The evolution of United Nations
peacekeeping
MARRACK GOULDING
The following is an edited text of the Cyril Foster* lecture delivered by Marrack Goulding at the Examination Schools, Oxford University, on 4 March 1993. The text represents Marrack Goulding's views only, and in no way commits the United Nations or its Secretary-General. Mr Goulding ceased to be Under-Secretary-General for Peace-keeping Operations on 1 March 1993 before taking over the post of Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs. The lecture was a personal valedictory statement.
The title, 'The evolution of"peacekeeping', was chosen about a year ago. At the time, it seemed to make sense; with the phasing out of the Cold War, the United Nations had been given new opportunities to help control and resolve conflicts. As a result, new tasks and new methods had evolved from what had previously been a fairly homogeneous activity. The biological metaphor seemed an accurate way of describing what was going on.
However, the word evolution implies a comparatively leisurely process in which, by trial and error, organisms develop more efficient ways of responding to a changing environment. A year later, the metaphor seems less apt. 1992 saw an almost five-fold increase in United Nations peacekeeping activity; we had some 11,000 military and police personnel deployed at the beginning of the year; by its end the total was over 52,000. Today 'the forced development of peacekeeping' might be a better title.
I propose first to analyse what peacekeeping had become by the time the Cold War ended; then to classify the different types (I would have referred to 'species' if the evolution metaphor was still appropriate) of peacekeeping operations which are currently deployed or being planned; then to discuss the current trend from peacekeeping to peace-enforcement and the implications it has for the United Nations ability to develop into an effective system of collective security; and finally to draw some brief conclusions about the heavy
* Cyril Foster was a retired confectioner who, in 1956, left his estate to Oxford University with the request that it be used to enable ' a prominent and sincere speaker' to deliver once a year a lecture on the elimination of war and the better understanding of the nations of the world
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responsibilities which bear upon the Secretary-General and the Security Council.
What is peacekeeping?
Peacekeeping is a technique which has been developed, mainly by the United Nations, to help control and resolve armed conflicts. There is no agreed definition of it nor even agreement on when the first peacekeeping operation was set up. Professor Alan James, in a carefully researched work published in 19901, traces its origins back to the delimitation commissions which were established in the early 1920s to redraw a number of European frontiers after the First World War.
The official view in the United Nations is that the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) was the first United Nations peacekeeping operation. It consisted of unarmed military observers who were sent to Palestine in June 1948 to supervize a truce negotiated by Count Bernadotte in the first war between Israel and its Arab neighbours. It stayed on when, a month later, the Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the Charter, 'ordered' a ceasefire. A similar group was deployed a few months later in Kashmir. A major step forward was taken when the first armed United Nations force—the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF)—was deployed in Egypt following the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on that country in October 1956.
The key role played by UNTSO in the difficult task of implementing the Arab—Israeli Armistice Agreements of 1949 and UNEF's success in defusing the Suez crisis led to further demands for the Organization's peacekeeping services.
The golden age—dare I say the first golden age?—of United Nations peacekeeping was from 1956 to 1974, though there was a hiatus for six years after the disaster that befell UNEF in 1967. Those 18 years gave birth to 10 of the 13 peacekeeping operations established before the revival of demand for peacekeepmg in the late 1980s. On the whole they succeeded well in helping to control regional conflicts, especially in the Near East, at a time when the Cold War made it difficult for the Security Council to take effective action to resolve them.
The Congo operation (1960-64) deserves special mention. It is often described as a failure, but in fact it succeeded in its objectives, albeit at a very high cost, including the life of Dag Hammarskjold and a major constitutional-cum-financial crisis at the United Nations. It is interesting in the contemporary context for three reasons. First, it was deployed in a country where the institutions of state were collapsing—the first case of what the Foreign Secretary recently called 'painting a country blue'. Second, it was the first peacekeeping operation to include very substantial civilian elements. Third, it was initially deployed as a peacekeeping operation; but when it became clear
1 Alan James, Peacekeeping in international politics (London - MacmiUan for International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1990)
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that the peacekeeping mode would not enable it to achieve its objectives, the Security Council authorized it to use force on a considerable scale to end the secession of Katanga—the first, and until Somalia the only, case of a transition from peacekeeping to peace-enforcement.
