23 09 13 Thomson Reuters Foundation -EXPERT VIEWS: Are we heading for U.N. peacekeeping with more force ?

The 3,000-strong brigade is mostly made up of soldiers from the
region, housed within the wider U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, MONUSCO,
and the idea for it came out of a meeting of regional leaders last year.
But
it is a departure from normal U.N. peacekeeping and has set alarm bells ringing
among some peace experts.
So what does it mean for Congo’s civilians? And
does it set a precedent for future U.N. peacekeeping missions to have more
teeth?
Thomson Reuters Foundation asked a former U.N. peacekeeper, an
academic, and two experts in conflict resolution for their opinion. 
They are
former U.N. peacekeeper Christopher Langton, now head of Independent Conflict Research and
Analysis; Neil
MacFarlane, professor of International Relations at Oxford University;
Jonathan Cohen, director of programmes of peace-building NGO Conciliation Resources; and Kennedy
Tumutegyereize, east & central Africa programme director at Conciliation
Resources who travels extensively in the Great Lakes region.
 
Will the
Congo brigade help protect civilians from attack?
Christopher
Langton:
Reading between the lines, the reason for this brigade is to deal
with the heart of the issue. So instead of trying to protect civilians and
standing there and watching M23 (rebels) run past and the Congolese armed forces
run past in the other direction … which is what often happens, it may be a
partial recognition that they can’t go on protecting civilians unless they go
straight for the jugular and stop this group, which is steadily growing in
capability, stop it in its tracks before the mission becomes untenable.  
We
wait to see whether M23 will melt away into the forest or stand up to this
brigade, or whether the brigade is actually sufficient for the task. 
Neil
MacFarlane:
If we don’t put enough people in who can do the job and if we
don’t give them the equipment necessary to do the job, then there might be an
improvement at the margins, but it’s hardly a sea change.
Kennedy
Tumutegyereize:
Until you engage the Congolese civil society (in peace talks)
… the issue of civilian protection will remain more on paper, or will remain
more on civilians in cities and towns where the military units are.
But in
the countryside, most people don’t think the current trend will lead to any
significant levels of protection for the ordinary man and woman and child living
in the villages.
Assuming (the brigade) was effective and was hitting M23
hard, one would expect retaliation. And what we’ve seen from other rebel groups
… (is that they) target the soft targets – the civilians. This is a risk and
it’s a fear most people in the region have.
Most people tend to think that
politics and pressure on the (region’s) political leaders could be playing a
much bigger role than the brigade itself (in getting M23 to consider peace
talks). 
 
Are there any dangers with this brigade?
Christopher
Langton:
Not in this context, which is very contained in one country … and
where M23 appears not to be ideologically linked to Russia or China. It is
ideologically linked to itself principally and there are big commercial
interests.  
So I think everybody feels very comfortable that this is an
operation against a group of extremely sophisticated bandits and this isn’t
going to suddenly come back and hit us because al Qaeda is involved or something
like that. So it is a rather unusual case.  
All the players have been there
for a very long time and all the logistics, all the command structures. So I
don’t think there will be problems on that score. With one exception – if M23
get the upper hand on this brigade – pulling a rabbit out of a hat somewhere –
that might cause weaknesses to occur within the U.N. co-ordinated operation.
(Countries from outside the region) might say, hang on, this is getting bigger
than we thought, let’s take our peacekeepers out of here … we can’t afford to
have people killed.
Kennedy Tumutegyereize:
My main concern with this sort
of brigade is how it has blurred the lines … I think to an ordinary person on
the street, the distinction between this brigade and MONUSCO and others, for
example U.N. aid agencies, is not clear, or even if it were clear it doesn’t
matter anyway. So it makes life complicated for other agencies.
What makes me
… anxious is the statement allegedly coming from the U.N. military leaders, for
example for armed groups to disarm within a certain period of time, when
everybody knows that nobody will disarm. So the moment you start threats with no
mechanism of implementing or enforcing your threats, then it … directly and
indirectly undermines the credibility and legitimacy of the (U.N.)
mission.
Jonathan Cohen:
I’m not convinced it’s the right domain to have
the U.N. step into a more aggressive role because I think it opens up some very
real dangers, and it worries me because it seems to be part of a wider trend
that problems can be solved through the use of force.
If you’re not prepared
to have creative longer-term responses to the sorts of power vacuums that these
(armed groups) step into, you can pursue a military response to bat them down
and try and defeat them but … they’ll rise again in a different form … You’re
not contributing to the resolution, you’re just transforming the conflict into a
different stage.
 
Why is it difficult for U.N. peacekeepers to protect
civilians?
Christopher Langton:
Why is it difficult? Really by its own
definition. You don’t have rules of engagement as a peacekeeper that allow you
to do more than defend, which means you have to be creative or you’re sort of
sitting there while enemies are attacking you. You might hold them off or you
might not, but then they go away and you can’t follow them up and deal with them
because your rules of engagement under the U.N. don’t allow you to do that –
unless you have a Chapter 7
resolution(which gives you the mandate to use force), which more often than
not you don’t. You don’t have airpower, etc. It goes back … to the U.N. having
no authority of its own and no military command.
The other thing is you
cannot stop civilians moving on the battlefield, the area of conflict. In
somewhere like Congo, which is heavily forested, civilians will melt away into
the forest in fear. You can’t stop them. And very often you don’t have enough
humanitarian supplies to sustain them, so that’s another reason why they’ll move
away from the protected areas. It’s a hugely complicated matter.
I’ve never
done peacekeeping in Africa, but I can imagine the difficulties faced by
peacekeepers elsewhere would be magnified several times in Africa, given the
space, the terrain, the huge diversity of ethnicities and so on.
 
