Is Failure an Option for Older U.N. Peace Operations?
By Richard Gowan, on 22 Apr 2013, Column
The United Nations may be on the verge of launching a new wave of peace operations, beginning with a blue helmet force in Mali in July. Further deployments to Somalia and Syria are also on the horizon. Yet the U.N. still has a huge amount of unfinished business to complete in countries where peacekeepers are already deployed, ranging from Haiti to Liberia and Lebanon. As Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his advisers look for the resources for a new generation of missions, they will face pressure to cut costs and downsize existing missions -- even if that means leaving some fragile states’ problems unresolved.
U.N. operations have always tended to come in waves. In the early 1990s, the organization deployed an unprecedented number of missions to sort out conflicts left over from the Cold War in Africa and Central America, before stumbling into the disasters of Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. A decade later, a new set of U.N. missions deployed to West and Central Africa, while others took on outlying trouble spots such as Haiti and Timor-Leste. Throughout the early 2000s, the Security Council and U.N. Secretariat raced to keep up with the number of new missions. All too often, relatively small operations ran into major crises, as when more than 500 U.N. troops were taken hostage in Sierra Leone in 2000, making reinforcements necessary.
Those reinforcements were usually forthcoming. African and Asian states offered the necessary troops, and Western countries were willing to pay for them. The Security Council continued to green-light new operations until 2007, when it mandated more than 25,000 personnel to tackle the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur. The financial crisis the following year finally dampened the council’s appetite for new missions.
But the U.N. is still dealing with the legacy of this surge of operations in the 2000s. Most of them are still in place, and many continue to demand hefty military resources. The U.N. Mission in Liberia will mark its 10th anniversary in September. While it has been considerably reduced from its peak strength of more than 15,000 troops and police, and more cuts are planned, it still deploys 8,000 uniformed personnel.
Since the global economic crisis, the main financial supporters of U.N. missions, led by the U.S. and Europeans, have tried to keep a lid on the cost of peacekeeping. They have broadly succeeded, and the peacekeeping budget has hovered around $7 billion, paying for roughly 80,000 troops and more than 10,000 police officers worldwide. By early last year, Western diplomats and U.N. officials were cautiously optimistic that they had guided U.N. peacekeeping through the financial storm in reasonable shape.
The main cause of their optimism was the prospect that the overall demand for U.N. peacekeeping was about to drift slowly downward. There appeared to be political pathways toward downsizing or completely closing long-running missions such as those in Haiti and Liberia, which would not only reduce the U.N.’s financial burden but free up contingents and assets such as helicopters for ongoing missions.
U.N. officials guessed that the global number of peacekeepers might fall to between 60,000 and 80,000 over the next five years. Although there has been an ugly dispute between Western and non-Western governments over peacekeeping costs, with non-Western troop contributors seeking to be reimbursed at a higher rate for their contingents, it looked as if the gradual shrinkage of missions would keep peacekeeping sustainable. But the advent of the new Mali operation has put these calculations in doubt.
This month, the Security Council has been debating options for a force involving more than 12,000 personnel. Such a force is likely to cost well more than half a billion dollars a year. This in itself will offset the savings the U.N. is trying to make elsewhere. Meanwhile, the U.N. is working on plans to build up its political presence in Somalia, which currently operates alongside more than 17,000 troops from the African Union. There is a growing possibility that the U.N. will take on peacekeeping duties in Somalia in the foreseeable future, although this is not guaranteed. A blue helmet force might be smaller than the AU presence, but it would still be a costly undertaking. And while it is hard to predict what, if any, stabilization force will be required in Syria, there is still a possibility that the U.N. will need to send soldiers there, too. Combined, these three missions could reverse the downward trend in deployments and costs that seemed probable just a year ago.
There is no fixed ceiling for U.N. deployments. Indeed, a decade ago, many analysts would have questioned whether the organization could manage its current level of operations. Nonetheless, Western diplomats may find it hard to sell a major upswing in the overall peacekeeping budget in their capitals. There will be pressure to balance the new missions with cuts elsewhere. Potential targets for cuts include the two largest U.N. missions, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Darfur, which cost almost $3 billion dollars between them and field a combined total of nearly 50,000 uniformed and civilian personnel.
Last month, the Security Council authorized the deployment of extra troops to hunt militias in the eastern DRC, but it also directed Ban to explore ways for the mission to offload other tasks onto U.N. development agencies “to the fullest extent possible.” And while the Sudanese government and Darfuri rebels signed a new peace deal in Qatar earlier this month, many observers believe that the region is liable to remain unstable and that the peacekeeping force there can do little to affect it. If the current initiatives concerning the DRC and Darfur fail to make progress, diplomats and U.N. officials may finally conclude that these two missions are irreparably lost causes.
In the meantime, there may be pressure to hasten or deepen cuts to other forces, such as those in Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and Haiti. In many cases some cutbacks will be supportable and even beneficial -- some analysts argue that the mission in Haiti, in particular, has outlived its usefulness. But it is essential that policymakers do not push for cuts in existing missions that could precipitate disorder or political backsliding in the countries they have stabilized in the past decade. If the cost of a new wave of U.N. missions is to leave the work peacekeepers have done elsewhere fatally incomplete, that may be too high a price to pay.
Richard Gowan is the associate director for Crisis Management and Peace Operations at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. His weekly column for World Politics Review, Diplomatic Fallout, appears every Monday.
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