The Near East war of October 1973 gave rise to two other remarkable achievements: the interposition of the second United Nations Emergency Force between the Egyptian and Israeli armies in an exceedingly dangerous and complicated military situation; and, eight months later, the deployment of a United Nations force (UNDOF) to control an agreed buffer zone between Israeli and Syrian forces on the Golan Heights in Syria. That force is still there—unpublicized because it does its job so well.
After those two successes, the line went almost dead until in 1988 the new readiness of the United States and the Soviet Union to work together revived opportunities for resolving regional conflicts and created a renewed demand for peacekeeping.
During the intervening 14 years, only one new operation was set up—UNIFIL in southern Lebanon. UNIFIL also is interesting in the contemporary context. It is an operation about whose viability the then Secretary-General and his senior advisers had doubts. It was nevertheless pushed through the Security Council by the United States for pressing, if passing, political reasons: President Carter was launching the negotiations which were to lead to the Camp David Accords and did not want that process derailed by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon which had just taken place.
UNIFIL has not been able to carry out its mandate because it has never enjoyed the necessary cooperation from all the parties concerned. But its presence has brought succour to the people of southern Lebanon and its withdrawal would certainly lead to an intensification of hostilities. It has thus become a quasi-permanent fixture. It illustrates how much easier it is to get into a peacekeeping operation than to get out of it—and the need therefore for the Security Council to satisfy itself that conditions exist for successful peacekeeping before taking the decision to set up a new operation.
The 13 operations established during the Cold War (of which five remain in existence) fostered the gradual evolution of a body of principles, procedures and practices for peacekeeping. Few of them were formally enacted by the legislative organs of the United Nations. But they came to constitute a corpus of case law or customary practice which was by and large accepted by all concerned, though until the mid-1980s Moscow continued from time to time to grumble about peacekeeping's lack of legitimacy because it was not explicitly provided for in the Charter.
The established principles of peacekeeping can be summarized under five headings.
First, peacekeeping operations were United Nations operations. Their United Nationsness derived from various factors: they were established by one of the legislative organs of the United Nations (unlike the enforcement operations in
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Korea or (subsequently) Kuwait and Somalia where the Security Council's role has been only to authorize certain member states to undertake military action for a specific purpose); they were under the command and control of the Secretary-General, who acted with authority delegated to him by the Security Council and reported regularly to the Council; and their costs were met collectively by the member states as 'expenses of the Organization' under Article 17 of the Charter—a principle which was established with much difficulty during the 1960s. It was this United Nationsness which had made United Nations peacekeeping operations acceptable to member states who would not otherwise have accepted foreign troops on their territory. Suspicions that peacekeepers were acting as instruments of their governments' policy, rather than of the collective will of the international community, could be fatal for the credibility of an operation. It had been learnt the hard way that it could also—literally—be fatal for the peacekeepers themselves.
Second, it had become established over time that peacekeeping operations could be set up only with the consent of the parties to the conflict in question. It had also been learnt that they could succeed only with the continuing consent and cooperation of those parties. This had turned out to be both a strength and a weakness.
It was a strength in that, for the parties, it made peacekeeping less threatening and more acceptable. For the troop-contributing countries, it reduced to a very low level the risk of combat casualties. It was supposed also, in theory, to improve the chances of success; the parties would have agreed in advance to what the peacekeepers were going to do.
In practice, the consent principle had sometimes turned out to be more of a weakness than a strength. Consent once given could later be withdrawn. President Nasser's withdrawal of Egypt's consent to the presence of UNEF I on Egyptian territory in May 1967 had been the classic example. It tragically illustrated the perennial truth that if one of the parties takes the decision to go to war there is very little that peacekeepers can do to prevent war. In other cases, cooperation promised was later reduced or withheld. This could be especially difficult for the peacekeepers when they found that they, not those who had broken their promises, were blamed for the resulting human suffering and/or humiliation of the United Nations.
