| Committee for Conflict Transformation Support | CCTS
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| Getting to No
by Michael Randle, Department of Peace Studies, Bradford University Is there a role for the military in peacebuilding? To address the question it is first necessary to clarify terms. It is usual to distinguish between peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and peace building. Peacekeeping as originally conceived operated by the consent of the parties involved. The first major peacekeeping mission undertaken by the UN was the deployment of the UN Emergency Force in Egypt (UNEF) in 1957 in the aftermath of the attack on that country by British, French and Israeli forces to retake the Suez canal for Britain. The deployment was authorised under Article 6 of the UN Charter which deals with the peaceful resolution of conflicts, and though the forces were armed they were under instruction to use their weapons only in self defence. It relied essentially for its effectiveness on the willingness of the parties to observe the ceasefire, and their desire to avoid being identified as the one to have broken it, and possibly having to face sanctions as a result. That kind of peacekeeping role probably could be undertaken by an organised civilian force. Indeed in April 1956, at the start of the Suez crisis, a British MP, Henry Usborne, wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian proposing the recruitment of 10,000 volunteers to patrol a two kilometre demilitarised zone on either side of the Israeli-Egyptian border.[1] In Peace-enforcement operations, the peacekeepers are authorised to use their weapons not just in self defence but in other circumstances, notably defending civilians under attack or engaging armed groups that are breaking the ceasefire, and sometimes more broadly to protect public security. The missions are authorised under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter which deals with action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression. Following the failure of UN peacekeepers to prevent the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 and Screbrenica in 1995, there has been a decisive shift within the UN towards giving peacekeepers this enforcement role. Enforcement is not something unarmed peacekeepers themselves, or for that matter military peacekeepers authorised to use their weapons only in self-defence, can carry out, though coercive non-military pressure could be exerted in conjunction with their deployment through international sanctions or internal civil resistance. In Darfur, where the 7000 African Union forces operate under this restriction on the use of force, the UN imposed some very limited sanctions in April of this year against four Sudanese nationals accused of war crimes, including two rebel leaders, a former air force chief and a Janjaweed militia leader. To that degree there is some enforcement, and further sanctions against the Khartoum government could well be imposed if it does not take action to disarm the Janjaweed. There is also the latent threat of war crimes trials at the Hague, and a dossier of evidence has been passed to the ICC. The uncomfortable fact is, however, that none of this has prevented appalling massacres and deprivation in Darfur with an estimated 200,000 deaths. Millions too have also fled from their destroyed villages.[2] Peacebuilding refers to the process of putting Humpty Dumpty together again – rebuilding the economic, social and institutional structures necessary for a country to function in a way that provides for at least a modicum of security and well being for its citizens. This task has to be carried out primarily by the citizens of the country concerned in accordance with their own values and traditions. Outside agencies can play only an enabling and supportive role if this is to be genuine peacebuilding rather than pacification and the imposition of a possibly inappropriate political and social structure. Civilian agencies are better placed than the military to engage directly with the population and take their direction from them – which is not to say this is always what happens.[3] However, the military can provide security and have the organisation and equipment to carry out some of the physical tasks that may be necessary to get a country moving again after a destructive conflict. To sum up: The military have to date been the chief agency for peacekeeping in the original sense of the term, that is a mission based on the consent of the parties concerned and with authority to use its weapons used only in self-defence. The question here is not so much whether the military have a role as whether the role currently played chiefly by them could be taken over by civilian peacekeepers. Quite possibly it could be, though it would depend on the recruitment and training of volunteers for such missions and building up the institutions and infrastructure to sustain them. Moreover, there remains the question of how much of a handicap not having weapons for self defence might prove to be. There would have to be a clear understanding, for instance, what action would be taken if peacekeepers were kidnapped. Regarding enforcement, unarmed peacekeepers could not carry this out. Here the question is whether they could provide by their presence and authority a reasonable measure of protection to the civilian population, and whether sanctions and internal civil resistance could prove sufficiently powerful coercive instruments when enforcement was required. Finally, peacebuilding is essentially a civilian operation, though the military can aid in construction and rescue work – as they often do for instance in the case of natural disasters