Rethinking UN's role in a more peaceful world

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): If the Orangemen's marches in Belfast undo the Northern Ireland peace initiative and the UN peacekeepers are forced to withdraw from Bosnia's Moslem enclaves, it will be more proof to a growing band of pessimists that humankind, having scraped by thus far, is finally heading for disaster. Even those who look alike, live alike and, in their private lives, love alike, can't exist cheek by jowl without deadly conflict.

You can believe all that if you must and hark back to what you say were the stable days of the Cold War, when everyone seemed to know their place.

But, I say, hold on. At the least, it is rather more complicated than this, and at the most quite a bit more optimistic.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute is about to publish its 1995 year-book which observes how, during 1994, "patient and painstaking efforts to resolve some of the world's most intractable conflicts came to fruition." In the last year of the Cold War, according to SIPRI researchers, there were 36 major armed conflicts. It has dropped every year since. In 1993 it was down to 33. Last year it was 31 and this year looks like being even lower.

Conclusion: The world is a better place and the Cold War was not a time of a frozen peace.

The Cold War stirred things up like nothing before or since, not just in Korea and Vietnam but in almost every part of the Third World. If you lined up the world's population and singled out every 300th person, shot them in the head and dumped them one on top of another, you'd have a pile of corpses 3,600 miles high. This was the casualty pile in the so-called stable Cold War years.

These observations raise a profound and serious question about international peacekeeping. The UN rarely intervened in the Cold War years. It chose its peacekeeping operations with great care, partly because of the constraints of what the superpowers could agree to and partly because everyone knew what they're learning today -- you can't be everywhere when everywhere is 30 or 40 simultaneous conflicts. The result over time was a rather positive success rate in peacekeeping.

So why do we expect the UN to intervene in every conflict today and then conclude that it is essentially impotent when it doesn't? Why, for example, has the international community decided not to intervene in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh or the war between the Myanmar government and the Mong Tai army? And what about Chad, Cambodia, Columbia, Kashmir, Kenya, Peru, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Turkey? The fact is these 11 current wars have a common ingredient -- the media shows only passing interest and thus we know very little about them.

Interestingly, ex-Yugoslavia, now the most expensive peacekeeping operation ever launched by the UN, is not even one of the half dozen worst conflicts in terms of casualties. During 1994 these were Angola, Algeria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Yemen and Rwanda. What is so special about the needs (and appeal) of country X, say ex-Yugoslavia, over country Y, say Sierra Leone?

My only answer is this combination: the white European skins involved, the short one hour flying time for film crews to and from a comfortable base in western Europe and the anxiety that the Yugoslav tragedy may be reproduced in the former USSR on a much larger scale. But the dominant influences are the first two and I think we must face up to this and re-define our criteria for intervention.

The time has come to move back to the Cold War rule of the UN only intervening when there is "the consent of the parties". Only on the rarest occasions has the UN forced a peace. When it has tried to do, as with the American-led firefights in Somalia and the NATO bombings in Bosnia, it led to disaster. The UN should go in, not when the media rouses our interest, but when the people at war, whatever their color or religion, don't want t fight any longer and wish to find an intelligent, face-saving escape, or when there is a way of intervening before a war starts.

Our violent world does seem to be slowly improving. The pessimists who see nothing but ethnic turbulence have forgotten what went on during the Cold War. If we pick and choose carefully, as circumstances compelled the UN to do during the Cold War, much more progress in building up the credibility and thus the effectiveness of an important institution will be achieved. Over time, with preemptive mediation -- as is being done so well in Burundi, and should have been done in ex- Yugoslavia -- the number of conflicts raging at any one time may fall to a single digit. That would be progress, and, in our more rational and optimistic moments, we should set our sights on it.