Sierra Leone: The end of UN peacekeeping?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "So far, we have had no offers," said chief United Nations spokesman Fred Eckhard last Tuesday of Secretary- General Kofi Annan's call for the major military powers to send experienced troops to bolster the crumbling UN peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone. He should not hold his breath.

The United States offered to airlift Bangladeshi troops to the devastated West African country, but none of its own. Britain sent 800 paratroopers to secure Freetown's airport and evacuate Western civilians who are threatened by the rapid advance of Foday Sankoh's rebels, but not to stop his advance.

Russia promised to fly in some Indian and Jordanian soldiers earmarked for the UN force, but said nothing about sending Russian troops.

"We would have liked to see some of the governments with capacity, with good armies and well-trained soldiers, to participate," said Kofi Annan mournfully.

"But they are not running forward to contribute to this force. We have to take the forces we get."

A few thousand Western ground troops, backed by all the high- tech weaponry that the United States can rapidly deploy, could quickly halt Sankoh's advance on Freetown and destroy the bulk of his Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces.

They are, after all, mostly drug-and drink-sodden teenagers with much experience in chopping off the limbs of helpless civilians, but few real military skills.

But that would involve killing lots of those teenagers. It looks bad on television when heavily armed white men slaughter ragged African kids -- even drug-crazed, murderous ones.

It plays even worse with the Western public when some of those same Western troops die on live television, and the reality of ground war is that soldiers get killed.

So there will be no Western troops for Sierra Leone, even if Freetown is overrun by the RUF again as it was in January, 1999 (when around 5,000 civilians were butchered in a few days). But there should be no need for Western troops anyway: the 8,500 UN troops already in the country, if properly equipped and led, should be more than a match for Sankoh's ill-disciplined thugs.

Some of the UN troops, like the Zambian soldiers who make up most of the 500-plus UN troops being held hostage by the rebels, are poorly equipped and a bit out of their depth in Sierra Leone. The bulk of the force, however, is made up of Indian, Nigerian and Jordanian soldiers whose military skills are not in question.

Indeed, the situation in Sierra Leone was pretty much under control until a regional peacekeeping force dominated by the Nigerian army handed over to the UN. The problem is the UN.

The UN bureaucracy is capable (barely) of running a classic peacekeeping operation where forces are deployed into a static situation and a cease-fire is already being observed.

It is uniquely ill-fitted to command a real-time military operation where the bullets are flying and hard decisions are urgently needed. And it gets worse.

The United Nations system is almost congenitally incapable of ordering troops under its command to shoot people, even if killing them is the only way to save the lives of far greater numbers. The bad guys know this, and regularly take advantage of it.

It's not just Zambian troops who fall victim to this phenomenon. Remember the Western soldiers serving with the UN in Bosnia whom the Serbs seized and tied to stakes in 1995 in order to deter NATO air attacks?

Remember Srebrenica?

Remember Rwanda, where there was a UN force in place before the genocide started, but it did not intervene? If you are operating under UN command, you will not be allowed to take the offensive and use deadly force, even when that is what's needed.

There is a useful contrast to be drawn between Bosnia in 1992- 1995, where mainly Western troops under UN command failed miserably to prevent a Serbian genocide of the Muslim population, and Kosovo in 1999, where Western forces under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization command nipped a similar situation in the bud by using limited military force against Serbia.

A similar contrast can be drawn between the brutally effective regional intervention force (ECOMOG) under Nigerian leadership that routed Sankoh's forces and imposed a cease-fire in Sierra Leone, and the UN force that has now replaced it.

The Nigerian troops shot first, looted freely, and rarely took prisoners, but they did bring a kind of peace to the country. The UN troops are much better behaved, and the slaughter has started up again.

The UN hasn't actually got worse since the end of the Cold War. It's just that the tasks have got a lot harder. If the job is to stop a genocide or halt a civil war, perhaps it is best left to regional security organizations (like NATO in Kosovo) or coalitions of the like-minded and willing (like the force that Nigeria led in Sierra Leone).

There would still be the problem of providing these alliances and coalitions with legal cover from the UN Security Council (which NATO conspicuously lacked in Kosovo).

The Western powers in particular would remain reluctant to commit their ground forces to combat because of the intense popular aversion to casualties. But at least there would be some chance that the job gets done properly.