like earthquakes –and provide protection. I take it, however, that in this seminar we are not just talking about peacebuilding in this restricted sense, but about the whole process of moving from a conflict, or immediate postconflict situation, to one in which the society can provide its citizens with at least a modicum of security and well being. It is legitimate to question the credentials and intentions of some UN and non-UN operations, but it would be perverse to suggest that in no case have they contributed to stability and facilitated the peacebuilding process. Nevertheless it is important to keep open, and continually revisit the question of whether peacemaking/peacebuilding could be done in a different, nonviolent way. Do we have to accept ‘the world as it is’- or can we create the conditions and institutions that would enable us in addressing the question posed by the title of the seminar to get from Yes to No? Before considering that, we should remind ourselves of the extent of military involvement in peacekeeping, or putative peacekeeping missions. Military forces (as of March 2005) were deployed in UN peacekeeping operations in 17 countries, concentrated in Africa, but including Europe (Cyprus and Kosovo), Asia (including East Timor in the Asia/Pacific region), the Middle East, and Latin America.[4] Since 1945, there have been 60 such missions, many of them undoubtedly contributing to the stability of the areas where they were deployed. In addition, there are currently twenty five non-UN multilateral operations in being which have, or claim to have a peacekeeping purpose. Of these, sixteen have military and observer functions, and seven purely civilian police and civilian functions.[5] We should note too that the distinction between peacekeeping and peace enforcement has become increasingly blurred since the end of the Cold War and particularly so since the start of the present century. Or to put the matter another way, it is now generally taken for granted that peacekeeping missions will involve an element of enforcement in most – though not in all – cases. This would appear to narrow the opportunity to deploy unarmed peacekeepers. Important milestones in this shift of emphasis were the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations chaired by Lakhdar Brahimi (2000), the report in 2001 of the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, the report in 2004 of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change entitled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Kofi Annan’s report in 2004 , In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, and, crucially, the UN Summit Meeting in September 2005 which endorsed the concept of the responsibility to protect. Among the conclusions and recommendations of the summit were the need to mount operations with adequate capacity to counter hostilities and fulfil effectively their mandates, support for the efforts of the EU and other regional entities to develop capacities for rapid deployment and standby arrangements, and a reaffirmation of the commitment to the protection of children in situations of armed conflict. One result of this shift has been that size of the UN military deployments for peacekeeping has increased exponentially since the turn of the century. Bruce Jones, coordinator of the Center on International Cooperation, notes in a Preface to the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2006 that in 1998 the UN deployed 14,000 peacekeepers worldwide, whereas by this year it deployed 90,000.[6] These figures include civilian participants, but though the proportion of these has been increasing, the deployments are still overwhelmingly military in character.[7] Thus as of April of last year, according to figures published by the UN, the seventeen UN peacekeeping operations deployed 67,132 military and police personnel, 4,511 international civilians and 8,444 local civilians.[8] Jones cites another telling figure, namely that the UN is now the second largest mover of military personnel in the world after the US [9]. At the same time, as noted earlier, the scope of the missions has progressively broadened to include in
many cases the protection of civilians, aid and reconstruction workers, and to engage in combat those who breach a ceasefire agreement. Since 1999 ten peace operations, both UN and non-UN, have been
authorised under Chapter 7 ‘to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence, often
qualified by the phrase ‘within capabilities and areas of deployment’[10]. And even where there is no The logic behind this shift is compelling: no-one would want to see a repeat of the situation in Srebrenica where Dutch forces in the UN mission stood by while the Serb militia rounded up the men and took them away in trucks to be shot and buried in mass graves, or of Rwanda where in April 1994 Belgian and French forces in the UN mission, UNAMIR, also did nothing as the Hutu militia, Interahamwe, began a systematic slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. One argument in favour of increased military deployments in UN peacekeeping operations and tougher rules of engagement is that larger forces with clear and well publicised rules of engagement are more likely to deter attack than an inadequate one with an uncertain mandate. Ian Johnstone, notes that in the four major crises that ‘bookended’ the period between 2000 and 2005 – Sierra Leone (2000), East Timor (2000), the Democratic Republic of Congo (2005) and Haiti (2005), the Security Council Mandate under Chapter 7 gave the UN missions some enforcement authority ‘but with enough ambiguity to leave room for different interpretations as to when force should be used’. In all cases too they started with a less than forceful approach and then escalated as the crises expanded.