Is the
brigade a sign of a longer-term shift to peacekeepers with teeth?
Christopher
Langton:
I think the main thing is this (brigade) could never be a complete
precedent for U.N. intervention … but it will be a useful lesson … for the
U.N.
What I think will happen is that the precedent that will be set here is
a military one, which will form part of the evolution of military action under a
U.N. mandate and how it might be carried out … It will be a model – how does a
military force interface with U.N. monitors, humanitarian agencies, in a
conflict.
It won’t, however, be a political precedent, because there aren’t
any arguments between the Security Council members.
(In Congo) there is a
host nation invitation, which is one of the requirements … so the government …
invited MONUSCO to up its game to the use of kinetic force against M23.
You
would never have got that in the Balkans (in the early 1990s), and that’s (one)
reason why this might not be a complete precedent because in the Balkans there
were quasi-state forces involved, whereas M23 quite obviously is a non-state
group with no voice in the United Nations. Whereas of course Serbia, Russia had
a voice, which complicated things back in the early days when people starting
talking about (U.N. peacekeepers) and the use of force.
The other reason is …
all the members of the brigade are (from the region). We notice that other
nations involved in MONUSCO … are not involved in (the brigade).
The other
truth, and the reason why (Congo) can’t be considered a complete precedent, is
that the U.N. has no authority, it has no military command structure of its own,
it has no logistic structure of its own, it has to call on its members to
provide all those things. And if somebody disagrees, it doesn’t happen.
Neil
MacFarlane:
Courtesy of the events of the 1990s – Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kosovo,
Bosnia, Somalia – the United Nations as an organisation, and interested states,
began to think about what you’re supposed to do in situations of internal chaos
where states cannot or will not protect their own citizens.
We’re now in a
situation where there is a body of international norms and also a growing body
of international law that suggests that in certain circumstances … the United
Nations can act within states to protect rights when the state is not willing to
do so or is incapable of doing so. That’s a big change.
So what you’re
talking about in Congo is a logical, practical extension of that change at the
level of principle. In the long term, I think this is the way we’re going. I
think once you’ve got the issue of human protection on the agenda it’s not going
to go away. And the more failures there are, the more pressure there will be to
actually do the kind of thing you are talking about.
On the other hand, Congo
has been, off and on, a thorn in the side of the United Nations for most of its
existence as an organisation. It has a specific history and it generates
specific needs. And I don’t think we can generalise from that case to a shift
towards peacekeepers having more teeth.
The other thing is, what is the
appetite of U.N. member states for peacekeeping? If you want teeth, you need
highly professional, well-equipped, technologically advanced forces on the
ground and in the air.
My sense would be that it is extremely difficult
currently, as we see in Syria at the moment, to get the mandates or the
authorisations out of the U.N. Security Council that you need for forceful
action to protect civilians.
 
What will peacekeeping look like in 10-20
years’ time?
Christopher Langton:
In 20 years’ time, we will probably have
been through several phases of conflict of different types, some of which are
beginning to happen now where the U.N. is having difficulty finding a
role.
We may find that Africa defines its own way of dealing with conflict
through the example of the brigade and the successful African Union military.
Because, whatever happens, we’re still going to be faced with great power
interests conflicting with each other and trying to agree an approach to a
conflict.  
Maybe the one thing that will change – maybe – is China’s
attitude. [China is one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security
Council that authorises peacekeeping missions. The others are the United States,
Russia, France and Britain.]  
So far, China has stood back from involvement
in the military aspect of conflict management and resolution … If China comes
forward and says, yes we will take part, then the traditional reticence of
Russia and its natural antipathy to anything the West does could also
change. 
If you look at peacekeeping, putting Africa aside, most of it has
been led by the West, but most of the troops … have been provided by other
countries – eg Pakistan, Bangladesh, India … But of course those countries are
all jockeying for positions themselves. India might be a member of the Security
Council in 20 years and that can change things.
Neil MacFarlane: 
There
are lots of situations where the presence of peacekeepers has stabilised
situations. It may not have produced political settlements of conflicts, but the
presence of international peacekeepers has probably reduced the probability of
renewal of conflict and suspended conflict for long periods of time. And I think
that will continue to be true.
For the United Nations to be a reliable
provider of protection of civilians in conflict situations, the Security Council
and the permanent members of the Security Council have to be on board with the
proposition that if the protection of civilians in conflict is an international
obligation where the state is unable or unwilling to do its job, then that has
to be implemented consistently, not just in cases where nobody on the Security
Council has an objection.
So if we’re talking about moving towards a regime
where human beings are systematically protected in the first instance by their
state and in the second instance, failing the first, by the international
community, I think we’re probably moving in that direction slowly but we are
nowhere near that. 
Jonathan Cohen:
I’d love to see a really meaningful
debate about how you link the deployment of peacekeeping operations to the wider
peacebuilding agenda and recognise that keeping peace needs to be connected to
building real peace, and building real peace needs to get beyond political
elites – it needs to recognise that you don’t enforce a peace on a society and
hope it will hold. You have to actually engage in a much deeper analysis of why
societies become engulfed in conflict.
Outsiders will always intervene
because they will have either strategic, security, economic, or geopolitical
interests that will push them to do so, but they need to do so with a
longer-term perspective, with an investment in local actors to be the long-term
resolvers of these conflicts, not external actors.
There are some encouraging
signs that international organisations and states are beginning to see
that