Читать книгу Understanding Peacekeeping - Alex J. Bellamy - Страница 44

The UN was conceived as the successor to the failed League of Nations by the Western allies during the Second World War. The catastrophic loss of life and physical devastation caused by the war, coupled with the invention of the atomic bomb, convinced international leaders that international organization was more necessary than ever. Taking up the idea that great powers should play a legalized executive role in world politics, the main wartime allies (Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States) initially conceived the UN as the vehicle through which they would police world affairs through a system of collective security. The ‘police’, plus China, were given special rights – permanent membership of the Security Council and veto powers – but also bore, in the words of US Secretary of State John Stettinius, ‘the principal responsibility for action’ (in Goodrich and Carroll 1947: 415). For all its problems, this combination of special rights and responsibilities, and the guarantee that the UN could never act against the interests of the great powers (of 1945), ensured their continued participation in the new organization and helped it survive the global chill of the Cold War.

The vision of a UN policing role led by these great powers was severely circumscribed during the Cold War. Assessments of the UN Security Council during this period see it more as an instrument of crisis management than as an institution concerned with policing international law (Lowe et al. 2008). Indeed, it’s important to recall that the UN Charter defines the Security Council’s principal role as maintaining international peace and security, not enforcing international law. But Cold War politics also stymied the potential for consensus among the superpowers and, hence, the Security Council’s ability to live up to this goal. The UN thus faced some profound tensions as to its proper role in global politics, tensions which arose in part from different ideas about the lessons of the Second World War. Three concerns in particular pulled world leaders in different directions.

First, the experience of war created a strong impetus for outlawing it as an instrument of state policy. Second, the monstrosities perpetrated by Nazism, fascism, Japanese nationalism and Stalinism, combined with the immense contribution to the war effort made by colonized peoples in India, Indochina, Africa and elsewhere, strengthened the belief that peoples had a right to govern themselves. This helped discredit the idea of empire and bolster calls for decolonization. But it also presented problems of how to manage the process of decolonization and the subsequent new states from interference by the world’s great powers. In addition to the ban on military force, the key protection afforded to the new states was the principle of non-interference. Finally, the Holocaust and other horrors persuaded states to place aspirations for basic human rights at the heart of the new order. The tension this created within the UN Charter set in train the core dilemma over adopting generally Westphalian or post-Westphalian approaches to global order.

The Cold War meant that the great powers never exercised their global policing functions as the Charter’s drafters had hoped. This shaped the development of UN and other peace operations in important ways. Perhaps the first impact of the Cold War on the UN’s work can be illustrated by its failed attempts to create a standing army and its response to North Korea’s invasion of its southern neighbour in 1950. The first victim of the Cold War was the proposal for the UN to have its own standing army to enforce the decisions of the Security Council. The Charter’s drafters had originally conceived the idea that, in order to avoid the uncertainty that had characterized the League’s collective security system, the UN’s member states would provide the organization with a standing military force. This ‘UN army’ would be politically directed by the Security Council and commanded by a UN Military Staff Committee (Novosseloff 2018). These provisions were written into the UN Charter (e.g. Articles 42 and 43), and negotiations began in 1945 to establish the force. It may be surprising nowadays, but one of the leading advocates of the UN army in 1945 was the United States. The US government went so far as to indicate which forces it would set aside for the new UN force – around 40,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen, including an aircraft carrier battle group (Lorenz 1999). This American activism raised concerns in Moscow that the UN army would be a front for the Western allies, and the Soviet Union pulled out of the negotiations. The idea of building a UN army died in 1948, although there have been repeated efforts to resurrect it (see Koops and Novosseloff 2017; see also box 6.2, pp. 118–20).

The US-led intervention in Korea in 1950 ostensibly suggested that, unlike the League, the UN had the capacity to play a leading role in collective security. However, the peculiar circumstances in which the intervention was authorized meant that it turned out to be the exception rather than the rule for UN operations during the Cold War. The intervention was facilitated by the Soviet Union’s absence from the Security Council, which left it unable to use its veto power. Moscow’s absence was in protest at the Council’s refusal to recognize the communists as the rightful government of China. When the Soviets realized their mistake and returned to the Council, they ensured that the United States could not continue to use the UN to legitimize its intervention in Korea (Luck 2006: 49–50). The Korean War was the only explicit example of peace enforcement action against a sovereign state during the Cold War.