[11] There is evidence too that the peacekeeping missions over the last decade and a half have made a real difference. A report produced by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Colombia in 2005 concluded that ‘contrary to widespread belief, civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply’ since the end of the Cold War and they attribute this mainly to peacekeeping operations, particularly those undertaken by the UN.[12] So if peacekeeping is working, why seek to change it? As the saying goes – ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. I take as my starting point that military action should always be a choice of last resort. Even where there seems to be no alternative to it, it frequently entails a tragic loss of civilian life and, hardly less tragically, the violent death of young men and women conscripted by law or economic circumstances into state-run or rebel armies. For instance when the Sierra Leone government, UNAMSIL, and UK forces engaged the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) militia in Sierra Leone in 2000, they can hardly Enforcement in some situations can deteriorate into a prolonged and perhaps unwinnable war. Afghanistan points to the danger. True the initial US/UK invasion had nothing to do with peace keeping. However, the deployment of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) under Nato command, though not itself a UN operation, was endorsed by two Security Council resolutions and now claims to be a peacekeeping and peacebuilding mission.[13] Similarly, although the Iraq invasion was carried out in breach of international law after the US and Britain abandoned their attempt to obtain the endorsement of the Security Council, the deployment of the multinational force (MNF-I) was subsequently endorsed by the Council.[14] Afghanistan and Iraq also point to the reality of an emerging new imperialism with US bases in these countries stationed there for an indefinite period. In so far, then, as peacekeeping can be ‘civilianized’ whilst remaining effective, it should be. One way
of moving in that direction would be by a continuing expansion of the civilian element in the missions
and/or more unofficial type peacekeeping by those committed to a nonviolent approach. There is a
growing interest in the role civilians can play as evinced by the training programmes for civilian peacemakers being undertaken by the EU, the OSCE and individual governments. In Britain, this There are other reasons to review the direction in which peacekeeping is moving. Johnstone considers some of the problems and dilemmas involved in his chapter cited earlier.[16] The UN is facing difficulties in finding sufficient numbers of trained military people to maintain the expanded level of operations. As the UN High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change commented in its report in 2004 ‘[T]he total global supply of available peacekeepers is running dangerously low. Just to do an adequate job of keeping the peace in existing conflicts would require almost doubling the number of peacekeepers around the world. The developed States have particular responsibilities to do more to transform their armies into units suitable for deployment to peace operations. And if we are to meet the challenges ahead, more States will have to place contingents on stand-by for UN purposes.’[17] The danger where there is a shortfall in the numbers required is that a mission without adequate numbers or resources is likely to raise expectations which it cannot fulfil. The usual qualifying phrase‘within the limits of the mission’s capabilities’ is unlikely to be very effective in lowering them. A second dilemma mentioned by Johnstone is that a qualified mandate could draw people to the areas where peacekeepers are deployed. This, he argues ‘can quickly overwhelm the capacity of a mission and expose it to manipulation by those who want either to see the operation fail or invite robust action from the peacekeepers in the hope that it will work to their advantage’. A third dilemma is that protective action in one area can lead to reprisals against civilians in another, a pattern, Johnstone notes, that one sees in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A fourth dilemma arises over whether or not to take pre-emptive action. To do so is to risk the charge of escalating the violence. Failure to do so may mean that civilians needlessly lose their lives. Yet another problem, not mentioned by Johnstone, is that it can be difficult in a war zone to decide
whether civilians are being deliberately targeted or are the victims of ‘collateral damage’ – the
unintended if sometimes inevitable killing of civilians in military engagements. However, any moral
distinction between putative collateral damage and outright massacre diminishes to zero point where
there is a reckless and disproportionate use of force or where there is a secondary objective of
demoralising the civilian population. All too often in modern warfare, one or both sides in a conflict
are guilty of such wanton disregard of civilian life – for instance the wholesale destruction of Fallujah
by ‘coalition forces’ in Iraq in 2004 on the one side and suicide attacks by Sunni militias on US forces
