Peacehawks

CHILD SOLDIERS: WEAPONS OF CHOICE, BUT WHOSE CHOICE?

2011-09-12T23:20:00.000-07:00

A book review for Peacehawks:

They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, by Senator Romeo Dallaire, Arrow Books, London, 2010 (307 pp, 12.07 LBS)

By Jamie Arbuckle

INTRODUCTION

Canadian Senator and retired General Romeo Dallaire, the author of the best-selling Shake Hands With the Devil (Random House Canada, 2003), and the original commander of the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Rwanda in 1994, has written another book, just as timely, urgent and compelling as his first. Peacehawks thinks it important that we inform you of this book as quickly as we can – I finished reading it an hour ago.

My life and my career have been very short on living heroes: Robert Rogers died almost a century and a half, and T.E. Lawrence five years, before I was born; I was 22 years old when Dag Hammarskjold was killed, and 23 when JFK was assassinated; my father died when I was only 32. I didn’t expect to have any more heroes in my direct experience of life. But I have been rarely privileged to know, even briefly to work with, Romeo Dallaire, and he is every inch a hero for our so dusty, spiteful and divided time. I thought you needed to know my view of the author as you read this review.

DISCUSSION

Search as we may, there are no comprehensive or reliable figures for child soldiers around the world. The only reference to outside figures I have found on scores of websites is from Human Rights Watch, who estimate that there are “hundreds of thousands” of child soldiers between the ages of 8 and 17 years old.[1]They are however ubiquitous in some of the most chaotic parts of the world, and they are in certain areas a major impediment to the peace process. They were perhaps at their worst in Sierra Leone in 2000, when a spate of pointless and random killings and kidnappings peaked with the taking of nearly 500 U.N. peacekeepers as hostages. I have written about that elsewhere in Peacehawks.[2]

Dallaire poses straight from the outset a quite arresting view of the child soldier: as a weapon system. The child soldier, he says, has several systemic advantages: he, or often she, is plentiful, inexpensive, easily disciplined, expendable and easily replaced. The child soldier is thus the obvious weapon of choice of those for whom violence and outrageous cruelty are their own ends.

The problems of child soldiers – the wanton cruelty of their recruiters and their “leaders”, the damage they do and which is done to them, the lengthy and fraught rehabilitation required for them – all this is clearly and succinctly set forth. To illustrate some of his points, Dallaire skillfully and movingly fictionalizes some encounters and episodes. So realistically and effectively is this done that I assume he was synthesizing actual cases, and he alludes to this; such a section was “fictional, but all too real.”

Dallaire also states early and clearly in his book his dual aims: while he is deeply engaged in the rehabilitation of child soldiers, he quite sensibly insists that the real strategic aim must be to prevent the “system” from coming into being at all. “If it is possible to use the child as a weapon system …, it should be possible to decommission or neutralize that weapon system: to eradicate the use of child soldiers.” That is setting his own bar quite high, and it needs to be said at the outset that this book doesn’t quite clear it. I will come back to that.

Dallaire spends some pages analyzing one of the keys to the attractiveness of child soldiers: the proliferation of light weapons, cheap, simple and robust, just like good toys should be. Most children could never have carried, let alone used the service rifle of most of my career. It is estimated that there are around the world today about 650 million of these smaller small arms, readily and inexpensively (AK 47s as low as $6) available to anyone with the means to buy them. Nearly all were produced in the developed nations, especially the Permanent Members of the Security Council (U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China – the P5) and Germany, who the Carnegie Institute estimated (in 1997) to be the source of over 90% of the world’s conventional weapons production[3]. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute updates and confirms: from 2000-2010, the top six suppliers were the usual suspects: the P5 and Germany.[4] Thus, the Carnegie Institute, with figures from 1990-96, and SIPRI with figures from 2000-10, together establish a continuum over 20 years. Dallaire says these same six nations now produce about 1 million small arms each year, and he calls small arms, rightly, “weapons of mass destruction.”

An attempt in 2006 in the General Assembly to introduce a treaty to ban all small arms, deliberately styled on the land mine ban and treaty, was quickly stalled: there were 24 abstentions, including Russia, China, Pakistan and India, and a “no” from the United States.[5] Thus measures to limit or even to discuss what must affect a major industry of each of the P5 states, may seem to have little chance to prevail and, if so, this is unlikely to change.

There is a reason for this.

Sometime late last century, there was a great slight-of-hand manouevre at the United Nations: the discussion was re-framed to focus on illicit arms transactions, which it was alleged amounted to about U$7 billion per year[6]; by contrast, the Carnegie Institute estimated the total small arms transfers in 1996 at more than three times that figure, over U$21 billion per year, and SIPRI’s figures for 2010 are about the same. By thus finessing the issue, the Security Council has been able to line up solidly behind illicit transfers – the Security Council members are advocating an international crackdown on their competitors. Catch–22, anyone?

But even this is only one half of the issue – the supply side of small arms. I return again to the question of demand – who uses these weapons to arm children? Who is they? We need a typology of the “leadership” of children soldiers: who are they, what do they have in common, especially what weaknesses do they share and how are they commonly vulnerable. Especially as the supply side may be protected by a geo-political situation which they are able to dominate, there is all the more reason to focus on the demand for small arms for children – and, of course, for others.

Dallaire notes once again the familiar problem of the disconnect between the time frames of treating chronic and systemic problems, and the attention span of governments and the media and, of course, donors. Especially in the post-conflict stage, when rehabilitation is both possible and urgent, “money follows interest, and interest is largely driven by media attention, which is more easily captured by the drama of conflict than by peace.” With good reason the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre called its course on DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, Rehabilitation) “The Long Road Home.”

So far, the book has been a skillful and eminently readable survey of a problem as awful as any plaguing the international community – as chronic, as cruel, as neglected and as seemingly intractable, but with the additional burden on fragile mechanisms of treatment, that it is visited on children by adults. But, as Dallaire himself admits, a particularly effecting passage on the horrors of the child soldiers is “in equal parts awful and self-evident” (page 179), by this point a view I was very reluctantly coming to hold of the book in general – we were in the introduction promised more, a “so what” section, a “way ahead”.

