U.N. peacekeeping

...otherwise it would have been overwhelmed by the Serbs...

...The result was that in 1992, up to 80 percent of the food shipments were taxed away...

...But the United States was never prepared to invest its own soldiers on the ground in a peace enforcement operation or even to ship heavy weapons to Bosnia...

...But the strategy has one great advantage...

...UNOSOM I (with five hundred Pakistani troops holed up in the port of Mogadishu) could do nothing, not even prevent grain ships from being shelled from shore...

...In May 1993, 168 • DISSENT Politics Abroad UNOSOM II came face to face with the fundamental problems...

...The secretary general's report of 12 November offered three options, one of which must be chosen before March 31...

...So, too, could better coordination between the effort to disarm the faction fighters (May 1993) and the effort (January 1994) to provide alternative employment...

...Elsewhere the UN's further purposes—to defend human rights and promote social progress—will be heard...

...Food piled up at the docks as Somalis starved a few miles away...

...UNITAF met almost no opposition because the mass of the people welcomed the relief—and because the warlords knew it was temporary, no threat to their power...

...Given the historic animosities of Yugoslavia, for example, recognizing the sovereignty and existing borders of Croatia and Bosnia without an overall settlement crassly denied legitimate Serb claims to national identity and personal security...

...For Serbs, the federal unity of "Yugoslavia" was what made "small" Serbia tolerable and the non-Serb governments of Croatia and Bosnia safe for their Serbs...

...Learning to say "No," the United States led the Security Council's rejection of the request to protect thousands of displaced persons after the recent coup in Burundi...

...Trisecting Bosnia into Serb, Muslim, and Croat entities and condoning the ethnic cleansing of the past year and a half have been well described by Lord Owen, the European Community mediator, as "the peace made in hell...

...In Bosnia, the Safe Havens were much too small, allowing for Serb shelling, sniping, and mortaring, and they lacked wide connecting corridors...

...The Security Council foists mandates (without the means to implement them) on the UN forces in the field...

...Old precepts, painfully learned, from the early days of UN peacekeeping seem newly relevant...

...But self-determination must have indigenous roots...

...five thousand former Somali policemen have been recruited and will soon be retrained to perform basic police functions...

...Multilateral action under the United Nations Charter was not only the prescribed legal route to world order, it seemed a practical solution to human solidarity: each nation caring a little seemed sufficient to ensure that all together cared enough...

...The United States limits its contribution to air forces...

...It may, on the other hand, create a partial peace (as might now be done in Somalia outside Mogadishu) as a holding operation to a slowly expanding wider peace...

...The only separable parts of Yugoslavia immediately recognizable as independent, sovereign nation states were Slovenia and (arguably) Macedonia...

...January 1994) SPRING • 1994 • 171...

...defend itself and its mission when necessary...

...Ethnic cleansing, with all its horrors, followed from the premature recognition of Croatia...

...The challenge is how to reduce those humanitarian commitments in the least destructive manner...

...General Aidid had grounds for feeling singled out...

...But the failure to provide protection to the Bosnian Muslims (also Croats and Serbs), to the relief convoys, and even to the peacekeepers themselves has left the UN force in a most equivocal position...

...senators clamored for immediate withdrawal of all U.S...

...It reconciled our advocacy of collective security, universal human rights, and humanitarian solidarity overseas with the need to refocus cold war spending on reform at home...

...UNOSOM survived casualties inflicted on the Pakistanis in June (its total fatalities have now reached a hundred), but when Aidid attacked the Americans in October he struck UNOSOM's Achilles' heel...

...Resolutions are issued that bear on the Bosnian Serbs, but pressure on SPRING • 1994 • 169 Politics Abroad the Bosnian Serbs, such as it is, comes from the indirect effects of the misery that the UN economic embargo inflicts on the Serbian public...

...Opposite problems have emerged for the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the former Yugoslavia...

...National governments, moreover, will refuse to have the blood of their soldiers shed for foreign causes, however just...