or government army recruiting centres in built up areas, or attacks on Shia Mosques on the other. None of these caveats and difficulties, however, negates the responsibility to protect or the need to find practical ways of doing so where possible. They do indicate that it may not always be possible and that care has to be taken not to make matters worse through escalating or prolonging violent conflict. What then of alternatives that might reduce, and perhaps in the longer run eliminate reliance on military forces in peacekeeping? In considering this it is important to emphasize that peace building, or even peacekeeping, does not begin at the moment of crisis when a decision has to be made about sending in UN or other forces. Such interventions, are sometimes necessary to deal with immediate critical situations, but the underlying causes, whether local or global, need also to be addressed. Thus halting the flood of arms into Africa may be more important in preventing war and massacre than any peacekeeping mission. Similarly, taking action to halt and eventually reverse climate change is vital to reduce the tensions caused by environmental disasters and pressure on resources. (The creeping southward desertification in the Sudan was one of the causes of the crisis in Darfur as nomadic Arab tribes moved South and West.) A radical re-orientation of defence in the most powerful countries so that they relied mainly on nonviolent civilian-based defence for their home security would free up vast resources for constructive purposes and bring sweeping cut-backs in the defence industry. Such a shift is not at present on the cards politically but this does not mean it is intrinsically unreasonable. Given the successes of civil resistance of recent decades it merits renewed serious debate.[18] It is important also to recognize that often what is needed from outside is practical help and – where it is requested – advice to grassroots movements inside a country which are seeking to end a dictatorship, or an ongoing civil war, or to promote radical social change. Civil resistance on the one hand and community building on the other represent ways of doing so, and thereby possibly forestalling the need for outside intervention. Radical confrontational action of this kind can also be combined with programmes of conflict transformation which attempt to restore trust between divided communities. The term ‘conflict transformation’ here rather than the more traditional ‘conflict resolution’ indicates a recognition that some conflicts have to be fought out and won but that there can be creative nonviolent ways of conducting them. The question remains whether in the crisis situations which are bound to arise from time to time despite whatever conflict transformation or constructive work is undertaken, a purely civilian peacekeeping force could be effective in all the situations which peacekeeping forces encounter. In particular, could an unarmed force provide the kind of protection that is envisaged by the notion of a responsibility to protect? The intuitive answer is no. If armed UN peacekeepers were powerless to prevent the slaughter in Rwanda and Bosnia because they were hampered from using their weapons, what chance would an unarmed peaceforce have? However, before dismissing the notion out of hand, one should note the difference, practically and psychologically, between deploying an armed force with an uncertain mandate and a peaceforce whose members have no weapons but are prepared a) to work among the people at the community level and b) if necessary to put their lives on the line to halt violence and abuses. Unarmed civilian groups have achieved some remarkable successes in protecting vulnerable individuals and groups. In India the Shanti Sena – ‘peace army’ – set up on the inspiration and advice of Gandhi, sent volunteers into the city of Ahmedabad in September 1969 where at least 2000 people had been killed, and thousands more had fled from their homes in the course of Hindu-Muslim riots. Over the next four months they helped clear rubble, held meetings with local people to persuade them to invite back the people who had fled, and carried out a programme of relief and rehabilitation. (Nevertheless it took the deployment of the Indian army to put an end to the riots.) Shanti Sena worked in a similar way when communal riots broke out in the town of Bhivandi.[19} In January 1962 the World Peace Brigade was established at a meeting in Beirut. Its purpose, as set out in its founding statement was to organise, train and keep available a Brigade for nonviolent action in situations of actual or potential conflict, and to join with people in their nonviolent struggle for self-determination and social reconstruction. Of its actions over the next three or four years, the one that had most political impact was a planned nonviolent march in 1962 from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to the border with Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) to coincide with a general strike there calling for an end to the Central African Federation. The march and strike did not in fact take place as the British government finally agreed to elections in Zambia which in turn led to the demise of thefederation.[20] The experience of Peace Brigades International, however, is more relevant to the question of whether unarmed peacekeepers could provide protection to individuals and communities under threat. Since its formation in 1981, it has sent groups of civilians to accompany human rights workers, trade unionist and others at risk from death squads, government troops or militias in various countries. Currently it has projects in Colombia, Guatemala, Indonesia and Mexico and is starting a project in Nepal, and a joint project with other organisations in Chiapas, Mexico. The Nonviolent Peaceforce, launched in 2002 also does accompaniment work, and has ambitious plans to build up a force of 2000 active members and 4000 reserves (plus 5000 supporters) over the next six years for deployment in conflict situations. It now has teams working in five cities in Sri Lanka. Other initiatives of this kind include the Balkans Peace Team which sent small transnational teams to work with local anti-war and non-violence groups in Croatia during the war with Serbia, Witness for Peace which organised a border monitoring programme in Nicaragua starting in 1981, and the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led movement dating from 2001 which is committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent direct action methods and principles.