Third, it had been established that the peacekeepers must be impartial between the parties. They were not there to advance the interests of one party against those of the other. It was not like Korea where the United States and its allies had been authorized by the Security Council to use force against North Korea for the benefit of South Korea. This principle of impartiality arose from the fact that peacekeeping operations were interim arrangements set up, as UNEF had been, without prejudice to the claims and positions of the parties.
Of course, the peacekeepers had to criticize, use pressure, mobilize international support, even in certain circumstances take more forceful action when a party violated agreed arrangements. But, beyond that, they could not take sides. Otherwise they themselves would violate the terms on which the
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operation had been accepted by the parties. This requirement for absolute impartiality sometimes obliged peacekeepers to maintain normal relations with a party whose behaviour was being censured by most of the international community and thus exposed them to the charge of condoning that behaviour.
The fourth principle related to the troops required for United Nations peacekeeping operations. It was recognized that it would not be practicable for the United Nations to maintain a standing army. National armies and police forces could be the only source for the uniformed personnel the United Nations required. The Charter provided for member states to enter into binding agreements with the Security Council under which they would commit themselves to provide it with troops. There had been no agreement between the major powers on the conclusion of such agreements for peacekeeping operations—or indeed for peace enforcement. Successive Secretaries-General had perforce, therefore, to rely on member states to provide the necessary personnel and equipment on a voluntary basis. Member states had responded readily to the call.
The fifth principle concerned the use of force. More than half the organization's peacekeeping operations before 1988 had consisted only of unarmed military observers. But when operations were armed, it had become an established principle that they should use force only to the minimum extent necessary and that normally fire should be opened only in self-defence.
However, since 1973 self-defence had been deemed to include situations in which peacekeepers were being prevented by armed persons from fulfilling their mandate. This was a wide definition of 'self-defence'. In practice commanders in the field had only very rarely taken advantage of the authority to open fire on, for instance, soldiers at a roadblock who were denying passage to a United Nations convoy. This reluctance was based on sound calculations related to impartiality, to their reliance on the continued cooperation of the parties and to the fact that their force's level of armament was based on the assumption that the parties would comply with their commitments. The peacekeepers could perhaps win the firefight at that first roadblock. But, in lands of the vendetta, might they not find themselves out-gunned in the third or fourth encounter?
On the basis of these principles established during the first four decades of United Nations peacekeeping, a definition of peacekeeping could perhaps read as follows:
Field operations established by the United Nations, with the consent of the parties concerned, to help control and resolve conflicts between them, under United Nations command and control, at the expense collectively of the member states, and with military and other personnel and equipment provided voluntarily by them, acting impartially between the parties and using force to the minimum extent necessary.
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Six types of peacekeeping operation
The revival of peacekeeping since 1988 has officially seen the establishment of 13 new operations so far. My personal count is 16. One of the 13, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the former Yugoslavia, the largest operation yet fielded, is in fact a conglomerate of three separate operations. I would also add the electoral mission in Haiti in 1990. At the request of the Haitian authorities, it was not called a peacekeeping operation, nor was it established or financed as such, but it included substantial numbers of military and police personnel and operated in accordance with peacekeeping principles.
During these hectic five years of forced development, the Secretary-General and his staff have applied the established principles, procedures and practices of peacekeeping. On the whole they have stood the test well and have been able to accommodate a much wider range of activities than—with one or two exceptions—peacekeepers had undertaken during the Cold War years.
Peacekeeping operations had previously been largely military in task and composition. Their principal task was to help the parties stop fighting and to prevent any resumption of hostilities, thus helping to create conditions in which the peacemakers could negotiate a lasting settlement. Apart from the Congo, the only major exception to this model was the operation in West Irian in 1962—3, whose task was to help implement a settlement already negotiated.