...There the United Nations is committed to protecting the humanitarian convoys and the safe areas as well as maintaining an arms embargo over the entire area and an economic embargo against Serbia...

...Their justification is the alternative: a return to unmoderated war...

...With the advantage of hindsight, we can identify policy mistakes without which Somalia might look very different today...

...Only a Somali "Leviathan" with a monopoly of violence or a "Super-Warlord" capable of playing warlord against warlord could restore order and end the famine...

...retired admiral, Jonathan Howe, in charge...

...Thirty-two hospitals and 103 mobile vaccination teams are active (75 percent of the children under five have received measles vaccine) and 70,000 refugees have returned from Kenya...

...Somalia in which eighteen U.S...

...contingent...

...Following the October 3, 1993 crisis in FORCING PEACE What Role for the United Nations...

...Rival warlords had encroached on his territory in the South, and now the UN was preventing him from re-taking it...

...Unlike the usual partitioners—great powers who impose their will by force—the UN must insist on all-round consent and worry about the precedents such actions will set...

...In Bosnia alone, over 200,000 Muslims and 10,000 Serbs and Croats have died, and more than a million Muslims and 250,000 Serbs have become internal or external refugees (as of October 1993), according to the estimates of Thorvald Stoltenberg, the UN mediator...

...Croatia could have been partitioned between Croats and Serbs, but the ethnic mix was too intimate in Bosnia to allow a peaceable partition...

...For Croats, the inclusion of Bosnia in Yugoslavia was what made Bosnia safe for its Croats...

...For the most part powerful states will be free, as they always have been, to oppress their populations as they see fit...

...The fundamental problem was known from the beginning...

...The UN can try to feed the hungry and protect those driven from their homes until warring parties can be induced to make their own peace...

...It signals that borders are up for grabs and ethnic cleansing will go unpunished...

...The high hopes of a "new era" hailed by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali have crashed in the streets of southern Mogadishu and the very un-"safe havens" of Srebenica, Gorazde, and Sarajevo...

...A secret U.S...

...The killing so far has been contained within Croatia and Bosnia...

...New credibility .. . rising expectations . . . larger responsibilities . .. and an extraordinary opportunity to expand, adapt and reinvigorate the work of the United Nations so that the lofty goals as originally envisioned by the Charter can be realized": these sentiments, enunciated by the secretary general less than two years ago and actively encouraged by the Clinton administration's policy of "assertive multilateralism," have rapidly become antique...

...management...

...Thirty-nine district councils and six regional councils have been formed...

...the United States delivered...

...The population was divided into rival clans and united only in their rejection of foreign rule...

...The Clinton administration held out for March 31, 1994...

...The Security Council decreed...

...But in the large part of Somalia outside of General Aidid's southern Mogadishu, the UN effort is proceeding according to plan...

...Unlike imperial rulers, UN peacekeeping operations have rapid selfdetermination as their goal...

...Second, "good soldiering" for peace requires, where force must be used, minimum force, especially where noncombatants are involved...

...It proposed the establishment of a Somali national authority elected by the people, sustained by a police force trained by the UN...

...In failed states, these roots seem to take at least a generation or so of indigenous order and political success to nurture...

...Its once preferred strategy — "lift [the 1991 UN arms embargo] and strike [against Serb gunners]" —was designed to level the playing field between the Serbs and the poorly equipped Muslims...

...Today, starvation is not an issue in the areas within the reach of UN protection...

...The Security Council now must consider how far to retreat...

...None of UNPROFOR's military forces are prepared to undertake a massive campaign to defeat the Bosnian Serb forces...

...Worse still, the UN, founded on the self-determination of peoples, found itself waging what increasingly appeared to be colonial warfare...

...The taproot of error, however, lies with the diplomats...

...Moreover, they often grow in distorted ways in reaction to foreign, imperial, law and order...

...It must be negotiated...

...Still, the UN will find it difficult to stay out of violent civil conflicts...

