The UN and Humanitarian Crises

The UN and Humanitarian Crises
Mariano Aguirre
TNI Website, 6 June 2000

Spanish version

While British troops proceed with their mission in Sierra Leone, the UN secretary general calls on the international community to join forces with its peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Internal crises highlight external efforts: while the United Nations receives requests to ensure security in Lebanon after the Israeli withdrawal, the UN administration asks NATO countries that participated in the Kosovo war in 1999 to show as much enthusiasm for ensuring internal security as they did for the bombing campaign.

One of the biggest paradoxes in current international politics is that internal crises are on the increase while foreign commitment falls. There are crisis situations as far apart as Colombia to Afghanistan, with Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone in between, but the response of the so-called "international community" is at best moderated and at worst totally passive.
When a crisis occurs in a legally constituted state, resources are mobilised to sort it out. But the relevant international organisation - the United Nations - is weak and poor, and individual states use or ignore international law when it suits them.

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, made a dramatic call to the international community last September to increase its commitment to defend large-scale human rights abuses. His speech focused on the crises in Kosovo, East Timor and Chechnya, cases which evoked a range of responses.
In Kosovo, NATO and its leading member states decided to make an example of their response to Serbia. In East Timor, they waited too long and the reaction only came when paramilitaries in the pay of the Indonesian government had pillaged and murdered. And there was no reaction to the brutal Russian operation in Chechnya, in order to avoid destabilising the governments of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

Things have changed a lot since the start of the 1990s, when some governments were enthusiastically in favour of granting the United Nations the power to carry out peacekeeping operations. The crises in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo have led the governments of the United States and several European allies to conclude that so-called "humanitarian intervention" must be controlled by them and never by the UN secretary general.

As well as differences of opinion between governments with varied national interests in protecting their own soldiers and the economic investments in crisis locations, some governments are divided internally between those who call for limited humanitarian intervention and those who believe there should be no intervention at all.
A few days ago, for example, a Republican representative in the US Congress blocked funding for US troops in Bosnia. His view is that Europe should raise its share of funding and troops. Otherwise, he argues, the United States should withdraw from Bosnia, even if this leads to a renewed war and even though it would contradict President Bill Clinton's policy.

The dominant tendency at the moment is to do little to take a lead in the crisis and at the same time to step up criticisms of the United Nations. One of the writers fashionable in this camp, Michael Ignatieff, called in The New York Times of May 15 for the United Nations to give up its blue beret peace missions.
"When peacekeeping is needed", Ignatieff wrote, "it calls for soldiers who are capable of fighting under a strong mandate that allows them to go into combat with arms, artillery and intelligence and a single line of command answering to a national government or a regional alliance".

This argument in favour of the United States or NATO leading operations not only contradicts the peaceful objective that should be the first priority of humanitarian actions; it also contrasts in practical terms with limits on states and organisations such as NATO intervening in situations that do not correspond to them when they are guaranteed victory.

What is needed more than ever is coordinated moral and political action to defend populations in danger. International and humanitarian organisations carry out an important job, but it needs more diplomatic, economic and in some cases coercive commitment from states and multilateral organisations.
States can provide this by granting the United Nations with legitimate universal powers above each country's individual interests, to take the lead in nations where force is required (as a last resort).
But as long as the strongest states hold onto the control and at the same time the United Nations is forced to operate with insufficient, poorly trained troops and virtually no funds, complex crises such as Sierra Leone will be more and more likely to swell from disasters into progressively uncontrollable catastrophes.

Copyright 2000 Mariano Aguirre