Since 1988 this emphasis on the military has changed and peacekeeping operations frequently now contain substantial civilian elements. This is mainly because the United Nations is more often involved in internal conflicts than in inter-state ones. As it had already learned in the Congo, these are messy affairs in which success is hard to achieve and more than military skills are required. Helping to end a civil war is likely to involve a third party in a whole range of civilian activities which are less often required in the interstate context. Such settlements almost always, for instance, include some electoral act which needs to be impartially monitored. In some cases reform or replacement of state institutions can also be a part of the settlement. Even in interstate conflicts, experience has shown that there is a greater role for civilian peacekeepers than had been apparent in earlier years.
Before 1988, peacekeeping had been regarded, not entirely accurately, as a rather homogeneous activity. It is now possible to identify at least six different types of peacekeeping. This taxonomy is based on the functions the peacekeepers perform and is thus different from the taxonomy in Professor James's book which is based more on analysis of the political circumstances in which each operation was set up.
Type One is the preventive deployment of United Nations troops before a conflict has actually begun, at the request of one of the parties and on its territory only. The troops' function is partly early warning but mainly to increase the political price that would be paid by the potential aggressor. This idea, which came originally from Mikhail Gorbachev, was adopted by the
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present Secretary-General in his report An agenda for peace. It is currently being applied for the first time in Macedonia.
Type Two is traditional peacekeeping. The function is to support peacemaking efforts by helping to create conditions in which political negotiation can proceed. It involves monitoring ceasefires, controlling buffer zones, and so on. These are supposed to be interim arrangements but they can last for a very long time if the peacemaking efforts are slow to succeed: UNTSO has been deployed m the Near East for almost 45 years and UNFICYP in Cyprus for 29 years. Slow progress in peacemaking does not necessarily create a case for ending the peacekeeping; a long-standing peacekeeping operation may sometimes be the least bad option available to the international community if renewed war is to be avoided.
There are three sub-types: unarmed military observer groups as currently m the Near East, Kashmir and Western Sahara; armed infantry-based forces which are deployed in cases where the task is to control territory, as in Cyprus, Syria, southern Lebanon (in theory only, alas) and Croatia; and operations, armed or unarmed, which are established as an adjunct of, or sequel to, a peace enforcement operation, as on the Iraq—Kuwait border. This third sub-type is arguably a type in its own right because, being deployed under Chapter VII of the Charter, it does not formally require the consent of the parties concerned; in practice, though, it cannot succeed without their cooperation.
Type Three consists of operations set up to support implementation of a comprehensive settlement which has already been agreed by the parties. This has been the area of most rapid growth since 1988, largely because the end of the Cold War and the new effectiveness of the Security Council have made it possible to negotiate partial or comprehensive settlements of several regional conflicts. In the case of comprehensive settlements, the peacekeepers have had to undertake a wide range of functions old and new. These can include: monitoring ceasefires, the cantonment and demobilization of troops, the destruction of weapons and the formation and training of new armed forces; monitoring existing police forces and forming new ones; supervizing, or even in Cambodia controlling, existing administrations; verifying respect for human rights; observing, supervizing or even conducting elections; undertaking information campaigns to explain the settlement, the opportunities it offers the people concerned and the role of the United Nations.
The paradigm is the very successful operation m Namibia in 1989—90. The United Nations is currently conducting similar operations in El Salvador, Angola, Cambodia, and Mozambique. It will do so in Western Sahara also, if conditions can be agreed for holding the planned referendum.
There is one respect in which there has been some difficulty in applying to these type Three operations the principles established before 1988. It relates to the principle of impartiality. As I have said, that principle resulted from the fact that peacekeeping was an interim activity established without prejudice to the
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claims and positions of the parties, which would, it was hoped, be resolved through a process of political negotiation. Type Three operations, however, are deployed after the negotiating process has been completed. The claims and positions of the parties will have been reconciled in a comprehensive settlement agreed between them. Suppose that thereafter one of the parties fails to comply fully with its obligations under the agreed settlement. Can the United Nations remain impartial between that party and the other? Should it not take action against the offending party to persuade or compel it to honour its commitments ? Perhaps so. But if it takes that course and allows itself to become the perceived adversary of the offending party, does it not risk forfeiting that party's cooperation, on which the success of the whole enterprise may well depend ?
