An informative look from Al Jazeera on MONUC, the UN peacekeeping mission in DR Congo and the largest in the world.
One minor issue: MONUC is no longer just dealing with the "aftershocks" of the Rwandan genocide. Congo's conflict, while tied up in dynamics that cross the border into Rwanda, has long since morphed into its own multi-headed problem. But that's still more than enough for MONUC to deal with.
Not everyone, evidently, is as unconvinced as we are that Ban Ki-moon is "the world's most dangerous Korean." Pegging off the rather tendentious Jacob Heilbrunn FP piece of that title, Michael Keating at World Politics Reviewconcurs that Ban's tenure at the UN has not been far short of failure.
There's no need to pussy-foot around the UN's shortcomings, and, for his part, Keating acknowledges the tremendous pressures put on the S-G office, as well as the enormity of the challenges that the UN confronts. Yet Keating's claim that "[i]t's not that anyone expects the U.N. to solve these problems" belies, I think, the lofty expectations that most people actually have of the UN, and particularly of its most visible personage, the S-G.
You see people's high expectations most anytime you hear someone lament that "the UN" isn't doing enough about whatever geopolitical issue happens to be boiling that day. So even when a top UN official does issue a strong statement about, say, the trammeling of human rights in Iran, the organization as a whole is panned for not "doing" enough to protect Iran's people. And with pretty much no one else paying attention to the ghastly continuing conflict in eastern DR Congo, the UN is the only one on whom to hang our hopes for a solution. Unsurprisingly, those outsized expectations turn out to be quite the albatross for the UN when, in fact, a war that few countries are actually interested in resolving painfully deteriorates.
But the deeper flaw in Keating's criticism -- and one that I think most people simply silently assume -- is the way he dismisses out of hand those UN operations in tough climates that actually have worked.
With the exception of softball assignments like Liberia -- an acknowledged success story -- U.N. peacekeeping operations have hardly been worth their expense.
Why must an "acknowledged success story" be condescendingly equated to a "softball assignment?" The fallacious implication here is that what the UN does well, it does well because it is easy. Liberia was wracked by years of civil war, torn apart by rebel groups, devastated by human rights violations and child soldiery, and driven into the ground by one of the most rapacious of recent dictators, Charles Taylor. If that's "softball," then I don't even want to know what the major leagues are like.
Yet into this volatile mix came some 15,000 UN peacekeepers, and, over the course of the last six years, they have, in fits and starts, helped Liberia reach the state it's in today: relatively peaceful, with improving infrastructure, a growing economy, and Africa's first elected female head of state. And all this for about $600 million a year -- a bargain compared to, say, what the United States is paying in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Not all peacekeeping missions have been as successful as the one in Liberia, to be sure. But neither, I would contend, have any of them been abject failures. In even more difficult cases like DR Congo and Darfur, UN peacekeepers are the only ones doing anything on the ground. To suggest that these missions "have hardly been worth their expense" -- especially when that expense is so comparatively low -- offends both the very real successes they have had and even the notion that something should be done about these conflicts at all. Not every brutal civil war in an oft-ignored part of the world, it turns out, is that easy to solve.
(image of an UNMIL medical officer, from UN Photo under a Creative Commons license)
Even when Georgia and Russia bothdisagree on something, there's one teeny tiny little difference: Russia has a UN Security Council veto. Moscow used the full force of this "nyet" yesterday, when it vetoed a resolution agreed upon by ten of the Council's 15 members that would have extended the UN's 135-person observer mission in the border region of Abkhazia.
At issue -- still -- was the rather mundane matter of the name of the mission, which has for 16 years been known as the UN Observer Mission in Georgia. Russia objects strenuously to this name's implication that Abkhazia is part of Georgia, which, of course, it is according to every country in the world except Russia and Nicaragua. Coupled with the resolution's entirely pro forma affirmation of Georgia's "territorial integrity," this dastardly affront was too much for Russia to bear.
This Russia Today video gives a good perspective of, well, the Russian side of things: it's quite simple, really; Georgia started a war last year and just can't deal with the "new republics in the region" that have emerged.
The full picture is, of course, much more complicated. And, as far as the UN Observer Mission in GeorgiaAbkhazia whatever you want to call the region is concerned, the debate should be utterly moot. The point is to have monitors there, to help with disarming and to ensure that there are no border violations or military escalation from either side.
With OSCE monitors similarly booted from South Ossetia, and EU observers unable to enter either region, this leaves no objective eyes on the ground in the region. In this light, it's easy to understand Georgia's fears that Russia's strategic design is exactly to deprive the area of witnesses or a disincentive for war. Georgia has its own political objectives in invoking the proverbially aggressive Russian bear, but the fact is that the UN observer mission had no dog in this fight and should be allowed to continue doing its job, whatever one calls the place where they are doing it.
*I owe the title to IntLawGrrls, whose helpful post reminded me too to stop reading about Iran and focus a little to the north.
UPDATE: Chris Borgen at Opinio Juris has a smart look at Russia's "bilateralization" of the Abkhazia/South Ossetia issue.
