Why the UN Can’t Stop Civilian Slaughter

On November 11, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic honored the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide with a moment of silence. Nearly 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks were murdered by Ratko Mladic’s Bosnian Serb forces. Denied the right to carry defensive weaponry, Bosnian defenders were confined to a demilitarized safe zone protected by ill-equipped and poorly trained Dutch peacekeepers. It was not long before Srebrenica’s fall echoed throughout the world.

A similar, haunting echo reverberated just a year earlier in 1994 during the Rwandan Genocide when a UN peacekeeping mission, not permitted to use military force to enforce a cease-fire agreement, witnessed the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people. According to the seminal Brahimi Report, “No failure did more to damage the standing and credibility of United Nations peacekeeping in the 1990s than its reluctance to distinguish victim from aggressor.” In both Srebrenica and Rwanda, the failure to protect civilians from systematic carnage delineated the limits of international intervention. As the UN continues to deploy Peacekeeping Operations (PKO) around the globe in response to complex conflicts, policymakers need to consider what PKO are realistically expected to achieve. In “Twenty-first Century UN Peace Operations: Protection, Force, and the Changing Security Environment,” Alex Bellamy and Charles Hunt tackle these critical concerns.

In their article, the authors discuss how, initially, UN PKO served as a buffer between warring states, keeping a pulse on ceasefire implementations and peace agreements. Now, under increasing international pressure, these deployments have evolved into the “principal collective means of maintaining international peace and security,” rather than an impartial third party. Peacekeepers are tasked with protecting vulnerable communities, supporting the establishment of legitimate and democratic states, and building sustainable peace in places where “there is no peace to keep, no tradition of democratic government or respect for human rights, and little goodwill between parties.” Expectations for UN PKO have greatly risen, and, as peacekeepers themselves are often prone to insurgent attacks, the gap between what is expected of them and what they can deliver is widening.

According to Bellamy and Hunt, “Realistically, all [peacekeepers] can do is create conditions that allow local communities and armed groups to build peace themselves.” On the ground level, local populations expect that UN PKO are stationed to serve as an international military force protecting them from armed groups—such as those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, and South Sudan. If this is the primary role of UN PKO, then many peacekeepers remain incapable of protecting civilians—proving to be increasingly damaging to UN PKOs’ credibility, and disastrous for civilian life. UN PKO typically decide not to intervene in attacks on civilians primarily because of distance between their posts and the attacks. Poor internal coordination and an inability to accurately assess a conflict’s seriousness further hinder UN PKO from fulfilling their protective duties.

The central problem is that the resources provided to missions do not match the expectations and mandates attached to them. In order to overcome the challenges that UN peace operations face, Bellamy and Hunt assert that the UN Security Council must engage in deeper discussions on how it plans to implement its mandates, limit the unintended consequences of imposed international will, and make a clear distinction on its expectations for PKO. More critically, the doctrinal foundation and peacekeeping architecture upon which missions are built must be reevaluated. Establishing whether stabilization by any means necessary—including international military intervention—is a contradiction of peacekeeping principles is a fundamental issue that UN peacekeeping operations must resolve.

Article Source: Bellamy, Alex J., and Charles T. Hunt. “Twenty-first Century UN Peace Operations: Protection, Force, and the Changing Security Environment,” International Affairs, 91: 1277–1298, Nov. 2015.

Featured Photo: cc/(United Nations Development Programme)