At the same time, however, the UN was beginning to develop alternative ways of contributing to international peace and security. In 1947 the General Assembly reacted to a complaint from the Greek government that its Yugoslav neighbour was actively assisting communist rebels engaged in a civil war against the government by despatching an observation mission (UNSCOB) to report on cross-border movements. The following year – 1948 – became a ‘pivotal’ year for the Security Council as it engaged in two of the world’s most pressing crises, the Palestinian conflict and the struggle over Kashmir (Luck 2006: 32). The UN despatched a mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte – a Swedish aristocrat who had played a central role in freeing Jews at the end of the Second World War – to the Middle East to facilitate an agreement between the Jews and the Palestinians, but he was assassinated by what the Security Council labelled ‘a criminal group of terrorists’ (Resolution 57, 1948). Bernadotte was replaced by Ralph Bunche. After months of careful and skilful diplomacy, in early 1949 Bunche secured a ceasefire agreement that would be overseen by a UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) (Pelcovits 1993: 9–17). Bunche was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts (Urquhart 1993: 139–200).

UNTSO is often cited as the organization’s first peacekeeping operation (Goulding 1993: 452), and it has maintained a presence in the Middle East to this day. However, it has rarely been able to fulfil its mandate on account of limited cooperation from the belligerents and its own limited capabilities. UNTSO was initially established to support a Truce Commission for Palestine, established by the Security Council to oversee a ceasefire (Higgins 1969: 16). The initial figure of around 572 observers deployed to monitor the ceasefire was reduced after the conclusion of an armistice agreement in 1949, which produced a more stable ceasefire (Ghali 1994a: 94). Since then, its size has fluctuated between thirty and a few hundred personnel. It has suffered fifty fatalities. With its role limited to monitoring ceasefire agreements, UNTSO has proven unable to prevent the periodic escalation of hostilities in the region, but it has played a valuable role as a source of independent information and training ground for peacekeepers.

On 21 April 1948, the Council issued Resolution 47, which called for India and Pakistan to cease their hostilities in Kashmir and permit a plebiscite to determine the wishes of the Kashmiris. The Council also established UNMOGIP to observe the ceasefire and write periodic reports. In the space of a few months, and in the wake of the collapse of negotiations about a UN army, the Security Council started to carve out a role for peace operations in international peace and security.

These missions were created ad hoc. But they formed the basis for a coherent role for the UN through the idea of ‘preventive diplomacy’. Most of the credit for this went to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, though some argued that the UN’s first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie (1946–52), had laid the groundwork (Elabray 1987: 170). This put peace operations at the centre of the UN’s new collective security role (Urquhart 1994: 175–85). Hammarskjöld first set out the concept of preventive diplomacy in his annual report to the General Assembly on 31 August 1960. This document described it as the ‘main field of useful activity of the UN in its efforts to prevent conflicts or to solve conflicts’. By ‘preventive diplomacy’, the Secretary-General meant something more specific than simply the use of diplomacy for peacemaking between warring parties. Instead, he saw the UN’s primary role as intervening in order to prevent the escalation of local conflicts into regional or global wars involving the superpowers. This was spelt out most clearly in reference to the UN’s mission in Congo (ONUC, 1960–4). Such peace operations were justified, he argued, ‘by the wish of the international community to avoid [an] important area being split by bloc conflicts. It is a policy rendered possible by the fact that both blocs have an interest in avoiding such an extension of the area of conflict because of the threatening consequences, were the localization of the conflict to fail’ (in Zacher 1970: 67–8). A few years earlier, Hammarskjöld had instructed his envoy to Lebanon that the operation was a ‘classic case of preventive diplomacy’ designed to ‘keep the Cold War out of the Middle East’ (Urquhart 1994: 265).