...The UN special representative, Mohammed Sahnoun, valiantly tried to negotiate a peace, appealing to the humanity of the very warlords who ran the famine...

...Again, with hindsight, we can see many mistakes...

...UN diplomats must discover how to sustain as much humanitarian protection as the UN's member states will support while pushing ahead the UN's peacemaking and peacekeeping role, vital to an eventual resolution of those devastating conflicts...

...Failures of policy and now a general failure of will leave supporters of multilateral security with few choices...

...Under these conditions, even the best UN peacebuilding operations are bound to be patched-up affairs, shaky agreements among distrustful parties and elections held in the midst of moderated war, as was the UNorganized election last May in Cambodia...

...The protection dilemma is real...

...Military victories 170 • DISSENT Politics Abroad will turn into political defeats if UN peacekeepers enter into a war with the people they were sent to protect...

...These are the thin hopes that sustain UN efforts...

...The UN should negotiate first...

...The bulk of its troops were lightly armed, and the entire force relied too much on the military and logistic backbone of the U.S...

...It was all too good to last...

...Each retreat saves the UN money and lives, but expands the area exposed to warlord politics and famine...

...The current peace on offer to the Bosnian Muslims is the only game in town...

...They are also still the best hopes the international community has...

...The successful reversal of Saddam Hussein's aggression in the Gulf and the December 1992 U.S.-led rescue of the Somali population from starvation heralded what appeared to be a remarkable partnership...

...For Bosnian Muslims, the inclusion of Croatia in Yugoslavia was what made Bosnia safe...

...withdrawal from Somalia, associates of the regime now terrorizing Haiti chased U.S.-UN advisers from the harbor of Port-au-Prince, wrecking the peace plan...

...Then UNOSOM entered a war in which Aidid made noncombatant Somalis the shield behind which his partisans hid...

...Radical Muslim forces from Iran and the PLO were ready to come to Bosnia's aid but they were prevented from doing so by Russia and, it seemed to many observers, would have merely widened the fighting to Kosovo, Macedonia, and even beyond...

...But this mandate, unlike UNITAF's, threatened the political existence of the warlords...

...Three hundred thousand Somalis died in 1991-1992 in a famine brought about by the murderous competition of the Somali warlords...

...In December 1992 the U.S.-led Unified Task Force (UNITAF) became the Somali "Leviathan," and the roads were opened and the famine broken...

...The "fantastic gap" now stimulates irredentist claims across Eastern Europe...

...Failed states, such as the former Yugoslavia and Somalia, have often been the victims of partition or imperial rule...

...When he attacked the Pakistani peacekeepers in June, UNOSOM's indiscrimi nate response on July 12, killing a dozen respected clan leaders, made him into a local hero...

...The status quo, proceeding with the plan to build a Somali state, requires replacing the Americans and others who will have left by March 31 and adding another brigade...

...Simple prudence will keep it out of the affairs of powerful states, unless countering international aggression— the UN's first purpose—mobilizes the world community as it did against Iraq...

...In Bosnia, General Francis Briquemont, commander of UNPROFOR (the United Nations Protection Force in the former Yugoslavia), denounced "the fantastic gap between the resolutions of the Security Council, the will to execute those resolutions and the means available to commanders in the field...

...The twin crises in Somalia and Bosnia have produced a crisis in UN peace enforcement...

...In retrospect, the UN Protected Areas in Croatia lacked adequate buffer zones between Croats and Serbs and did not have sufficient peacekeepers, providing the Serbs with excuses not to disarm and the Croats with the opportunity to engage in incursions...

...The "technicals," armed jeeps in which gunmen cruised around Mogadishu, were so named because "technical services" was the only line item on the budget of the humanitarian organizations where they could write off the protection money they had to pay...

...The resulting strategy — "constrict [the level of violence] and contain" —is not without costs to its European proponents...

...The failures in Somalia and Bosnia have already begun to claim victims elsewhere...