And here this excellent book just sort of dried up, and we cut to anodyne solutions to well established problems: communications (terrible, especially civil-military, but I wrote a whole book about that five years ago and, as Dallaire’s more recent experience attests, thereby changed absolutely nothing); political will (see R2P); the use of force (inevitable say some, others hold all forms of force as reprehensible and a sign of failure); “neutrality” (considered indispensable by some, as a chimera and a blind alley by others; among the latter the writers of the Brahimi Report[7]). In many of the many meetings Dallaire attended and chaired, it seemed that language was a key issue (the military unwilling to yield on the need for strong central authority in managing a multi-agency response to a complex humanitarian emergency, the NGOs resisting any use of the language of any form of senior management). The military terms “command and control” have admittedly become largely anachronistic; their replacements: coordination, cohesion, integration, cooperation are consensual rather than authoritarian, and may be too soft for a situation which is anything but. It also seemed to me that Dallaire was not always meeting with actors at the right, and his own, level.

Dallaire eventually comes to R2P – the Responsibility to Protect. I have written nearly all I have to say on that subject elsewhere on this blog[8]. Suffice it for me here to say that, the Arab Spring and the British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 notwithstanding, international intervention, especially the non-consensual use of armed force, in the affairs of member states, no matter how miserably failed those “states” might be, is far from becoming a norm.

So I would like to offer Senator Dallaire two possible methods for the untying of some of the knots he seems to now face.

I have inferred from Dallaire’s language that he is often not meeting at the appropriate collegial level – one of his discussions concerned the use of the term “war game”, which was eventually re-titled “simulation exercise”. Very well, but my first suggestion is that he might need to look up several levels from this sort of chat rooming to identify his real negotiating partners. These would be the senior managers, military and civilian, who might more fundamentally and to more lasting effect lead the way to real solutions to the communications problems, which I have elsewhere suggested are really cultural problems. His descriptions of his meetings, which he sensibly abbreviates for us (“I am not going to recount here every step of the journey we’ve been on … Six years of meetings, conferences, round tables, war games, draft working documents, reviews of those drafts, and re-drafting.”), are anguishing. I think I spent most of the 90’s in meetings like this, then I spent the first five years of this century writing my book, and I can hardly bear to hear of similar crossed transactions still regularly occurring.

It seems to me that his military contacts should be with very senior defense department officials from troop contributing nations, in and out of uniform, either policy makers or very close to those who are. His civilian interlocutors ought to be from the senior ranks of the UN Secretariat, representatives of regional and sub-regional organizations, such as the AU and ECOWAS, as well as from the specialized agencies of the UN, from the EU and from major international organizations such as the Red Cross (ICRC). They would represent the strategic (diplomatic and political) level, and would have broad access across a considerable range of power structures, nationally and internationally.

And just what is it Dallaire would want these senior policy bods to do? It’s a continuation by other means of the question I asked earlier: how do we “neutralize that system”? Who recruits, arms, trains, employs, abuses the children? What can be done about them? If it is the purveyors of the weapons, then the object might be to reverse the re-framing of the question from the narrow focus on illicit transactions, to embrace consideration of all small arms and conventional weapons transfers, and let the vetoes fall where – and from whom - they may. If it is the “host governments” who are to be targeted, this raises a whole other spectrum of targets, and possible actions to stop – whatever they are doing in respect of child soldiers. Of course, it’s probably all of the above.

My second suggestion concerns the need to isolate the conflict area. Whether it is the neighbours, a far-offshore great power, or a local (often illicit: diamonds, oil) source of support, the opponents of peace do not stand alone, and must be isolated. For example, Linda Melvern has described how, in 1993, Rwanda began to import “agricultural tools”, largely from China; this eventually provided a new machete for every third adult male in Rwanda. One of the poorest of African countries, from 1990-93 Rwanda was the third largest importer of weapons on the continent – the source of the finances for this seems to have been unsupervised international funding, as the economy of Rwanda had since 1990 been in the hands of the IMF and the WB.[9] So the poor just kept on getting poorer, until they were murdered by weapons purchased by their government with their money.

The external support for the governments of Sudan and of Zimbabwe has been well documented and the facts of this issue are not in dispute.

As the Brahimi Report has said:

would-be spoilers have the greatest incentive to defect from peace accords when they have an independent source of income that pays soldiers, buys guns, enriches faction leaders and may even have been the motive for war. … To counter … conflict-supporting neighbours, a peace operation will require the active political, logistical and/or military support of one or more great powers, or of major regional powers. The tougher the operation, the more important such backing becomes.[10]

CONCLUSIONS

This is an excellent book. As we might have expected from this author, it is on an urgent topic, it is clearly and compellingly written, and as we have long argued, there is just nothing wrong with an important book being a good read.

Dallaire takes a unique and arresting viewpoint when he posits the child soldier as a weapon system, and he gets our undivided attention when he details for us just how attractive that system can be. He sets himself a very high goal when he announces that he aims in this book to show us how “it should be possible to decommission or neutralize that weapon system: to eradicate the use of child soldiers.” He might well admit, without a trace of shame, that we are just not there yet. Perhaps this book takes us several steps closer, and Senator Dallaire at any rate clearly deserves our unreserved admiration for his efforts.

There remain however some strategic issues which are not going to be easily or quickly resolved.

The civilian and military actors must grow into their 21^st Century roles. They have bickered and indulged themselves in their narcissism of small differences for quite long enough. Inter-agency cooperation must be initiated at a level that can compel compliance, and that will usually mean at the level which holds the purse strings. This is probably not going to solve a lot of the major problems, but better coordination of the moving parts of an effort or a mission is important nevertheless.

The small arms epidemic is now about where the anti-landmine issue was over a decade ago, but small arms production (and, of course, sales) is a major undertaking of all permanent members of the Security Council, and they have been so for at least two decades. Those who aid, and those who tolerate, such senseless cruelty as is described in this book should be named, even if they cannot be shamed, and that goes specifically for those who hide behind such semantic quibbles as whether a transaction was illicit or “legitimate”.

Conflict areas, and especially peace spoilers, must be isolated, but this also involves members of the P5, who will not be easy to discipline. Here is where the demand and the supply sides of the equation meet, and here might be the focus of efforts: identify both halves, and prevent them from coming together. As we say here at Peacehawks: “Whatever it takes!”