The terms of reference for what was widely regarded as the UN’s first selfstyled peace operation, UNEF I – deployed to the Sinai to help defuse the Suez Crisis of 1956 – would play a key role in developing the UN’s subsequent core peacekeeping principles of consent, impartiality and minimum use of force (see chapter 7). However, the force did not set a formal precedent because it was widely perceived as responding to the extraordinary problems confronting the post-Suez Middle East. Moreover, the relevant actors in that case had very different ideas about the mission’s proper purpose. The British and French saw it primarily as a way to extricate themselves from Suez while protecting their interests. The United States, in contrast, saw it as a way of facilitating British and French withdrawal and securing the support of post-colonial leaders. The Soviet Union and most of the world’s new post-colonial states viewed it – and UN peace operations in general – as a vehicle for advancing decolonization. As a result, UNEF I’s terms of reference reflected a political compromise more than an ideal framework for peace operations. In short, the terms of reference represented the most that the Canadian diplomat Lester Pearson and Hammarskjöld calculated they could get away with without breaking the fragile consensus over UNEF I. The UN went on to conduct several more similar operations before the end of the Cold War (table 3.2). But it also undertook limited peace enforcement action in the Congo (ONUC) and a wider set of activities in Dutch West New Guinea (West Irian).

Table 3.2 lists all the UN’s peace operations between 1945 and 1987, when the Cold War era began to end (see Koops et al. 2015: chs 6–18). Only fourteen were conducted during this period, but they were all intimately connected with decolonization. UN peace operations during the Cold War can therefore be understood as a tool for managing one of the most significant structural shifts in world politics – the spread of the sovereign state. Almost half of these UN operations deployed in the Middle East, supporting the view that peace operations were an important part of the UN’s ‘preventive diplomacy’ role. In the Middle East, at least, both superpowers recognized the potential for escalation, and neither was prepared to wage war in order to defend their claims and allies in the region. This created an opening for consensus in the Security Council and helps explain the strong regional bias in the deployment of peace operations towards the Middle East. In contrast, only one UN operation (ONUC) deployed to sub-Saharan Africa, and this too came in relation to a crisis that divided the superpowers. In the Congo case, the United States was keen to prevent the rise of socialism by supporting decolonization while opposing – and assisting in the assassination of – the left-leaning Congolese nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba.

The UN’s operation in the Congo (ONUC, 1960–4) was a larger, more complex, costly and multifaceted operation than anything the organization had attempted previously. Although largely successful in terms of accomplishing its mandate by helping to hold the country together, it proved highly controversial, divided the Security Council and assisted in creating a financial crisis for UN peace operations. At its height, almost 20,000 troops were deployed alongside a significant civilian component, and the mission was mandated to fulfil a number of different roles, including enforcement tasks and consolidating state authority (Abi-Saab 1978; James 1994). ONUC was mandated to maintain law and order during the Congo’s turbulent decolonization after Belgian rule. However, the rapid disintegration of the security situation forced it away from Hammarskjöld’s vision of preventive diplomacy (based on the same principles as UNEF I) and towards peace enforcement to help defend the Congo’s territorial integrity (Dayal 1976). In 1961, for example, UN forces conducted a large-scale offensive against Katanganese separatists and Western mercenaries (Operation Morthor). There were heavy casualties on both sides, but UN forces prevailed.

Table 3.2 UN-led peace operations, 1945–1987

Mission	Dates	Purpose
UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO)	1948–present	Monitor adherence to terms of General Armistice Agreement in Middle East
UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP)	1949–present	Monitor Indo-Pakistan ceasefire in Kashmir
UN Emergency Force I (UNEF I)	1956–67	Buffer between Israel and Egypt in Sinai
UN Observation Group in Lebanon (UNOGIL)	1958	Monitor arms and troop movements in Lebanon
UN Operation in the Congo (ONUC)	1960–4	Restore order and assist Congolese government
UN Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA)	1962–3	Administer West New Guinea before transfer to Indonesian sovereignty
UN Yemen Observation Mission (UNYOM)	1963–4	Monitor arms and troop movements into Yemen from Saudi Arabia
UN Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP)	1964–present	Maintain order before 1974 Turkish invasion; monitor buffer zone afterwards
UN India–Pakistan Observer Mission (UNIPOM)	1965–6	Monitor ceasefire after 1965 India–Pakistan War
Mission of the Representative of the Secretary-General in the Dominican Republic (DOMREP)	1965–6	Observe and report on breaches of the ceasefire in the Dominican Republic
UN Emergency Force II (UNEF II)	1974–9	Act as a buffer between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai
UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF)	1974–present	Monitor the separation of Israeli and Syrian forces on Golan Heights
UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)	1978–present	Buffer between Israel and Lebanon

