The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (38 page)

If this speaks to the theme of continuity in that it points to the ‘underlying political character’ of all peacekeeping, the surge in operations since 2003 also makes it clear that the Council has not retreated from the more ambitious kind of tasks with which UN peacekeepers became associated in the 1990s.
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Human rights monitoring, training and protection, the organization of national elections, and the implementation of large-scale demobilization and reintegration programmes
of former combatants, are all tasks, singly or in combination, that have been entrusted also to the missions established since 2003. This implies an acceptance by the Council that it cannot avoid complex operations in civil war-like conditions. They also show that normative pressures and influences on Council action have not disappeared, even though the ‘solidarist consensus’ is at best weak and limited.
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The chief lesson from the history of the Council’s involvement in peacekeeping after the Cold War – acknowledged as such by the Brahimi report and emphasized since by the Secretariat – is that the UN is politically and structurally ill-equipped for war-fighting or large-scale enforcement action.
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The history of UN peacekeeping, both during and after the Cold War, also attests to the impotence and weakness of UN forces when these have been confronted with large-scale, offensive military actions. This was evident in the case of UNEF in 1967, but was also the experience of UN forces in Cyprus when Turkey invaded the island in July 1974, of UNIFIL in South Lebanon during Israel’s invasion in June 1982, and of UNPROFOR in Croatia when it was faced with a full-scale assault on the Krajina in August 1995.

It is against this reality that the implications of developments since 2003 must be considered. On the one hand, it would be wrong to conclude that the UN, even if it wanted to, can return to an era when distinctions appeared more clear-cut or better understood, be they ‘classical peacekeeping’ versus ‘enforcement’ or ‘intra-state’ versus ‘interstate’ conflict. For one, the observation made by Nicholson in 1963, that ‘future Congos cannot be ignored simply because they were not dreamed of in the philosophy of San Francisco’, appears to be more widely accepted now than it was then.
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The scope of UN peacekeeping has broadened and the UN’s continuing involvement in intra-State conflicts means that questions of consent, impartiality, and use of force will always involve difficult judgements on the part of Council, requiring member states to weigh the benefits of deployment against the possible consequences of inaction. As John Sanderson put it in the wake of UNTAC’s mission in Cambodia, ‘peacekeeping operations have become a finely balanced affair.’
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On the other hand, the historical record and the logic of war also point to real and inherent limitations of the UN and, especially, of consent-based peacekeeping in contexts of ongoing civil war. In 1994, Michael Rose, then UN Force Commander in Bosnia, presented the issues and choices involved in terms of a clear-cut and simple analogy to events in Somalia the previous year. In so far as his notion of a ‘Mogadishu Line’ implied that there is always a simple choice between ‘classical peacekeeping’ and ‘war’, it is a crude and unhelpful portrayal of the
complexity of the issues involved. More charitably, this analogy may also be interpreted as an attempt to bring home the basic truth that UN peacekeeping cannot, nor
should
it when circumstances require otherwise, be a substitute for war. If this is indeed what he meant, it bears repeating as it holds true for UN peacekeeping in all its varieties.

S
INCE
1990, United Nations sanctions have become an essential instrument of multilateral action. With the imposition of trade sanctions on Iraq in Resolution 661,
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the Security Council opened a new era in the use of collective coercive economic measures as a means of responding to violations of international norms. In the previous forty-five years of UN experience, the Security Council
employed sanctions only twice, in the cases of Southern Rhodesia (1966) and South Africa (1977).
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The next fifteen years witnessed an active phase of Security Council decision-making, with dozens of sanctions resolutions levied against eighteen distinct targets, including such non-governmental entities as al-Qaida and the Taliban, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and militias in eastern Congo. Sanctions were imposed to serve a range of objectives: to reverse aggression, restore democratically elected governments, protect human rights, end international and civil wars bring suspected terrorists to justice, and more recently to counter the threat of international terrorism.

The legal authority for the imposition of UN sanctions rests in
Chapter VII
of the UN Charter, which provides in Article 41 that the Council may call upon states to impose non-military measures such as the interruption of economic and diplomatic relations to protect international peace and security.
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The political logic of sanctions lies in the desire of policy-makers to have options other than war for applying pressure on targeted states, entities, and individuals accused of violating international norms. Sanctions offer a middle course ‘between words and war’.
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They avoid the costs of military action, yet they provide policy options more forceful than diplomatic remonstrance. When employed effectively they can exert significant pressure on those targeted. When designed and applied astutely, sanctions can serve as the basis for a bargaining dynamic in which the promise of lifting sanctions becomes an incentive to encourage political concessions and cooperation.
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Sanctions emerged as a preferred form of action by the Council for a number of reasons. First, the application of
Chapter VII
sanctions was an acceptable form of Council action which permitted great power cooperation as the UN entered the post-Cold War era. The fact that sanctions were being imposed mostly against states which were not critical allies of the former superpowers made this cooperation feasible. Secondly, unlike earlier times in which the dynamics of international trade provided benefits – at least in the short term – to states subverting embargoes, the post-Cold War era of rapidly expanding global trade brought rewards to nations that joined and supported international economic coalitions. The economic benefits
accruing to nations within the European Union, and the sanction of possible exclusion from that community, have been important factors encouraging political cooperation among member states. Finally, in a world where vocal domestic concerns and transnational advocacy networks push governments and the United Nations ‘to do something’ about war and human rights abuses, sanctions served as a public indicator that the Security Council was prepared to take action.
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The record of Security Council sanctions since 1990 is one of striking contrasts, if not contradictions. As the Council moved forcefully to use sanctions as a means for advancing the UN mandate to preserve peace and security, most particularly in Iraq, it found that the outcomes of these measures were undermining other dimensions of the UN agenda, especially the goal of improving the human condition. While sanctions provided the major powers with a powerful tool for collective action within the Council, the wide-ranging social impacts of these measures resulted in a declining consensus on the Iraq sanctions regime and disagreements on sanctions reform. By 1994, the Council had learned numerous lessons from these detrimental sanctions episodes, adapting its measures to mitigate unanticipated consequences and exploring prospects for improved sanctions implementation. UN practice experienced a sea change that significantly advanced the sophistication of the sanctions instrument. An era of sanctions reform ensued as the Council shifted its focus from comprehensive to more selective measures. Aided by a series of international processes sponsored by individual states – Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden – the Council abandoned the use of general trade sanctions and relied instead on targeted measures: financial assets freezes, travel bans, aviation sanctions, commodity boycotts, and arms embargoes.
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As the UN counter-terrorism programme developed after September 2001, the Council mandated the application of these targeted tools to disable terrorist networks.