...Nonetheless, the October disaster (in which about three hundred Somalis also died), Aidid's earlier attack on June 5, in which twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers were killed, and the fruitless effort to capture Aidid exposed the political bankruptcy of the UN's attempt to enforce law and order on an increasingly resistant population...

...A more thorough partnership with Somalia's regional neighbors in a mediation effort in 1991, a more extensive mandate for the U.S.-led UNITAF in December 1992, when controlling the weapons of the clans would have been easier, and above all a smoother political transition from UNITAF's partial successes in negotiating with the warlords to UNOSOM's more ambitious statebuilding agenda could have made a difference...

...forces from UNOSOM (the Untied Nations Operation in Somalia...

...soldiers died, U.S...

...Others paid and supported...

...The second involves a retreat to the UNITAF mandate, a force of about 18,500 protecting road convoys so that no region is completely bereft of food...

...First, the international community must try to achieve a comprehensive agreed upon peace among all the parties...

...It is wrong to act otherwise...

...Emboldened by the prospective U.S...

...The famine was man-made: induced both by the ravages of civil war after the collapse of Siad Barre's dictatorship and by the extortion of the Somali warlords, who "taxed" relief convoys in order to fund their competition for power...

...Humanitarian needs will not wait upon the agreement of all the parties, and even an agreed peace will often fail (as the Addis Ababa agreement among the Somali factions did...

...For many of us, multilateral action seemed the ready solution to a difficult dilemma...

...UNOSOM fired back, turning southern Mogadishu into an East African evocation of 1950s Algiers, 1960s Saigon, and 1980s Beirut...

...States, moreover, are rarely willing to invest their resources or the lives of their soldiers in war other than for a vital interest (such as oil in the Persian Gulf...

...In Somalia, we learned that neither the UN nor any other outside body can reconstruct coercively the legitimacy and effectiveness of states that have failed...

...chain of command bypassed the UN chain SPRING • 1994 • 167 Politics Abroad of command, which was itself designed to garner U.S...

...UNOSOM, however, was a paper tiger, lacking the capacity to enforce the agreement...

...Intelligence reports in November and December of 1992 provided an accurate portrait of the Somali crisis...

...Cyrus Vance's warnings in December 1991 not to recognize the independence of Croatia and Bosnia outside of the framework of an overall settlement ring devastatingly true...

...Press charges of "Chocolate Soldiering" as the UN forces supposedly melt in the face of opposition are particularly disturbing...

...One can assume that this option is rhetorical...

...this will probably be the outcome in Somalia come March...

...The humanitarian convoys have saved untold thousands, but they also fed the armies and prolonged the war...

...With more than half the population in the safe areas dependent on UN convoys for food and medicine, military action against the predominantly Serb aggressors would be met by a complete cut-off of humanitarian assistance by those same Serbian forces, which control the access routes...

...With popular support, superior force, and the diplomatic engagement of the international community, "peace enforcement" may then seek to create and defend a narrow corridor of continuing humanitarian support as it has in Bosnia...

...Its mandate gave it the authority to disarm the factions (the faction leaders had agreed to disarmament at the Addis Ababa Conference in March 1993...

...UNPROFOR, with large contingents of British and French troops, has already sustained fifty-seven fatalities...

...The third retreats to Mogadishu port and airport, to a 5,000-troop contingent and the mandate of 1992, which returns Somalia almost to the level of international involvement that prevailed during the famine...

...Peace cannot be forced...

...support, with a U.S...

...But if states have a vital national interest in a dispute, they are not likely to exercise the impartiality a UN peacebuilding operation requires...

...The October disaster in Mogadishu was exclusively of U.S...

...The scale of human suffering if the UN Ian Shapiro abandons its humanitarian effort may leave no choice but slogging on...

...UNICEF is assisting 40,000 pupils...

...Even the most well-meaning outside body, the UN, cannot bring about stable national solidarity...

...he was asked to disarm first...