Greg Scoblete at RealClearWorld highlights the following from a speech on foreign policy from Mitt Romney that, to use Greg's rather charitable words, "doesn't add up." Comparing the U.S. military to that of Russia and China, Romney makes this claim:
And then consider all the things we expect from our military that they do not expect from theirs. We respond to humanitarian crises, protect world shipping and energy lanes, deter terrorism, prevent genocide, and lead peace-keeping missions. [emphasis mine]
I'm finding it hard to recall American troops rushing in to prevent genocide in Rwanda or Darfur...and a quick check of the numbers reveals that the United States currently contributes a whopping 96 personnel (75 of whom are police, and only 10 of whom are troops) to the 90,000-plus involved in UN peacekeeping missions around the world . Not exactly leading the way. Russia, by the way, has contributed almost four times that many, and China has contributed over 2,000 personnel. Though at least the U.S. is on track to pay its full bill for peacekeeping this time around...
(image of a Chinese peacekeeper -- a particularly musically inclined one -- in DR Congo, from UN Photo)
Dipnote solicits a post for the occasion from a top State Department official involved with UN peacekeeping. Her words echo ours:
[W]hile UN peacekeeping can’t resolve every conflict, the U.S. firmly believes that it can be a valuable tool for helping parties to a conflict restore peace and stability.
The truth of that statement can been seen in places like Sierra Leone, Guatemala, and Mozambique, which are at peace today with the help of successful peacekeeping missions. The U.S. strongly supports the UN’s “blue helmets,” and in part that support stems from the fact that multilateral peacekeeping allows the U.S. to share the burdens and risks of peacekeeping with the world community.
And this support is more than merely rhetorical. For the first time in years, the administration's budget allocates full funding to all UN peacekeeping missions. Now it will have to make sure that Congress does not attempt to wedge in any cuts to this important funding.
(image of Pakistani peacekeepers in Haiti, from UN Photo)
Today is International Day of UN Peacekeepers, which is a day that we honor the over 100,000 blue helmets from 118 countries who serve in 16 conflict zones across the globe. As a general rule, peacekeepers go where the no single country is willing to send their troops and are overwhelmingly drawn from countries of the developing world. They operate in some of the harshest conditions on the planet, including South Sudan, Darfur, Chad, East Congo, and Haiti. It is not glamorous work, but separating former combatants, disarming, demobilizing, and re-intigrating former combatants into normal civilian life is key to long term peace in these war-torn regions.
It is dangerous work too. 132 peace keepers lost their lives in the line of duty in 2008.
Without the men and women of UN peacekeeping willing to put their lives on the line the world would be a much more violent place. Take a second to thank a peacekeeper for their service. As George Clooney say, peace, like war, needs waging.
Wrapping up a relatively quiet trip to Africa, the UN Security Council toured Liberia, a country that has calmed after years of devastating war, but which still has the potential for instability. Addressing the topic of the UN peacekeeping mission that has operated in the country since 2003, Liberia's president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, offered this:
Asked when the country would be able to stand on its feet without peacekeepers, Johnson-Sirleaf told Reuters after talks with a Security Council delegation: "Two years after the elections. Then we can ask everybody to leave."
Four years (elections are scheduled for 2011) may seem like a rather arbitrary timeline, but the Secretary-General and Security Council representatives on the trip -- including U.S. ambassador Susan Rice -- were inclined to agree with the schedule, as well as with the proposed troop drawdown to come. The UN is currently omnipresent in Liberia, and its peacekeepers play an important role in making sure the country remains safe, stable, and democratic. And as Nick Kristof's most recent column attests, some problems -- one of the worst, in fact -- have stuck around even as peace has settled in.
(image of UN vehicles in Monrovia, from Scarlett Lion)
The physical safety of women in a given country is a better predictor of its peacefulness than wealth, level of Islamic influence, or even strength of democracy. Violence against women (including female infanticide and sex-selective abortion) may account for more deaths than all the wars of the 20th century. This kind of cultural aggression likely sparks increased nationalism and, eventually, warfare.
[Rwanda Defence Forces] has been encouraging the deployment of women in peacekeeping and has been providing training and educational opportunities for women. Since last year, RDF has worked with local governments, police and civil society organizations to create more than 400 local anti-sexual and gender-based violence clubs across the country and has trained more than 6000 people for peacekeeping missions.
Then I remembered that Rwanda also has the highest percentage of women in parliament in the entire world. Causation doesn't equal correlation, for sure, but it's worth thinking about the role that curbing violence against women has had in the country's evolution since the 1994 genocide (in which the murder, maiming, and raping of women reached a terrifying peak). Improving technology is certainly helping Rwanda, but improving the position of women is not only a human rights imperative; it is also contributing to the country's peacefulness.
(image of Rwandan women, from flickr user Women for Women under a Creative Commons license)
An international peacekeeper has been shot dead in Sudan's Darfur region, in an apparent bid to steal his car, the joint UN-African Union mission said.
He was shot outside his home on Thursday night in the south Darfur town of Nyala as he was parking his car, Unamid officials said.
The situation in Darfur degenerated for a reason, to be sure, and those responsible for creating and perpetuating this state of anarchy will have to be held accountable. But the reality is, this kind of opportunistic banditry is what is going on in Darfur right now, and efforts should be focused on ensuring that the people of Darfur -- let alone those who risk their lives protecting them -- be protected from this kind of wanton violence.
(image of UNAMID peacekeepers at a funeral, June 2008, from United Nations Photo)