The UN sanctions against Iraq were the longest, most comprehensive, and most controversial in the history of the world body. Although the sanctions were
justifiably criticized for their harmful humanitarian impacts,
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they were largely successful in achieving Iraq’s disarmament by pressuring the regime to accept (however grudgingly) the UN weapons monitoring mandate.
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Sanctions also helped to extract concessions from Iraq on the border dispute with Kuwait and cemented the military containment of Iraq. The embargo on oil exports drastically reduced the revenues available to the Baghdad regime, prevented the rebuilding of Iraqi defences after the Gulf War, and blocked the import of vital materials and technologies for producing weapons of mass destruction.
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Sanctions were less successful in encouraging greater Iraqi cooperation with the international community. In part, this was due to the truculent nature of the Iraqi regime, but it also resulted from the unwillingness of the US government to consider any lifting of UN sanctions in exchange for Iraqi concessions. As early as May 1991, President George H. W. Bush stated, ‘my view is we don’t want to lift these sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.’
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This policy continued under President Bill Clinton, who remarked in November 1997 that ‘sanctions will be there until the end of time, or as long as he [Hussein] lasts.’
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This position was contrary to Resolution 687, passed at the end of the 1991 Gulf War,
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which stated that sanctions were to be lifted when Iraq complied with UN disarmament obligations. This moving of the ‘political goalposts’ became an obstacle in diplomatic relations between Iraq and the UN.

According to the head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, Rolf Ekéus, sanctions were crucial to the success of UN weapons inspection and dismantlement efforts in Iraq.
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Sanctions supplied the pressure for Iraqi officials to accept UN weapons inspections, and they kept pressure on the regime once the disarmament process was under way. On several occasions, UN officials used the leverage of sanctions, and the hope that the embargo might be lifted, to persuade the Baghdad government to cooperate. According to Ekéus:

Beyond helping to drive the disarmament process, sanctions undermined Iraqi military capabilities by cutting of the regime’s financial lifeblood. Sanctions kept the revenues from Iraq’s vast oil wealth out of the hands of Saddam Hussein. Estimates of the total amount of oil revenue denied to the Iraqi government range as high as US $250 billion.
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For the first six years of sanctions, Iraq sold no oil whatsoever, except for small allowances to Jordan and Turkey. After the oil-for-food programme began in 1996, oil sales were permitted and eventually generated a total of US $64.2 billion in revenue.
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The proceeds were deposited in a UN escrow account, not the Central Bank of Iraq. While the Iraqi government used smuggling and kickback schemes to siphon hard currency out of the oil-for-food programme, these funds were only a fraction of the total oil revenues being generated. The Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme (Volcker Commission), investigating corruption in the oil-for-food programme reported Iraqi earnings from oil smuggling outside the sanctions regime for the period 1991 to 2003 at about US $11 billion. Total illicit income within the oil-for-food programme from illegal surcharges and fees was approximately US $1.8 billion.
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These were enormous sums, but they represented less than 20 per cent of total oil revenues generated through the UN programme.

By denying financial resources to the Iraqi government, the sanctions prevented the regime from rebuilding its military capabilities. US government figures showed a precipitous drop in Iraqi military spending and arms imports after 1990. Iraqi military expenditures dropped from over US $15 billion in 1989 to an average of approximately US $1.4 billion per year through the 1990s.
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Estimated Iraqi arms imports showed a similar steep decline, dropping from more than US $3.5 billion in 1989 to minimal levels through the 1990s.
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The realization of military containment
goals did not produce changes in Iraqi political behaviour, however, as Saddam Hussein continued to undermine the inspection process.
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In the late 1990s, political support for continued sanctions against Iraq began to erode. In response, the Security Council sought to reform the sanctions system by easing restrictions on civilian imports, while tightening pressure on weapons and military-related goods. The strategy became known as ‘smart sanctions’, and built on the sanctions reform processes noted above. It was intended to enable the rehabilitation of Iraq’s civilian economy while maintaining restrictions on military goods and dual-use imports.
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The Security Council came close to approving this approach a number of times in 2000 and 2001, and finally adopted the smart sanctions package unanimously in Resolution 1409 of 14 May 2002. The new plan restored political consensus on the sanctions regime in the Security Council and created an effective and sustainable arms-denial system.