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—the dilemma is very rarely as stark as I have just described it. The normal pattern is that all parties fail, to a greater or lesser extent, to comply perfectly with the agreement they have signed. The United Nations therefore has to chastise everyone to some extent. But even if one party was wholly virtuous, the United Nations would still have to think very carefully before making the other party its enemy. Formally speaking, that might be a justifiable course. But it would not be the right course if, as a result, it became more difficult to achieve the overall objective of implementing the agreed settlement. Non-confrontational persuasion might offer better results. Such dilemmas cannot be resolved through formal interpretation of the mandate. They require carefully judged political decisions—by the Chief of Mission on the ground and the Secretary-General and, sometimes, by the Security Council itself.
Type Four (a new one) consists of operations to protect the delivery of humanitarian relief supplies in conditions of continuing warfare. This has been tried in recent months in Somalia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Somalia it failed. This was not, as is often alleged, because of inadequate rules of engagement. It was mainly because of the absence of recognized political authorities with whom the United Nations could reliably conclude agreements for the deployment and activities of the peacekeepers, and because the unrecognized pretenders to power who controlled different parts of Somalia were not willing or, in some cases, able to provide the cooperation needed for the United Nations to succeed.
When the Secretary-General recognized that peacekeeping was not going to work in Somalia, he recommended to the Security Council that more forceful methods be employed. The Council then authorized various states, led by the United States, to field what was called the Unified Task Force. This was supposed to establish a secure environment for humanitarian operations and then hand over to a United Nations peacekeeping force. It subsequently became clear that the Unified Task Force would not succeed in establishing a secure environment of the kind envisaged by the Security Council and that a degree of compulsion would continue to be required. The Secretary-General therefore recommended to the Security Council that it set up a new United Nations
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force, under Chapter VI] of the Charter, with the mandate and armament necessary to enforce secure conditions for humanitarian operations.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina United Nations peacekeepers have had more success than is generally acknowledged in protecting humanitarian operations. But there too local warlords have denied them access to many areas of need and have continuously harassed and obstructed their efforts. Their rules of engagement permit them to use force against such obstruction but for reasons already explained their commanders have judged that 'fighting the aid through' is not a practicable proposition.
A feature common to Somalia and Bosnia is the difficulty of making peacekeeping work vis-a-vis armed groups outside the control of recognized political authorities with whom the United Nations can conclude the necessary political and practical agreements. This problem will grow as the organization becomes involved more frequently in internal conflicts. It is one of the impulses pushing it strongly in the direction of a greater readiness to use force.
Type Five is arguably not peacekeeping at all because it is likely to involve enforcement. It will also involve peacemaking (that is the fashioning of a political settlement) and what the Secretary-General has called post-conflict peacebuilding. This is the deployment of a United Nations force in a country where the institutions of state have largely collapsed, anarchy and lawlessness abound, the breakup of the country may be imminent and some external agency is needed to put it together again, [t is Foreign Secretary Hurd's scenario of' painting a country blue'. It requires an integrated programme including humanitarian relief, a ceasefire, demobilization of troops, a political process of national reconciliation, the rebuilding of political and administrative structures, economic rehabilitation and so on. As already mentioned the United Nations undertook this task successfully in the Congo in the 1960s. The new United Nations force in Somalia will have the same task and, like its predecessor in the Congo, is likely to have to use force to achieve it.