Read this book, and think for yourself, as we know you always do: “What can be done? How can it be done? And where am I in this?”

Some suggestions for further reading are at:

www.childsoldiersinitiative.com

www.unicef.org/protection

www.childreninarmedconflict.org

http://www.unicef-irc.org

[1] See http://www.hrw.org/news/2008/12/03/facts-about-child-soldiers

[2] See Not by Doves but by Hawks: Peace gets a Chance in Sierra Leone, by Jamie Arbuckle, http://peacehawks.blogspot.com/2010/03/not-by-doves-but-by-hawks-peace-gets.html, 25 March 2010.

[3] Preventing Deadly Conflict: The Final Report, The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the Carnegie Commission of New York, New York, 2007, page 18.

[4] The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “TIV Arms Exports From the Top 10 Largest Exporters”, 12 September, 2011, file:///Users/jamesarbuckle/Documents/Peacehawks/Child%20Soldiers/SIPRI%20Top%2010%20for%2010%20years.webarchive

[5] The Africa Europe Faith and Justice Network Journal, “Small Arms – the World’s Favourite Weapon of Mass Destruction”, by Hugh McCullum, 2006.

[6] http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N11/289/72/PDF/N1128972.pdf, Security Council S2011 255, 5 April 2011

[7] http://www.un.org/peace/reports/peace_operations: Popularly known and referred to as the Brahimi Report: “50. Impartiality for such operations must therefore mean adherence to the principles of the Charter and to the objectives of a mandate that is rooted in those Charter principles. Such impartiality is not the same as neutrality or equal treatment of all parties in all cases for all time, which can amount to a policy of appeasement.”

[8] See http://peacehawks.blogspot.com/2010/01/r2p-vs-state-sovereignty-last-refuge-of.html: “R2P vs State Sovereignty: The Last Refuge of Scoundrels”, by Jamie Arbuckle (presentation to Canadian Studies Centre Symposium, the University of Innsbruck,12 November 2009)

[9] Melvern, Linda, Conspiracy to Murder, the Rwandan Genocide, Verso, London and New York, 2004, pp. 56-7

[10] Brahimi, op.cit. Italics added.

WITH LAWRENCE IN VALHALLA

2011-04-10T09:57:00.000-07:00

A book review essay for Peacehawks by Jamie Arbuckle

… the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with eyes wide open, to make it so. This I did.

T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, by Michael Korda (Harper Collins, New York, 2010. Ilus, 762 pp. $35.00)

Other books discussed in this essay:

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by Lawrence of Arabia (Hazel Watson and Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks, 1926. Illus, 700 pp [Penguin Vers.])

Lawrence and the Arabs, by Robert Graves (Jonathan Cape, London, 1927. Illus, 454 pp)

Lawrence of Arabia, by Basil H. Liddell Hart (Da Capo Press, New York, 1937, Illus, 406 pp)

Introduction

Did we really need another bio of Lawrence? Well, the most recent of the several, Hero, by Michael Korda is, I think, the best of the bunch, and for me it has been worth the wait.

There has for nearly 100 years been heated controversy about Lawrence: was his contribution as significant as his supporters maintain, or was it merely a “side-show of a side-show”? Was he a genuine leader of the Arab-Revolt, or its betrayer – for betrayed the Arab Revolt surely was. Was he a genuine hero, or merely an early public relations trick? I think it is sufficient here to recognize these enduring controversies – it is not the purpose of a review essay such as this to resolve them. That does not mean I will not take a stand, as will soon become apparent. As Liddell Hart said¸

… I have found two sharply contrasted currents of opinion as to Lawrence’s achievement, character and qualities of leadership. One is overwhelmingly favourable, the other disparagingly skeptical. Such a difference in view is to be expected about any outstanding figure: the remarkable feature of this case lies in the contrast of the composition of the two groups. For it is significant that the first includes all those who for long periods were in close contact with Lawrence and his work in the Arab campaign … The second current of opinion … is composed of men who had only a fleeting contact with Lawrence or, more often, a hearsay acquaintance with his activities.[1]

That first group, Liddell Hart might have added, included such as David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Field Marshall Allenby, Marshall of the Royal Air Force Trenchard, Gertrude Bell and, of course, Robert Graves and Liddell Hart himself.

Lawrence was considered the most famous man in the world in his lifetime (1888-1935), and the puffery of Lowell Thomas’ media circus did not quite obscure the real events and the genuine achievements of the Arab Revolt. Thanks to the steady procession of books about Lawrence[2], his fame has pretty much endured. His reputation was updated, boosted and popularized by David Lean’s movie (starring Peter O'Toole) in 1962, which was based on Seven Pillars, and was one of the best movies of the last century. As incredible as his story is, it was pretty clearly understood by the many in his own time, and has been fairly accurately conveyed for succeeding generations: his reputation as a hero has been shaken now and again, but has on the whole remained intact.

In this essay, I will discuss inter alia four general points:

Was Lawrence genuinely heroic, in character and in deed?
What was the Arab Revolt, and how was it handled at the political/diplomatic/strategic level? Was it of real importance, or was it, as some have charged, a mere sideshow?
Was his contribution to the First World War of value tactically and strategically, or was his record mere hyped propaganda?
Is there a legacy of Lawrence which is worth revisiting and preserving?