[21] Clearly, grassroots peacekeeping forces do not as yet have the numbers or infrastructure to provide a workable alternative to the mixed military/civilian peacekeeping of the UN or bodies like the EU and the African Union. Given that fact, my own view is that in crisis situations such as Darfur where civilians are daily being killed by the Sudanese government forces, by government-backed Janjaweed militia, and now by rival anti-government rebels, the African Union peaceforce should not only be supported but be given the additional help they have requested – mainly more funding and better supplies and transport. Help of this kind, and perhaps overflights of the area, may be more helpful than sending in UN troops from outside Africa, and certainly preferable to an invasion of the country But what is needed above all is to restart the political process by opening up negotiations with those resistance groups who did not sign up to the ceasefire deal in Abuja, Nigeria in May of this year [22]. Whether unarmed peacekeeping could ever entirely obviate the need for military involvement must remain an open question. Certainly that is not a possibility in the near future. But it does already have a place and in combination with other forms of nonviolent intervention, and radical nonviolent action could point to a more creative way of keeping the peace. Notes [1] See Thomas Weber, ‘Nonviolent Intervention – a History’ Chapter 2 of Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan and Thomas Weber [2] The figures are from an on-line BBC news briefing on Sudan’s Darfur Conflict dated 3 October 2006. [Back to text] [3] My colleague Howard Clark after seeing an earlier draft of this paper commented that the civilians in so-called peace [4] See the Background Note on Peacekeeping Operations (DPI/1634/Rev.46) published by the UN Department of Public [5] Figures published by SIPRI’s and cited in the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2006– a project of the Centre on International Cooperation, Lynne Rienner, Boulder & London, 2006. See pp.152-53. [Back to text] [6] Bruce Jones, Preface to The Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2006, the first issue of a new publication, p.ix. [Back to text] [7] I have not managed to find the figures which show that the proportion of civilians in UN operations has increased, but am assured by my colleague Tom Woodhouse that this is the case. [Back to text] [8] UN Background Note on Peacekeeping Operations (DPI/1634/Rev.46), cited above. [Back to text] [9] See the Bruce Jones Preface to the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations 2006, p.x [Back to text] [10] Figures cited by Ian Johnstone in the Annual Review 2006, p.6. [Back to text] [11] Ibid, p 6. [Back to text] [12] Andrew Mack et al, The Human Security Report , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005. [Back to text] [13] UNSC Res.7248 (Dec 2001) and UNSC Res 1623 (Sept 2005) [Back to text] [14] UNSC Res 1511 (October 2003) and UNSC Res 1546 (June 2004) [Back to text] [15] David Jackman, ‘Civilian peacekeepers: Signs of Hope’. The Ploughshares Monitor, Vol 16, No 3, September 1995. [Back to text] [16] Johnson, Annual Review p.7 [Back to text] [17] From the 2004 report of the High Level Panel on High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change entitled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. Executive Summary, p.5. [Back to text] [18] There is a considerable literature on what is termed variously ‘social defence’, ‘civilian-based defence’ or ‘defence by civil resistance’. See for instance Chapter 7 of Defence without the Bomb: The Report of the Alternative Defence Commission, Taylor & Francis, London, 1983, pp.208-248, Gene Sharp, Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1990. [Back to text] [19] Narayan Desai, ‘Intervention in riots in India’, in A. Paul Hare and Herbert Blumberg (eds), Liberation without Violence: a third-party approach, Collings, London 1977, pp.74-91. The account is taken from Desai’s book, Towards a Nonviolent Revolution, Sarva seva Sangh Prakashan, Varanasi, India, 1972. [Back to text] [20] See Charles Walker, ‘Nonviolence in Eastern Africa 1962-4: the World Peace Brigade and Z|ambian Independence, in Liberation with Violence cited above. [Back to text] [21] See Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan and Thomas Weber, Nonviolent Intervention across Borders, cited above, which has chapters on Peace Brigades International, Witness for Peace, and the Balkan Peace Team. The book also has a typology of Cross-border Nonviolent Interventionby Robert J. Burrows. [Back to text] [22] See Alex de Waal, ‘We could have had peace in Darfur for another $100m’, The Guardian, 29 Sept 2006, p.35. De Waal is a specialist on the area who was advisor to the African Union in the mediation in Abuja, Nigeria, last May between rebel forces and the Sudanese government. He argues that the real failure in Darfur was a political one, and that the ceasefire deal which was accepted by only one of the three main rebel groups could probably have included the others with more tact, patience and funding. [Back to text] |
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