorized by the Council on 16 July 1960 and initially deployed to ensure the smooth withdrawal of Belgian troops from the Congo. These had been reinserted in the resource-rich province of Katanga without the consent of the Congolese government, ostensibly in response to a rapid deterioration of public security in the days and weeks following the declaration of independence on 30 June 1960.
¹⁸
To deal with the crisis, UN forces were sent – in large numbers and with impressive speed by the standards of many later operations – to assist in the ‘maintenance of law and order’ and in the ‘provision of essential public services’.
¹⁹
The situation on the ground, however, remained fluid and uncertain, the result in part of the decisions, first, in Katanga and, later, in South Kasai, by local leaders backed by external actors to declare their independence from Congo. In February 1961 the Council, citing the ‘danger of widespread civil war and bloodshed’, authorized ONUC to take ‘all appropriate measures to prevent the occurrence of civil war in the Congo, including… the use of force, if necessary, in the last resort’.
²⁰
Later, in November 1961, the authority of the Secretary-General was widened still further to include ‘vigorous action, including the use of the requisite measure of force, if necessary’.
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The effect of this steady expansion in ONUC’s mandate was to ensure that the UN force became, and would remain for the duration of its deployment, a factor in the domestic politics and internal power struggles of the newly independent territory.

At the time and in the early years following ONUC’s withdrawal in 1964, the UN’s Congo experience generated, not surprisingly, a substantial literature on peacekeeping.
²²
From the late 1980s onwards, as the organization was slowly
being liberated from its Cold War constraints, the continuing relevance and the generally high quality of the Congo literature was largely overlooked in much of the new writings on peacekeeping. While the UN’s involvement in the Congo clearly cannot be divorced from its Cold War context, the 1990s were to show that the Congo experience was not devoid of lessons and warnings as the UN again became involved in situations where governmental authority
within
a specific territory was violently contested. There are two related aspects to this. The first concerns the effects of Security Council decision-making on the workings of the UN force on the ground. The second, more profound, has to do with the inherent difficulties of inserting and operating, in a third-party capacity, a military force in the midst of an ongoing civil war.

In assessing the effects of Council decision-making on ONUC’s performance as a peacekeeping force, there are several striking parallels to the post-Cold War experience. These may be summarized under seven, necessarily overlapping, categories: tensions created by the steady expansion of and resulting ambiguity of ONUC’s mandate in response to changing circumstances on the ground; operational problems in managing UN forces arising from uneven and patchy levels of local consent throughout the area of operations; difficulties generated by complex and cumbersome command and control arrangements; tensions between the civilian and military sides of the mission; enormous logistical challenges; problems associated by the provision of humanitarian relief in the midst of ongoing violence and, crucially, key questions regarding the use and utility of force.

As for the wider question of ONUC’s involvement in what soon developed into a civil war, it is clear that while the principles of consent, minimum use of force, and strict impartiality – as in the former Yugoslavia some thirty years later – provided the
initial
basis for UN engagement, ONUC was inexorably drawn into the conflict, however much it sought to maintain a posture of impartiality, through its efforts to pacify domestic violence and restore law and order.
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For ONUC, the context of civil war meant that ‘in almost all the actual power contests of Congo politics the United Nations could not avoid taking decisions which favour[ed] one side or the other.’
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In this sense, Congo pointed to an uncomfortable ‘logic’ of civil wars for those wishing to intervene effectively from the outside; intervene that is, in order to bring fighting to an end and lay the ground for a political settlement of some sort. That logic might be expressed as a tendency towards two extreme options: on the one hand, ‘giving war a chance’ by siding with one or more parties to the conflict, or, on the other, imposing order through the assumption of comprehensive trusteeship responsibilities over the disputed territory. In recent times, as will be
seen later,
²⁵
the former has usually been followed by the latter, though both, for their own reasons, remain unpalatable options to most member states. Because of this, these options have been hedged with restrictions and self-imposed limitations, and have also been presented as something different from what they really are.
²⁶
In Congo, for reasons of Cold War politics and the context of decolonization, neither option could openly and realistically be entertained. They have been embraced only with reluctance since, and then partly as an acknowledgement of the limitations and failures of ‘classical’ peacekeeping. The larger point here is precisely that ‘classical’ peacekeeping of the kind outlined by Hammarskjöld in the late 1950s and discussed above is a tool of questionable utility in situations of violent and ongoing internal conflict. That was the lesson drawn by the UN immediately after Congo, though it would have to be re-learnt in the post-Cold War era.