Some General Notes on Sources

While a pro hominem argument is no more necessarily valid than is an ad hominem, the nature of the controversies surrounding Lawrence may be to some extent clarified, one way or another, by knowing a little more about those who wrote about him, both then and now.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by Lawrence himself, was published privately in about 100 copies in 1927, but not available to the public until after his death. To set the records straight, and to rescue himself from the debts run up in the publication of Seven Pillars, an expurgated version was prepared later that same year for general release as Revolt in the Desert. There has been much debunking of Seven Pillars/Revolt in the Desert. As Graves has said, “the historical accuracy of Lawrence’s account has been jealously questioned by some … reviewers of Revolt in the Desert: he has been accused of self-interested exaggeration. However as there were forty or fifty British officers, besides Arabs, as witnesses of his activities and as no one of them has challenged the accuracy of his statements, this criticism hardly calls for answer.”[3] Korda further observes that

… in writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom Lawrence had, like many authors of a memoir, expressed his own version of events … Much of the factual material in the book has since been confirmed by the release in the 1970s of many if not most of the documents, but throughout the book Lawrence, consciously or not, attributed to himself actions that were often initiated by others. No doubt, as he wrote, revised and rewrote … , getting with each revision farther away in time from the events, he made himself increasingly the hero of the book. He did not falsify events or invent them, as he has been accused of doing, but he put himself at the center of the story …[4]

Sir Basil Liddell Hart had been an infantry officer who fought throughout the First World War, including the Battles of Ypres and the Somme. Invalided out of the British Army in 1924, he became one of the pre-eminent military historians and theorists of the 20^th Century. One of Liddell Hart’s most influential books was entitled The Strategy of the Indirect Approach (1929); it is said to have been a frequent read of Field Marshall Guderian, and to have persuaded him that he should and could go around the Maginot Line. Liddell Hart was knighted in 1966.

Robert Graves also had been a line infantry officer, and also survived four years in the trenches in WWI. His memoir, Goodbye to All That (Cape, 1929) is a classic and may well be regarded as a founder of the genre. Graves went on to become one of the most celebrated poets in the English language: in his very long life he produced over 140 works of poetry, plus the perennially popular trilogy I, Claudius. He died at the age of 90 in 1985.

Both of these authors were contemporaries of Lawrence who knew him well, both were decorated veterans of the Western Front, and both went on to distinguished careers. It is not likely in the least that either would have been at all willing to distort or to magnify in any form the person or the exploits of Lawrence.

Michael Korda is the son of Vincent Korda, the youngest of the three Korda brothers; the eldest, Alexander, owned the movie rights to Revolt in the Desert, and intended to make of it a movie. Zoltan, the middle brother, was to have done the desert sequences of the movie; Vincent was to have been the art director. However, Alexander was persuaded by Lawrence to abandon the project, as Lawrence feared that the publicity would be injurious to his search for a quiet life as an Aircraftsman (Private) in the Royal Air Force. Alexander, who called Lawrence “the nicest man I ever failed to do business with”, agreed to abandon the project; more, by retaining the rights, he ensured than no one else would make the film, at least in Lawrence’s lifetime. One might say therefore that Michael Korda had “the life and legend” in his blood, and his literary skill and his devotion to his subject are clearly apparent on every page.[5]

Michael Korda was the first of Lawrence’s biographers to have had access to documents held under classification for 70 years after the end of the War, giving him a so-far unique access to corroboratory information. These de-classifications have tended to confirm Lawrence’s own accounts – plus of course those of Liddell Hart and Graves - in nearly all important details.

The Heroism of Lawrence

Lawrence’s attitude towards heroism and heroes was as ambivalent as others’ attitudes about him were to become. On objective grounds, we might leave this issue as being too subjective to be worthy of serious evaluation. But heroism does matter, as heroes are those who can move men and nations to actions which seem so difficult as to be considered impossible, but which are clearly do-or-die challenges, and which neither politicians nor bureaucrats can inspire nor manage. The almost total absence of heroes from our recent history has left us with some entirely predictable stalemates and almost as many outright failures – “who dares, wins” runs the motto of the British Special Air Services, and “dare”, in this context, means far more than simply to undertake risk.

Graves tells us that “Hero worship seems not only to annoy Lawrence but, because of a genuine belief in his own fraudulence as its object, to make him feel physically unclean …[6] He does not believe that heroes exist or have ever existed; he suspects them all of being frauds.”[7]

However, writing three-quarters of a century later, Michael Korda judges that

His whole life had been, in a sense, a training programme for heroism on a grand scale; the war had merely provided an opportunity for Lawrence to fulfill his destiny. His intense will and his determination to have things his own way were always remarkable. He had methodically pushed himself beyond his physical limits, as a child and as a youth long before the war. He had carefully honed his strength and his courage, … punished himself for every temptation toward what other men would have regarded as normal impulses. Since boyhood his life had been a triumph of repression, a deliberate, calculated assault on his own senses. He would always remain, however reluctantly, a combination of hero and genius …[8]

Lawrence, who dreamt by day, will not be easy to understand, and impossible to catalogue.

Much has been written about heroism and heroics, and most of it not very helpful. In modern English usage, the term often has a derogatory connotation, and no one really likes “heroics” in a comrade or a colleague. “Heroics” is actually a term often used of Lawrence – by his detractors.

There are at least two other interpretations of the term.

The first I will call “Socratic”: As Bettany Hughes, in her book The Hemlock Cup, describes it, “In the Platonic dialogue Protagoras,10, Socrates offers good advice: we need to know what it is that we are scared of; courage is knowledge of what is and what is not truly to be feared.”[9] This type of courage Lawrence repeatedly displayed; he was often able to motivate the Arabs, as well as British colleagues, by placing apprehended dangers in a context which allowed them to be sensibly discounted.

The second form of heroism I will call “exemplary”: this is the ability to conceal or to conquer fear of genuine peril, and so inspire and lead others to do what must, despite hazard, be done. This is not a devil-may-care attitude – only a fool will completely ignore real danger, and men will not willingly nor for long follow a fool, certainly not the free-ranging tribesmen of the Arab Revolt. Indeed, one view of courage is that it only genuinely exists where fear is present and is overcome. As Edward Whymper, leader of the first successful climb of the Matterhorn in 1865, put it,

… remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence … Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.[10]

Graves tell us that Lawrence was wounded no less than nine times – in one action he was grazed five times and suffered a broken large toe, yet ran several hundred yards uphill when the action was complete. In no case of his wounding did he ever leave the battlefield, and probably never even saw a Doctor.[11]

An important aspect of courage is its vulnerability to fatigue: soldiers who are not highly resistant to fatigue will find their courage draining away as does their physical energy. In my book, Military Forces in 21^st Century Peace Operations: No Job for a Soldier, I quoted the U.S. Army analyst and historian Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, who said

Will power, determination, mental poise, and muscle control all march hand-in-hand with the general health and well being of the man. Fatigue will beat men down as quickly as any other condition, for fatigue brings fear with it.[12]

Clearly, Lawrence would have agreed with Marshall on the importance of physical and mental preparation for his adventures, and his biographers and contemporaries are unanimous in remarking on the rigour with which he prepared himself for the heroism he so actively and frankly sought – and abundantly and frequently displayed.