Type Six is, again, not really peacekeeping but I include it because it is currently under active discussion in the Bosnian context and because it illustrates the extent to which, in the public and the political mind at any rate, peacekeeping's evolution is taking it across the threshold into peace-enforcement. It can be called ceasefire enforcement and is essentially a forceful variant of the traditional peacekeeping which I have classified as Type Two. A United Nations force would be deployed, after an agreement had been reached between the parties, with the authority and armament to use force against any party which violated the ceasefire or other agreed military arrangements. The mandate would be analogous to peacekeeping in that the parties would agree to the initial deployment of the force and the force would act impartially in enforcing the agreed arrangements. But it would differ from peacekeeping in that the force could open fire in situations other than self-defence, for example to silence guns that persisted in violating the ceasefire.
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This is a concept which is currently under discussion in the context of the Vance-Owen plan for Bosnia and Herzegovina where it would form part of the implementation of a wider settlement. It is assumed that even though the leaders of the three factions would have accepted the plan, various of their partisans might (to put it generously) turn a blind eye to instructions to comply with it. In such circumstances force would have to be used if the plan was not to suffer the fate of the dozens of other agreements concluded between the various combatants in the former Yugoslavia.
From peacekeeping to peace-enforcement: desirable, practicable?
During the last five years the established principles, procedures and practices of peacekeeping have, as I have said, stood up remarkably well to an unprecedented increase in the demand for United Nations peacekeeping services.
In spite of the budgetary difficulties created for member states by the size and unpredictability of demands for peacekeeping funds, and in spite of the fact that certain large member states owe several hundred million dollars for previous years' assessments, the flow of funds has been sufficient, just, to enable the Secretary-General to carry out the tasks given to him by the Security Council. The costs of peacekeeping increased five-fold during 1992, to an annual rate of about $2.8 billion. But the increase in unpaid dues that year, expressed as a percentage of the increase in peacekeeping costs during the year, was only 28 per cent, much less than the 74 per cent which was the corresponding figure in 1991. This shows that, contrary to the general perception, member states have responded well to the increased demands for peacekeeping finance. The backlog of arrears, currently some $670 million, is nevertheless a major complication which impacts directly on the organization's ability to reimburse to the troop-contributing countries the sums due to them.
The increase in activity has nevertheless highlighted some shortcomings in existing arrangements. By common consent, the departments concerned at United Nations Headquarters in New York need to be strengthened if they are to have the planning and command and control capability to support operations on the scale currently deployed. Financial and logistic procedures need to be streamlined. There needs to be a working capital fund for peacekeeping and a reserve stock of basic peacekeeping equipment to enable the Secretary-General to respond more quickly when the Security Council decides to establish new peacekeeping operations. Present arrangements by which a few member states commit themselves to have troops on stand-by to serve with the United Nations at specified terms of notice need to be refined and extended to many more countries. The United Nations needs to do more to help member states tram their personnel for peacekeeping service and perhaps to undertake more training itself.
Much work is in hand in New York on all these issues, in spite of the crushing pressure of the day to day management of existing operations. I believe that the
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wind stands fair for peacekeeping to continue as an effective United Nations instrument for the control and resolution of conflicts.
However, in recent months governments and public opinion in many countries have increasingly questioned whether peacekeeping is enough. Its reliance on the consent and cooperation of the parties has, it is said, shown it to be incapable of taking the forceful action required in situations like those in Bosnia and Somalia. Perhaps that is partly due to the fact that the Security Council may sometimes have deployed peacekeeping operations in situations where it was not entirely clear that conditions actually existed for successful peacekeeping. Be that as it may, the current tendency in the Security Council is to give peacekeeping operations more muscle. Last month the Council decided to add infantry to UNIKOM, the military observer mission on the Iraq—Kuwait border, despite the fact that its unarmed personnel had promptly alerted the Council to Iraqi incursions and had thus enabled the Council to take effective counter-measures. Later the same month the Council decided to move UNPROFOR, the very large operation deployed in the former Yugoslavia, from Chapter VI to Chapter VII of the Charter, though only in the context of the protection of its own personnel.