The political fallout from ONUC had a profoundly negative effect on UN peace operations. The Soviet Union and France in particular complained that it had exceeded its original mandate and that, having authorized the mission, the Security Council had little control over its direction. In particular, the Soviets condemned the American role in the ousting and assassination of Lumumba and the installation as president of Mobutu Sese Seko – an American ally, head of the army and, as it turned out, a corrupt tyrant. They argued that, in supporting Mobutu, ONUC was acting as a proxy for the US, not as an agent of the Security Council. In addition, they complained about the operation’s spiralling costs. In protest at both the direction and the cost of the mission, the Soviet Union and France withheld their peacekeeping dues. This caused an immediate funding crisis for UN operations and led to the adoption of a new financial system nearly a decade later.

More generally, France and the Soviet Union were sceptical of UN operations, seeing in them the danger of politicization that led the Soviets to reject the UN army concept in the 1940s. At French and Soviet insistence, several reforms were made to the way that UN peace operations were constituted and managed. Most significantly, operations would be mandated for only six months at a time. This gave the Security Council the opportunity to review individual operations and permanent members the chance to veto the continuation of operations. Although adding to the complexity of managing peace operations, this was a positive development which ensured that UN operations were doing the bidding of the organization as a whole, prevented future politicization, and gave the Security Council a permanent role in overseeing the missions it authorized. Second, the financial crisis sparked by ONUC led to the removal of peace operations expenses from the general UN budget and the creation of separate peacekeeping budgets (see chapter 2).

After ONUC, UN peace operations took something of a political battering and entered two decades of relative decline. When the 1967 war in the Middle East forced the collapse of UNEF I, the UN and its then Secretary-General, U Thant, were pilloried in the American and British press for failing to prevent the conflict by acceding to Egypt’s request to withdraw (Thakur 2006: 328). This was rather unfair, given UNEF’s mandate and the Security Council’s inability to reach a consensus on how to proceed, but it contributed to a general pessimistic attitude about the potential for peace operations to make a positive contribution to international peace and security (Urquhart 2007: 24). In the twenty-three years that followed ONUC, the UN took on only five new missions, four of which were continuations of previous UN engagements in the Middle East and Kashmir. The fifth, UNFICYP in Cyprus, was aided by a unique set of circumstances that saw Britain, which had assumed responsibility for security on the island, keen to divest itself of those responsibilities and spread the burden. Things got particularly bad in the 1970s and early 1980s, when a worsening of Cold War tensions reduced the level of consensus in the Security Council. Combined with the enduring financial crisis, this encouraged further retreat from peace operations, with only one new mission (UNIFIL in Lebanon) established between 1977 and 1987. This was also a particularly divisive era in the wider UN membership, with the General Assembly increasingly used to push the agenda of the post-colonial world, much of which had organized itself into the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).

In 1971, the Security Council appointed Kurt Waldheim as Secretary-General, undeterred by the fact that he had failed in his bid to be elected president of Austria and that he had served as an officer in the German army during the Second World War. To rub salt into the wound, the Soviet Union vetoed the alternative candidate, the American Max Jakobsen, on the grounds that the Arab world would never accept a Jewish Secretary-General. The General Assembly followed suit by declaring ‘Zionism is racism’ and calling for a ‘New International Economic Order’, moves which helped further alienate the United States and other Western governments. To make matters worse, it later transpired that Waldheim had lied about his military career and had, in fact, been an SS officer and a willing volunteer for the Nazis. By 1980, the UN had almost become an irrelevance in the West (Traub 2006: 19–21; Urquhart 2007: 25–6). There was therefore little support for expanding the scope of its peace operations. And, as it turned out, UNIFIL revealed many of the problems that had prompted states to move away from using UN peace operations as a tool of preventive diplomacy. Financial shortfalls and the lack of consent from belligerents persuaded many member states that peace operations could function effectively only if all the conditions set at the time of UNEF I were in place (see chapter 7). It is not surprising that there was a general retreat from peace operations, given the deep divisions that wracked the world along these two axes: the USA vs. USSR and the West vs. the Non-Aligned Movement.