The Arab Revolt: Betrayal in the Desert

Lawrence felt for the rest of his life that he had been irreparably morally tainted by his role in leading the Arab Revolt. As Korda described it, he had lead “Arabs into battle for lands that the Allied powers had already decided they were not going to get.”[13] The stages of the Allies’ betrayal of the Arabs were several.

With the outbreak of WWI, the “sick man of Europe” was brought to his deathbed. Turkey came into the war on the side of the Axis powers, but Turkey was herself struggling to emerge intact from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had been failing since the middle of the previous century. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 had been just one of many attempts to dispose of the European and Mediterranean portions, but nothing had been done about the Ottoman disjecta membra in what was variously called Mesopotamia, Palestine or Arabia, and none of these critical areas had any formal delineation.

In respect of the Arab Revolt, the Allies had two strategic aims: to knock Turkey out of the War, and to provide some structure for the post-War Middle East. Those were the only and the last things any of the “allies” agreed upon: the British and French aims were very different, the British were divided between the Foreign and the Colonial Offices, the Jews, especially in Britain, were still unofficial but important – and would have been moreso had they not themselves been divided.

The one aim on which all agreed, an Arab Revolt to distract if not exactly to defeat the Turks, began with a statement by Lord Kitchener to the effect that Britain now promised “the Arabs” a state of their own to be carved out of the Ottoman collapse. As usual, neither the people nor the region were identified. Not mentioned at the time, and only discovered by Lawrence after he arrived in Cairo shortly after the outbreak of the war, was the planned intrusion of the Indian (colonial) government and army into “Mesopotamia” (also not defined). Up to that time, Lawrence still believed that British policy would result in the creation of an autonomous Arab government in an area which would include Syria.

In 1915, Sir Henry McMahon issued a declaration on behalf of the British cabinet, essentially reiterating the Kitchener letter of the previous year, and even repeating all its significant omissions: no geographic definition, no “whom” in sight. However, the fact that McMahon was the High Commissioner of Egypt, formerly a part of the Ottoman Empire and now in the process of being converted by him into a British “protectorate,” and was a former Indian Army officer, naturally caused some unease. In a neat riposte, the Arabs nevertheless “accepted” that offer, and expressed their interpretation of the offer as that of a state of their own which reached from Syria to the Indian Ocean, and from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. The British were horrified by this – they had not meant anything of the sort, nor could they possibly have. McMahon temporized, replying that the delineation of a new state must await victory in the War.[14]

In 1916, as the Arab Revolt began to get underway, matters began to get really complicated, because parts of the area so loosely under discussion were of interest to the (colonial) Government of India, who were against independence in general – of course - and foresaw a colonial future for Mesopotamia, under their control - of course. More worrying was the French interest, as they considered themselves the protectors of the Maronite Christians of Beirut, and had colonial aspirations of their own in Syria. Palestine had up to this point not been mentioned at all, but Zionism was a growing force, and would have been more so were the Jews not themselves deeply divided on the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

So there were now four strains of dispute centred on the future of Arabia/Mesopotamia/ Palestine: the British government’s desire for an ally against the Turks in the Middle East; the French desire for Middle Eastern additions to her Empire; the desire of the Government of India (which was a colonial mechanism) to add to itself in Mesopotamia; and finally the Jews, who although they were not well or cohesively organized at this time, were becoming a force to be reckoned with.

This then, was the background to the next and easily the most troublesome utterance of a British government, ever: the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This carved up the Middle East between the French and the British: the British got what is now Iraq; the French got as colonial possessions Lebanon, most of Syria, and parts of southern Turkey; part of modern Syria and part of Iraq would be an “Arab State” under French control; another Arab state would be formed of part of Iraq and Jordan under British control; Palestine would be jointly “administered” by Britain and France. So the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East was carved up into small states with senseless borders carelessly (or cunningly, as Korda suggests), drawn, utterly unequal division of resources (principally oil and water) and, so far as the British co-administrators were concerned, opening Palestine to Jewish immigration (the British considered that Jewish immigration into Palestine would be as good for the Arabs already there as for the Jews). Of course, nothing of this was to become known to the Arabs.

British policy on Jewish immigration to Palestine was formally promulgated by the British a year later (1917) in the Balfour Declaration. The significance of this is that it was the first of these policies/ agreements to have been made public; although Sykes-Picot was at the time one of the most widely held secrets in the world, it had not been officially publicized, and while the Arabs may have been made uneasy by the tang of betrayal on the air, they could not be sure and they at any rate could not, having once risen against the Turks, abandon their revolt – they must, like all revolutionaries, see the thing through to the end, whatever that might be.

But Lawrence was the one person in constant contact with the Arab Revolt who knew intimately and at first hand all the steps and measures of the betrayal of the people he was leading into battle for the very lands and offices which it had already been decided to deny them. In Hero there are reproduced two maps drawn by Lawrence in brilliant colour relief and detail, one showing the partition of Syria and Iraq in accordance with Sykes-Picot, and one showing Lawrence’s own plans for the Arabs, and for which they thought they were fighting.[15]

One effect of this largely secret diplomacy was that, at the end of the War, both the Jews and the Arabs believed they had been promised a homeland in Palestine, and they could both prove their case: one party referred to McMahon, and one to Balfour - and both believe that to this day.

It’s enough to make anyone ill, and we are not over its ill-effects yet today. But did all this matter, or was the Arab Revolt merely “a side-show of a side-show”?

The side-show taunt originates with a notorious debunking “biography” of Lawrence by Richard Aldington, entitled Lawrence of Arabia: a Biographical Enquiry (Collins, 1955). Aldington had, like Liddell Hart and Graves, served all through some of the most severe fighting in WWI, having risen from the ranks to become an infantry officer. He was unrelentingly, bitterly disparaging of Lawrence and of the entire Middle Eastern campaign – Korda calls his book “a sustained 488-page rant.” Aldington was contemptuous of what Lawrence himself, in one of his self-disparaging moods, had called a “side-show of a side-show.” Aldington said to a friend, “These potty little skirmishes and sabotage raids which (Liddell) Hart and Lawrence call battles are somewhat belly-aching to one who did the Somme, Vimy, Loos, etc.”[16] We have seen that this did not seem to be the case either to Liddell Hart nor to Graves, who also had done “all that.” But the criticism has sometimes stuck, and it is worth considering.