Creating this kind of grey area between peacekeeping and peace-enforcement can give rise to considerable dangers. In political, legal and military terms, and in terms of the survival of one's own troops, there is, on the one hand, all the difference in the world between being deployed with the consent and cooperation of the parties to help them carry out an agreement they have reached and, on the other hand, being deployed without their consent and with powers to use force to compel them to accept the decisions of the Security Council.
To take that view, however, is not to say that the United Nations should not use force. On the contrary, if the organization is to evolve into an effective system of collective security, it must, as was recognized in the Charter, have an enforcement capability. In that context, the greater readiness of the international community to contemplate enforcement action by the United Nations is to be welcomed and could represent a decisive moment in the development of the organization. It nevertheless gives rise to a number of questions which need to be urgently addressed.
I. By what criteria does the Security Council decide to use force, which in effect means going to war, against countries or groups which fail to comply with its decisions? There may be sound reasons why it is right to use force against Iraq and the Bosnian Serbs, but not against other member states which continue to occupy their neighbours' territory contrary to the Security Council's wishes, or against other movements which fail to heed the Council's decisions. But if the Security Council is to escape the charge of double standards it—and especially its Western members—need to be more careful in defining those reasons and getting them accepted. The same question of criteria arises m relation to forceful intervention for humanitarian purposes. Why Bosnia,
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Kurdish Iraq and Somalia, but not Angola, or Liberia or southern Sudan where equally atrocious situations exist?
2. How can the Security Council ensure that its use of force will succeed ? The credibility of the organization already suffers when a peacekeeping operation fails. During the Reagan era the inability of UNIFIL, through no fault of its own, to implement its mandate was used remorselessly in Washington to discredit the United Nations. Think how much greater the damage will be if resort to force by the Security Council does not succeed or if it gets bogged down in an interminable conflict like Britain's in Northern Ireland or India's in Kashmir (which seem more appropriate analogies than the often quoted Vietnam).
The answer to that question must lie, first, in very careful military appreciation of the task to be performed and, second, in deployment of sufficient forces to ensure its accomplishment. Equally, it is necessary to define a credible and practicable end-game, so that the United Nations force can be withdrawn without leaving behind chaos, tyranny or some other result which causes continued suffering or otherwise discredits the United Nations.
These are demanding requirements They mean that, in the face of public pressure for forceful intervention, governments, and especially those of the Five Permanent Members, will often have to explain that conditions do not exist for the successful use of force and that other solutions must be tried.
3. Is the international community ready to pay for peace-enforcement ? This is a vastly more expensive action than peacekeeping. During Desert Storm, on the basis of press estimates of its cost, we calculated that one day's expenditure on that operation would have been more than enough to finance United Nations peacekeeping for the whole of 1991. There is also the question of whether the costs of peace-enforcement operations should, as in the,case of Kuwait, be borne by the governments contributing the troops, with financial support from their friends and allies, or whether they should be borne collectively by the member states as a whole. The latter principle was, with great travail, established for peacekeeping during the 1960s. If peace-enforcement is to strengthen the credibility of the United Nations as a world system of collective security, it is desirable that it too should be financed collectively.
4. Will enough member states be willing to contribute to peace-enforcement operations with the increased risk of casualties which they entail ? And how many of those who are willing will have the armament and training necessary to engage in combat operations in unfamiliar terrain ? Member states so far have been admirably willing to contribute military and police personnel to the organization's peacekeeping operations, in which almost 40 per cent of them are currently represented. If the credibility and effectiveness of the United Nations are to be strengthened, it is desirable that peace-enforcement operations, like peacekeeping, should include a wide enough spread of member states to reflect the composition of the organization as a whole.
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5. How should command and control of peacekeeping operations be organized in the future ? As already mentioned, peacekeeping operations take place under the command and control of the Secretary-General, who is responsible to the Security Council. Existing structures in New York have found it increasingly difficult to plan, command and control the greatly increased peacekeeping activities of recent years. When the Security Council authorized the despatch of additional troops to protect the delivery of humanitarian supplies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was decided to take ' off the shelf elements of a NATO headquarters to establish the new command in Bosnia. This has not been an entirely happy experiment. A better solution may he in greatly strengthening the staff in New York, and especially the military staff, to give it the resources not only to plan new operations but also to provide the core elements of their headquarters. This would both enhance the Secretary-General's control of United Nations operations and ensure the uniform application to all such operations of the established principles, procedures and practices of peacekeeping.
