Give UN power to enforce peace
By Jonathan Power
LONDON (JP): We must always be thankful for small mercies, even if they are handed down for the wrong reasons. President Bill Clinton's turn around on sending U.S. ground troops to Bosnia, combined with British Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind's promise on the BBS that "We are not going to be involved in that war, either now or in the future," has taken the heat off what looked like becoming a quite untenable situation.
Christoph Girod, the deputy secretary-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, put his finger right on it: "The UN peacekeepers detained by the Bosnian Serbs were not hostages because the UN had used force against the Serbs." The Red Cross, he said, now considered the UN "a party to the conflict."
In short, the western powers, in their rush to bellicosity, had taken a stand on dangerous quicksand. Only the Republicans of the U.S. Senate, with their isolationist tendencies, saved the day.
The UN, they seem to have all decided, is, after all, for better or worse, in ex-Yugoslavia to try and keep the peace, which means attempting, however difficult, to stand equidistant between the hostile parties, negotiating, cajoling, policing mini-truces as they occur, and facilitating the transit of humanitarian relief. The good that has come out of this phantom rush to arms is that the U.S. has decided it is the better part of valor to give the UN Protection Force more support, rather than sniping at it from the sidelines while pushing the counter- productive bombing option and the lifting of the arms embargo.
But before we go any further, I want to muddy the picture. I do believe the UN should be able to fight a war, to roll back an enemy, to liberate conquered territory and bring freedom to a victimized people. Why? For the very simple reason that the charter, 50 years old this month, says so.
Article 42: "The Security Council...may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security." This was the great legacy of the allies' victory over Nazi Germany, that future misdeeds of conquest and subjugation would be met by the united determination of the community of nations.
In 1947, the Big Five, the U.S., the Soviet Union, France, China and Britain, instructed their Military Staff Committee at the UN to come up with a brief on the composition of such a force. The senior officers suggested an air force with 750 bombers and 500 fighters, a navy with three battleships, six carriers, 12 cruisers, 13 destroyers, 14 frigates, 24 minesweepers and 14 submarines, and an army with 15 divisions, 450,000 men. Note the attitude in 1945-47. No peacekeeping. The talk was of peace-enforcement, employing professional warriors.
Peacekeeping as an idea evolved much later under the tutelage of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. The Cold War had put peace enforcement on the back burner and in desperation Hammarskjold fashioned the halfway house of peacekeeping-lightly armed, blue- helmeted units, traveling in highly visible white vehicles, who acted more like policemen than soldiers.
If necessity is the mother of invention, this was indeed a Nobel Prize winner. Peacekeepers separated the rival Egyptian and Israel armies in 1973, as the superpowers threatened to take sides and President Richard Nixon put American forces on a nuclear alert. They intervened in Cyprus and averted a Bosnian- type Christian/Moslem war there. Only two years ago they brought peace and elections to the killing fields of Cambodia that few observers thought could ever be tamed.
Most of the time, peacekeeping is by far the best option. Certainly it is in ex-Yugoslavia, where in a murderous ethnic war brother attacks brother-in-law quite irrationally. (If this war has proved anything, it is that large-scale inter-marriage is not the cure we once thought it was). There are now few rights and wrongs in this situation, even though we know the Serbs started it and have committed the worst atrocities. And no one's interest in the outside world is remotely threatened.
Nevertheless, undoubtedly in the next 50 years of the UN there will be situations when naked aggression will have to be repulsed, when every other tool will be found wanting and the international community will have to take a military stand.
Rather than America raising a posse as it did with Saddam Hussein, albeit with the blessing of the Security Council, it would be better if it were done as Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin foresaw, under the direct aegis of the UN.
The worst thing of all, as happened in Somalia and as started to happen in Bosnia, is when the "Mogadishu line" is crossed, when peacekeeping and peace-enforcement become intertwined -- the peacekeeping failed wounded by the roadside.
But let us use the opportunity sent by providence and seize this chance in the UN's 50th anniversary month, to have an honest and creative discussion about enforcement. We must pick up from where the great statesmen left off in 1947. It should be a very important debate.