Number 2,
Summer 1995

CCCRTE

Guus Meijer

Since the end of the Cold War, the involvement of the United Nations in peacekeeping operations has increased dramatically. While for many years the UN had a small military presence in a few conflict regions to monitor ceasefires and keep parties apart (e.g. Cyprus, south Lebanon), at the beginning of the 1990s the call for UN intervention, especially in violent ethnopolitical and other internal conflicts, old and new, grew louder. The organisation tried to respond as well as possible to a wave of Security Council resolutions in relation to Angola, Somalia, El Salvador, Cambodia, former Yugoslavia, Liberia, and Rwanda.

Some of these operations were largely succesful, others outright failures, while many come somewhere in-between and have left a combination of positive and negative impacts on the particular conflict situation and the society at large. Meanwhile, the financial resources which the member states were willing to contribute to make the UN's new role viable were far from sufficient and the political will to sustain this new role has often been lacking or too dependent on domestic political support.

The kind of UN operations changed rapidly, mostly becoming rather more complex because of the inclusion in the mandate of more and more non-military components, such as electoral observation, human rights monitoring and the delivery and/or protection of humanitarian assistance. This meant that civilians had to be deployed not only in logistical and administrative support functions, but increasingly with a function of their own that was relatively independent of the military side of keeping the peace. Civilian police functions have also increasingly been part of these new style UN missions and in one case, South Africa, there was no traditional military component at all. Currently, there are over 70.000 blue helmets on active service in 17 missions around the world, while the number of civilians has risen to over 11,000.

In June and July 1995, two conferences were held, one in New York and the other in Schlaining, Austria, to discuss the issues of preparation and training of civilian peacekeepers. The New York meeting was organized by the Training Service of the UN's Office for Human Resources Management, which is reponsible for the training and development of all UN staff at headquarters. A number of UN departments and agencies took part, amongst them the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), which has grown ten-fold with the increase of peacekeeping operations over the last few years, and its Training Unit, alongside a number of external "experts", such as academic researchers and representatives of training institutes.

It became clear that there are still a number of obstacles to the acceptance and implementation of proper training for UN civilians in peacekeeping. Some of these impeding factors have to do with lack of funding, lack of time (missions tend to be required in the field at very short notice), lack of interest from some key UN staff and from most member states, bureaucratic turf battles within the UN system, and the newness and rapidly shifting character of it all.

Another complicating factor is that civilian personnel is recruited from a wide variety of backgrounds and countries for a number of quite different functions (ranging from political affairs officers, election observers and human rights monitors to engineers, procurement officers, bookkeepers and car mechanics) -- unlike the military, who are brought in through block offers by troop contributing nations, who are also responsible for their training. Training needs for civilians are obviously much less uniform -- conflict resolution, for example, just being one of the potential areas which might improve the performance of UN missions as a whole. General management skills are seen as a high priority by DPKO, as is team-building, both among civilian personnel and between civilian and military staff.

Short, practical, tailor-made course

Positive examples cited were the recruitment, preparation and deployment of human rights monitors in Haiti, and the work of UNPROFOR's Management Training Unit in providing short, practical and tailor-made courses for UN personnel in the former Yugoslavia. Some individual staff members and member states work hard to make the best out of rather impossible circumstances and lobby for the UN as a whole to pay more attention to and to channel more resources into civilian training. Despite a number of positive proposals and suggestions, the conference, however, could not come up with a conclusive and coherent policy proposal.

A few weeks later, part of the same group and a number of others met again, this time at the invitation of the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR) in Stadtschlaining. Austria is one of the few countries which takes the issue of the recruitment and training of civilians for UN peacekeeping seriously and two years ago the Austrian government decided to support the creation of an international pool of trained civilians who would be available for UN field missions. The Schlaining centre started a specific course to this end and the conference was convened to discuss the experience with this "International Civilian Peace-Keeping and Peace-Building Training Program" (IPT) and to see whether it could serve as a model for other initiatives.

Conflict resolution training plus

The Schlaining proposal involves a three-week foundation course, followed by one-week specializations (for example, in reconstruction and sustainable development, human rights, mediation, media and information); these general courses should be provided by independent institutions (besides Schlaining, there are similar initiatives in Canada and Italy), while mission-specific preparation should preferably take place, once personnel has been recruited for a particular mission, in or near the mission area under the direct responsibility of the UN. Finally, on-the-job training, comprehensive post-mission debriefing and ongoing review and evaluation are seen as essential components of the UN as a `learning organization'.

Preparing civilians for UN peacekeeping will certainly involve more than training in conflict resolution, even in its widest possible sense. There is unanimity about the importance of this type of training, however. Questions remain about how best to organize it, how to fund it, find time to do it properly, develop common standards and content for different training institutions, and how to link general training to staffing specific missions. Hopefully, the two full reports of the conferences will serve as incentives, both within the UN and outside, to push these issues forward.