The definitive answer to this charge seems to be in a letter to a London weekly newspaper, quoted by Graves. The writer, who remained anonymous, was known to Graves “as an expert in these matters”; he had been an intelligence officer in the “Palestine Campaign”, and he wrote:

The revolt of 1916 isolated (a division) of six battalions, destroyed two thirds of (another division) of nine battalions and brought another division from Syria to Mecca. In the autumn of 1917 twenty four battalions (were) strung out on the line from Deraa to Medina. Had the Arabs sat still two thirds of this force would have been available for the Gaza-Beersheba front. In 1918 the British threat to Trans-jordania only became possible because of the growing strength of the revolt and the increasing sympathy of the local Arab population …by September 1918 reinforcements from Rumania and the Caucasian front … had been used up east of

Jordan

instead of on the Palestinian front. … an Arab army of 4000 fighting men was worth an Army Corps to the British Army on the Palestinian front, not only on account of the Turks, whom it kept busy in the wrong place, but because of the strain it put on Turkish transport and supply[17].

Lawrence’s Contribution to the Art and Science of Warfare

When Lawrence came to the Middle East the Armies, there as on the Western Front, were still in thrall to Clausewitz. As Liddell Hart described them, they “were fettered, above all, by a narrow doctrine of strategy. The soldiers of Europe had come to accept rigidly the theory of Clausewitz that all efforts and all forces should be concentrated on the main theatre and the main enemy. … it was a theory without elasticity and without regard to the practical question whether such ‘concentration at the decisive spot’ was likely to produce an effective result at the actual time.” This is probably the principal source of the general criticism of Lawrence, and of the Arab Revolt, that it was a sideshow. However, over 150 years before, Marshall Saxe had described this mind-lock as “no better than ‘maxims blindly adopted, without any examination of the principles on which they were founded … our present practice is nothing more than a passive compliance with received customs to the grounds of which we are absolute strangers.’”[18].

Having witnessed several bloody and inconclusive skirmishes by Arab tribesmen, among themselves and with the Turks (in 1916 and 1917 the Arabs had failed three times to take Medina), Lawrence turned back to Saxe, who had also said that “I am not in favour of giving battle, especially at the outset of a war. I am even convinced that an able general can wage war his whole life without being compelled to do so.” Saxe took great care that such heresy was not published in his life time: Foch, the Supremo in the West, ridiculed Saxe for this, but Lawrence saw more deeply into the challenges facing the Arabs, especially in respect of a major strategic goal of the British and the French in the Middle East, which was the taking of Medina. The Arab failures there had only confirmed that camel-mounted and dismounted tribesmen could not withstand the fire of modern artillery and machine guns.

In March 1917, with the Revolt scarcely a year old, Lawrence fell ill on the march, probably suffering from dysentery, malaria and possibly post-traumatic stress (while ill, he had had to execute an Arab tribesman to avert a blood feud brewing in his own ranks; the experience nearly undid him). Forced to remain in his tent for 10 days, Lawrence reviewed his campaigns to date, and asked himself rhetorically, “Why bother about Medina? … What would be the good of capturing it? , which was clearly impossible with present means … Indeed – here was a further thought – would it not be harmful to do so?”[19] Lawrence concluded: “We must not take Medina. The Turk was harmless there. … We wanted him to stay on at Medina, and in every other distant place, in the largest numbers. Our ideal was to keep his railway just working, but only just, with the maximum of loss and discomfort.” Nevertheless, Lawrence’s council did not prevail, and “plans were made and the preparations advanced.” [20]

Lawrence nevertheless continued to revise and refine his thinking: he would turn weakness into strength, he would employ hit-and-run tactics with minimum forces, he would not hold ground, “using the smallest force in the quickest time, at the furthest place.” He would avoid, rather than seek, “decisive battle.” He would “bleed the Turks to death by pinpricks, while forcing them to waste their troops trying to defend 800 miles of railway line,” the only purpose of which was to resupply those very Turkish formations committed to its defense[21]. As he later said of his tactics, “To make war on rebellion is like eating soup with a knife’: he intended to keep the Turks at this exercise for as long as possible.[22] The inheritors of his minimalist tactics, which came to be called guerrilla warfare, included among others the Long Range Desert Group in Libya and Orde Wingate’s Chindits in WWII, as well as Mao-Tse Tung and the Vietcong. Those who in our time have ignored this history they are now condemned to relive include the coalition forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Later on, when armoured cars were made available to him, Lawrence was similarly imaginative in their employment, as they allowed him to speed up the operation of reduced forces in greater safety; as Liddell Hart said, “Lawrence was at least a generation ahead of the military world in perceiving the strategic implications of mechanized warfare”. [23] Graves says that Lawrence fought at least 50 actions with armoured cars, and he used engineering techniques, especially enemy mobility denial operations, heavy machine guns and aircraft – all then very new – from the outset in very effectively coordinated and thoroughly modern operations.[24] He also used vessels of the Royal Navy for strategic transport and logistics, something the then newly-created Joint Staffs struggled with throughout the next war, and don’t always do too well today.

Conclusions

By almost any definition I know, Lawrence was truly a hero. He had terrific endurance, which is an important aspect of courage – tired men are easily discouraged, and may be easily frightened. He had the Socratic courage to recognize the dangers which were probably more imagined than real, but he had too much sense to ignore genuine danger. He had the exemplary form of courage as well: the men who followed him were convinced that he did not unthinkingly expose them to danger, but that where danger was real he was the first to expose himself and the last to seek safety.