The command and control demands of war are immeasurably greater than those of peacekeeping. No enforcement operation has yet taken place under United Nations command and control. Instead, in Korea and Kuwait and, initially, Somalia, the Security Council has authorized certain member states to use force to ensure compliance with its decisions. However, the Secretary-General recommended that the new United Nations operation in Somalia, which is under Chapter VII of the Charter, should be under United Nations command and control, though using elements from the headquarters which had already been established by the United States-led force in Somalia. But, like the command in Bosnia, this arrangement may raise questions about the extent to which the operation is—or is perceived to be—really under the United Nations and not controlled in reality by the member states contributing to the bulk of its troops.
It is to be assumed that the Security Council will continue to move in the direction of more forceful action, especially in response to civil wars involving intolerable human suffering. There is therefore likely to be continuing debate about whether this is better done by national forces and coalitions authorized by the Security Council or by forces under the command of the Secretary-General, and about how such operations should be financed. The outcome of this debate will have major implications for the future evolution of the United Nations as a system of collective security.
Conclusion
The future development or evolution of peacekeeping—and peace-enforcement—lies in the hands of two of the principal organs of the United Nations: the Security Council and the Secretary-General. They carry a heavy responsibility.
During the first four decades of the United Nations' existence, peacekeeping
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evolved in a less than benign environment. The Cold War blighted the organization's ability to perform many of the tasks envisaged for it in the Charter; and the Soviet Union maintained considerable reservations about the legitimacy of peacekeeping. On some occasions, notably in 1956 and 1973, the establishment and efficient functioning of a peacekeeping operation clearly served Soviet national interests and objections were not raised. But there was always hesitation about the Secretary-General's political role and opposition to his acquiring a military staff, let alone any stock of military equipment.
During those years Ralph Bunche and then Brian Urquhart, together with the Secretaries-General whom they served with such distinction, nurtured the evolution of peacekeeping and, with resourcefulness, and even stealth sometimes, established its credibility as a United Nations technique for conflict control and resolution.
These days, as the Secretary-General has observed, the United Nations has almost too much credibility. On some recent mornings, every single item on the BBC World Service news has related to a situation in which the United Nations is engaged in peacemaking or peacekeeping or humanitarian relief. The problem now is often not to persuade the Security Council to set up a peacekeeping operation, but to dissuade it from rushing into doing so when the conditions for success do not yet exist.
This places a great burden of responsibility on the Secretary-General. He is the guardian or trustee of a precious and carefully nurtured resource, whose usefulness depends on its continuing credibility. Preserving that credibility is no easy task: on the one hand, the Secretary-General has to try to ensure that peacekeepers are not deployed in conditions where failure is likely; on the other hand, he has to avoid appearing so cautious as to create doubts about the real usefulness of the United Nations or provide a pretext for member states to return to the bad old ways of unilateral military action.
This is not a responsibility which the Secretary-General should be asked to bear alone. The power of decision in these matters rests with the Security Council. It is important that the members of the Council should, if necessary, stand up to the clamour of domestic or regional pressures and take care to satisfy themselves in advance that conditions do really exist for a proposed peacekeeping operation to succeed.
Those conditions are well known, but they bear repeating. The mandate or task must be clear, practicable and accepted by the parties; the parties must pledge themselves to cooperate with the peacekeepers and their pledges must be credible; and the member states of the United Nations must be ready to provide the human and material resources needed to do the job. On any particular day, unfortunately, only a minority of the actual or potential conflicts in the world fulfil those conditions. It is often frustratingly necessary to wait until a conflict is ripe for the United Nations peacekeeping treatment. But when the conditions are fulfilled, there is almost no limit to what peacekeeping can achieve.
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