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UN peacekeeping in line of fire
Concerns are being raised that the growing demands on the world's 'Blue Helmet' forces are running out of control as UN officials go through the details of a $7.4 billion budget
- By Harvey Morris/Financial Times
- Published: 00:21 May 20, 2008
- Image Credit: Illustration: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
As diplomats at the United Nations prepare to sign off on the biggest peacekeeping budget in the organisation's history, concerns are being raised that the growing demands on the world's 'Blue Helmet' forces are running out of control.
Envoys and officials have been closeted at the UN's New York headquarters for much of this month, poring over the details of a $7.4 billion budget to field about 90,000 uniformed personnel worldwide in the year from July. This is 10 per cent up on last year and an almost threefold increase, in terms of cash and troops, since 2003.
The soaring peacekeeping budget, is also now three times as high as non-military expenditure by the UN.
It represents just 0.5 per cent of global defence spending or - as one senior peacekeeper described it - a "rounding up" figure in terms of US military spending in Iraq.
But, nevertheless, diplomats on the UN General Assembly's budget committee, ultimately answerable to their national treasuries, have been pressing for cost cuts and greater efficiencies.
A series of corruption scandals involving procurement of material, and cases of sexual abuse by members of some peacekeeping missions, have also fuelled demands for greater oversight.
A more fundamental worry is that a plethora of new peacekeeping mandates ordained or under consideration by the 15-member Security Council is straining the capacity of troop-contributing states and of the UN bureaucracy that supports the overseas missions.
"The Security Council has gone mandate crazy," says Richard Gowan of New York's Centre on International Co-operation, which issues an annual global peacekeeping report. Missions strictly within the budget committee's purview currently total 15.
Gowan said growing pressure from UN powers to send up to 27,000 peacekeepers to Somalia, along with the completion of the trouble-plagued deployment of a similarly sized force to Sudan's Darfur province, would amount to some 60,000 troops on the ground in East Africa alone: "$7.4 billion might turn out to be just a staging post," he said.
The concerns are echoed within the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), which now has some 27,000 civilian auxiliary posts - many of which it does not have applicants to fill - a figure 17,000 up on 2003.
Peacekeepers
Officials worry that the Security Council is too ready to order the deployment of peacekeepers to theatres such as Darfur, Chad or Somalia where there is as yet no peace to keep.
Traditionally, the Blue Helmets were not intended for a fire-fighting role. Their job was to monitor ceasefires between previously warring parties or to act as a buffer between them.
Nowadays, in a range of crises worldwide but principally in Africa, they risk finding themselves in the line of fire.
The average peacemaker is likely to be an Indian, a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi. The three states, with well-equipped armies and a strong military tradition, supply around a third of all UN forces deployed.
But, although peacekeeping amounts almost to an export industry for a poor country such as Bangladesh, these traditional suppliers now find themselves at their limit and increasingly reluctant to face the risks that 21st century Blue Helmets are required to run.
While developing country forces man most UN posts around the world, the US and Europe broadly opt for missions under Nato, European Union or national flags.
This has fuelled resentment that developing countries fill most posts while the permanent five members of the Security Council - the US, UK, France, Russia and China - maintain control.
UN peacekeeping is undergoing its second and this time much larger surge since the end of the Cold war. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, superpower rivalries limited the scope for international responses to regional conflicts.
In the 1990s, crises in the Balkans, Somalia, Cambodia and elsewhere saw troop levels rise eight-fold to almost 80,000. Then came the UN's failure to prevent the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia. After this UN member states turned away from the organisation for major peacekeeping initiatives.
But with unrest simmering in many parts of the world, the Security Council - the permanent five plus 10 rotating members - is under pressure to respond and its answer is more often than not to put boots on the ground.
The DPKO is obliged to carry out the council's instructions, sometimes against its better judgment.
"The Security Council has to be seen as doing something," says Nick Birnback of DPKO, "and to write itself into the headlines."
Post-Rwanda, the prospect of genocide in Darfur, or further loss of life in cyclone-hit Burma because of the recalcitrance of its regime, inevitably prompt public calls for UN action.
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