Lawrence was a significant innovator of the military art. His form of warfare has since been much emulated, and has had many names: guerrilla warfare, economy of force operations, commando and special operations. His form of warfare has fathered many modern organizations devoted to his style of making war: the Long Range Desert Group in Libya, Orde Wingate's Chindits in Burma, Commandos (told by Churchill to "set Europe ablaze"), Special Forces - it seems everybody has them, but there cannot be a force that would not wish itself as successful as Lawrence. His conduct of what is now called, still somewhat shakily, joint operations, was pure innovation – the means available to him were entirely new to him – to everyone, in fact - and he can have had no training in the use of machine guns, armoured cars, aircraft (the first use of aircraft in British military maneuvers had been just two years before) and counter-mobility operations – it was all original invention for him, by him. And there cannot breathe an army officer who would not envy him the Royal Navyl support he was able to inspire and direct. Few have done better at these sort of operations in the intervening nine decades since the Revolt in the Desert, and many of "the willing" are doing it significantly less well today, and in nearly the same places. His appreciation of the advantages of Saxe and the limitations of Clausewitz are by no means common among professional officers today.

The Arab Revolt was a success for the Allies, but the Arabs did not gain their political nor strategic goals. This was principally because the strategic aims were either unclear or were obscured, or both. The Arabs did not get what they fought for, and it was deliberately concealed from them that they were never meant to. We live today with the results of that deceit, and must share Lawrence’s shame at his part in the deception. But that does not mean that we must or can belittle the effects of the campaign – the benefits of the Turkish alliance with Germany were entirely nullified by the Arab Revolt, and the British victory in Palestine was indebted in ways entirely clear to those who fought there, to the 4000 fighters of the Arab Revolt.

As Graves says, “Not only (George) Bernard Shaw believed that if Britain had a Valhalla, Lawrence belonged in it.”[25]

Were I to lead a Staff College today, I now know where I would lead it: right back to those same desert battlefields of Lawrence and the Arab Revolt – except those areas are today still too busy with armies still struggling to learn the Lessons of Lawrence.

[1] Liddell Hart, p vi.

[2] A by-no-means exhaustive list: Graves 1927; Liddell-Hart 1934; Aldington 1955; Knightly and Simpson 1976. Lean’s movie was released in 1962. A biography of Ibn Saud by Howarth appeared in 1980.

[3] Graves, pp 410-11.

[4] Korda, p 593.. One reason for Lawrence placing himself increasingly at the centre of things may have been the punitive libel laws of

Great Britain

, which placed great pressure on an author to use extreme care in accrediting actions to anyone who might consider themselves thereby traduced or in any way wronged. It must also be remembered that the first complete draft of Seven Pillars was lost, along with all Lawrence’s notes and photographs; it was rewritten by Lawrence from memory and without notes in just over 30 days, a manuscript of over 400,000 words.

[5] In fact, the only sour note in Korda is when he says, very late in his book (p 689), that “Lawrence’s other early biographers – his friends Robert Graves, the poet and novelist ; and B.H. Liddell Hart, the military historian and theorist – … had written panegyrics to Lawrence without any serious effort at independent research or objectivity.” This is as graceless as it is pointless, especially as both those “early biographers” entirely support, and agree with, nearly every important point of what Korda, over 80 years later, himself says of Lawrence. Indeed, of 684 endnotes to Korda, 18 are attributions to Graves; 37 to Liddell Hart – panegyrics?

[6] Graves, p 11.

[7] Graves, p 48.

[8] Korda, Hero, p 571.

[9] Hughes, Bettany, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life, Jonathon Cape, London, 2010. 475 pp, illus, Eur 30.99.

[10] Whymper, Edward, Scrambles Amongst the Alps, Thomas Nelson, Vth Ed, 1900, p 398. On the descent from the successful climb on 14 July 1865, four of Whymper’s party of seven fell to their deaths.

[11] Graves, p 415.

[12] Arbuckle, James V., Routledge, London, 2009., p 75.

[13] Korda, p 83.

[14] Korda, p 266.

[15] Facing p 269.

[16] Korda, 688.

[17] Graves p.411-12. Italics added.

[18] Liddlell Hart, pp 30 and 124..

[19] Liddell Hart, pp131-32

[20] Lawrence, p 232-33. Italics added.

[21] This might well have been – but was not - Allied Strategy in

Italy

in WW II: the optimum effectiveness of that campaign was undoubtedly achieved when the Allied landings were consolidated, and the maximum number of Italians and Germans were committed to their ouster. The taking of Rome (which fell to the Allies the day before the D-Day landings in Normandy) and the surrender of the Italians should have freed the Germans of a major headache, but Hitler insisted in rushing more Germans into the baited trap. The Allies for their part were then faced with the much more formidable Wehrmacht, who were with each incredibly costly Allied “success” driven closer back onto their home defences and closer to the much more dangerous Allied assaults in the west. Foch would have approved of the Allied strategy in Italy in 1943-44; Lawrence and Saxe would have deplored it. Rommel, incidentally, agreed with Lawrence and Saxe, and advised Hitler against moving significant reinforcements into Italy – like Lawrence in 1916, Rommel’s advice was ignored. In other words, both the Allies and the Axis did what was worst for each; committing troops urgently needed in France to a cause, taking/holding Italy, which was of little count to the outcome of the war.

[22] Korda, p 366.

[23] Korda, p 309

[24] Graves, p 415-18

[25] Graves, p 623.

REVIEW OF “RESTREPO”: WHEN A PICTURE IS NOT WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

2011-02-02T12:27:00.000-08:00

Restrepo, 2010, a film by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.

Reviewed for Peacehawks by Jamie Arbuckle

It is a characteristic of our very advanced communications media that the medium is often not the message, and sometimes contains almost no message at all. This film is one such non-message.

The intention of the film seems to be to accompany the book, War, by Sebastian Junger. Junger is a skilled writer with a strong sense of contemporary history and is well known for his narrative skills, both of which are amply displayed in his book. War presents the operations of Battle Company, 2^nd Parachute Infantry Battalion of the 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan from May 2007 to July 2008. (The other companies in the Battalion are called “Chosen” and “Destined” – the irony, as in so much of the terminology used here, is certainly unintentional.) In particular, the movie tells inter alia the story of the Second Platoon of Battle Company in combat outpost Restrepo, which was named for a very popular medic, Juan Restrepo, and which was established shortly after he was killed in action in Afghanistan.

