This html article is produced from an uncorrected text file through optical character recognition. Prior to 1940 articles all text has been corrected, but from 1940 to the present most still remain uncorrected. Artifacts of the scans are misspellings, out-of-context footnotes and sidebars, and other inconsistencies. Adjacent to each text file is a PDF of the article, which accurately and fully conveys the content as it appeared in the issue. The uncorrected text files have been included to enhance the searchability of our content, on our site and in search engines, for our membership, the research community and media organizations. We are working now to provide clean text files for the entire collection.
In the past few years, U.S. forces have been engaged in serious combat only in the Gulf War. But with the Cold War over, they are being used for a number of operations radically different from a standard battlefield confrontation. The small force sent to the former Yugoslavia is there to carry out peacekeeping by keeping civil combat localized. The troops in Haiti have a U.N. mandate to “restore the legitimate government,” another activity now included under peacekeeping. Rwanda is another example, and Somalia was before it. Some of these operations are being justified in the name of preserving human rights or relieving suffering, but almost all of them have two common features. First, they are legitimatized by a United Nations tending recently toward a much enlarged concept of mission. Second, the forces are not there to confront a specific aggressor but to bring fighting and its associated disorders to an end.
Given a United Nations whose concept of peacekeeping has expanded enormously in the last decade, the tendencies of the Clinton administration, and the military and financial power of the United States, we undoubtedly will continue to be slated for a leading role. If that prediction is correct, it is important that we be clear about what is involved in so-called peacekeeping operations, what makes some of them more successful and less costly than others, and the conditions under which it would be worthwhile for the United States to participate.
One reason so many disparate operations are today considered peacekeeping is that the distinction between chapters 6 and 7 made in the U.N. Charter has been eroded. Chapter 6 provides for all measures short of force, while chapter 7 deals with enforcement actions. When failure under chapter 6 leads to implementation of chapter 7, it is no longer peacekeeping.
This is clear from the charter’s text. Chapter 6, “Pacific Settlement of Disputes,” defines “any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security” as within the U.N. mandate and describes the devices available for settlement: “negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangement, or other peaceful means" acceptable to the disputants. These provisions more or less presupposed two conditions: that aggression would occur when one established nation used illegal force against another and that only under such conditions would the United Nations need to use troops. There was no real thought that these provisions would be used against belligerents seeking to divide up a single state (such as Yugoslavia). This explains why, in the list of chapter 6 options, use of troops is conspicuously missing.
What changed the neat logic of the charter into the current amorphous approach?
In 1947, once the Palestine Mandate ended, war broke out between Israel and surrounding Arab nations. Israel survived, and a series of truces was agreed upon. But with seven nations involved, they needed professional help to carry out their agreement. Even the proper hours for beginning a cease-fire required consideration. As Paul Mohn comments, in the Middle East “rifle shooting reaches its climax at night [so] the lull of the early morning” was the best moment for starting the truce.1 Because of these complications, although the United Nations acted under chapter 6, it used men in uniform—at first, hastily recruited New York City policemen, later soldiers—to assist the parties in keeping the peace.
With a precedent established, it is not surprising that when the far greater crisis arose in 1956 in the wake of the Anglo- French-Israeli war with Egypt, the United Nations built on it. This time the outcome was the UNEF, an emergency force deployed along the Israeli-Egyptian frontier, on the Egyptian side.
The United Nations strayed from the original intentions of the charter by deploying troops under chapter 6, but, so far. these troops had not been intended or authorized to engage in real fighting. Nor did the UNEF have the complication of dealing with fighting within a single state. That changed in 1960, when U.N. troops deployed to the Belgian Congo, where they fought secessionists to preserve “national" unity. Then, in 1967, when Abdel Nasser of Egypt decided to stir up new trouble with Israel, he demanded that the UNEF withdraw from the Sinai section of the Israeli-Egyptian frontier. Then-U.N. Secretary General U Thant sensibly complied, because now only one of the two nations wanted that force to stay. When Yugoslavia fell apart in the early 1990s, the Congo lesson was forgotten and the United Nations found itself in the middle of a civil war.
What got lost in this evolution was a clear eye on mission. If troops are used for peacekeeping, what is intended? Ending the fighting whether the parties want it or not? Or only if at least one party wants U.N. intervention? Does it require the consent of all the belligerents? And what result is desired? A ceasefire? The collapse of the military force of one or more of the parties involved? These are all very important questions. And for most of them, neither the United Nations nor the U.S. government has answers. Consider this 21 April 1994 Associated Press dispatch from Nairobi commenting on the disintegrating situation in Rwanda: “The options [before the Security Council] included maintaining a smaller force in hopes of arranging a cease-fire, increasing the number of peacekeepers and trying to end the fighting by force, or pulling out completely and leaving Rwanda to its fate.” Pick one out of the hat?
At first, the Security Council, having heard from Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali that there was no prospect of an imminent cease-fire, decided to withdraw the 1,705 U.N. peacekeepers. But then, as the bloodshed went on. there was a flip-flop and new U.N. and U.S. forces were sent in. Luckily, the new government of Rwanda bent over backward to prevent revenge killings and a sort of peace was restored. But it might as easily have turned into another Somalia—just as Haiti might have ended in chaos, with U.S. troops being shot at from all directions.
There are many countries where conditions are similar to Haiti and where peacekeeping deployments easily could be called for. With both the mission and the requirements for peacekeeping blurred, the United States would do well to remember why Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, after the frustration of Vietnam, listed several conditions that should be present before the United States uses armed force: the interest is vital; we have defined political and military objectives clearly; and there is reasonable assurance of public and congressional support. He might well have added that the mission must not draw down the readiness of U.S. forces without an agreed plan for replacement. Without more clarity on these points, peacekeeping can be hazardous to our national health.
'Paul Mohn, “Problems of Truce Supervision,” International Conciliation, February 1952.
Dr. Hartmann, author of a dozen books on world affairs, is Emeritus Professor of Maritime Strategy, U.S. Naval War College.
11
Proceedings / January 1995