The film is of necessity not particularly deep, indeed there is almost no analysis at all. That is perhaps as it should be; the events should speak for themselves. Unfortunately, while being extremely realistic in the presentation of infantry combat, the only thing that really comes across fully here is the proverbial fog of war. This is perhaps the real, even if unintended message: nobody knows WHAT they are doing, much less WHY they are in Afghanistan. Very well, soldiers throughout history have usually been somewhere between confused and completely ignorant, and often quite wrong about, their mission. That especially is not surprising in respect of Afghanistan, which is rather loosely supposed to be a major component of something called the Global War on Terror, which almost no one understands either. This in turn is manifest of the habitual atmosphere of high-level charlatanism of the Bush era, as the United States endured the worst government in North America since George II (of Hannover, not Texas). Where there is deliberate distortion of facts at the strategic level, it is unlikely that there will be clarity at the tactical level of operations. It is no casual thing that "Selection and Maintenance of the Aim" is considered by nearly every army in the world to be the pre-eminent principle of war.

Early in the film, the Company Commander tells us that, prior to deployment, he read nothing, no books, no reports, of the area or of the conflict: “I wanted to come here with an open mind.” What he in fact brings to Afghanistan is an empty mind, which is not the same thing. Later, as Junger relates in the book, the Battalion Commander tells the assembled elders of the Yaka Chine (see below) that all his officers “are trained and educated enough that they could teach at a university. I challenge you elders to put them to work; put them to work building your country, fixing your valley.” As it develops, the elders’ judgment of those officers is quite different.

The denouement of this film comes with a pointless and botched operation called Rock Avalanche, an attempt to clear the Taliban from the Yaka Chine Valley. The title of the op is unintentionally revealing: Rock for the soldiers, and with about so much sense of what they are doing or why they are doing it; Avalanche for the people trapped under it, and with about so much sense of why this should be happening to them. In the end, it seems that the American casualties might just about have equaled those of the Afghan civilians – no one seems to know how many Taliban casualties there were. Of course, casualties to soldiers and fighters on the one hand, and to women and children on the other, are far from an equality. As Junger makes clear in the book (but NOT in the movie), almost the only certain result of Rock Avalanche was that the elders of the Yaka Chine unanimously declared jihad against every American in the Valley.

Long after the event, the company commander emerges briefly from professional lockjaw to muse on this paradox, but he comes to no conclusions - and how could he, a still-serving officer of the United States Army? His mind, apparently, is still open.

The Hescos - huge wall-shaped wire baskets filled with earth and rocks (see http://www.hesco.com/enter.html) - are perhaps also unintentionally symbolic of futility. In places over two metres high, and usually without the firing ports or steps of WWI trenches, and without overhead cover, they are predicated on an enemy with neither an air force (not yet) nor indirect fire weapons (they have mortars), The soldiers when under fire can only crouch behind them, and must expose themselves in order to return fire. On leaving Korengal, the soldiers gleefully and appropriately tip them over to fall into the valley below. Just before that, one of the soldiers writes his name in ball point pen on the wall of a Hesco. A fitting memorial?

The Korengal Valley was abandoned by the U.S. Army in the spring of 2010, having claimed almost 50 American lives - and we know not how many Afghans.

For those who have read the book, this film will add nothing. For those who have not read the book, the film will only confuse – which is perhaps the only authentic message to be presented here.

A much better presentation of essentially the same issues has been done by the New York Times, relating the experiences of a company of the 10^th Mountain Division in

Afghanistan

(see:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/battalion.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1#/1-87).

Do-able Peace: A Handbook

2010-09-28T01:19:00.000-07:00

The Mediator’s Handbook for Durable Peace, by Evan A. Hoffmann, the Canadian International Institute of Applied Negotiations, Ottawa, 2010.

Reviewed for Peacehawks by Jamie Arbuckle

At only 52 pages, this slim volume will scarcely displace the baton from anyone’s rucksack, but no one proceeding on a mission should leave home without it.

Evan Hoffman is the Executive Director of the Canadian International Institute of Applied Negotiations, a leader in their field of training on and researching into the techniques of mediation and negotiation, especially but not solely for peacekeepers of all brands and stripes. They have also been active in the non-violent management of conflicts and in promoting peace around the world. It detracts not at all from Evan’s own considerable accomplishments to say that he stands on the shoulders of a giant, which for us is a very good description of his father, Ben, whose work we have reviewed elsewhere in this blog.

Evan states his thesis early and clearly: “the balance of power between the parties at the time of mediation does not need to be equal, but a balanced agreement is necessary.” And there you have in a nutshell the major challenge of any mediation process: power is usually unevenly held, which is one of the more common causes of violent conflict. This asymmetry of power, usually accompanied by unequal access to resources, makes it difficult for the lesser to come to the table, while making it (seemingly) unnecessary for the greater to come at all. Only the prospect of a balanced agreement will attract the lesser to the table, and if the process does not iron out the differences, not least of power sharing, any semblance of peace will be an illusion quickly dispelled. It is the aim of Evan’s book to provide a model for durable peace.

Evan is not naïve about the long-term threats to a durable peace, even where the parties will have negotiated effectively and in good faith. Chief among these threats to the peace will be the spoilers: those who do not want peace at all, on any terms. These will be the warlords and the criminals who benefit from violent conflict in ways which have recently and sadly become all too familiar – their capacity to wreck peace and perpetuate violence has been demonstrated repeatedly in instances we need not enumerate here. Aside from saying that these need to be effectively managed, however, we aren’t given much practical advice on just how hard-core spoilers are to be handled. But the overt recognition of the spoilers is important, and is a subject frequently overlooked by the UN, who have often put themselves in the position of trying to implement an unworkable and unsustainable “peace.” Evan’s advice on this is succinct: “Do not implement bad agreements.”

While we admire direct speech, and this is certainly in the spirit of Brahimi, whose report we also greatly admire (1), here we’re not so sure. The Vance Plan of 1992 was certainly seriously flawed, but it did end the fighting between Serbia and Croatia, and it stayed pretty well ended. Dayton (1995) similarly had serious weaknesses, but did end the fighting in Bosnia Hercegovina, and it too has stayed largely quiet since. We remember saying to ourselves in about 1993, something to the effect that if Bosnia could enjoy anything like the Cyprus “peace”, also regarded as seriously flawed but a kind of a peace nevertheless, Bosnia and all Europe would rejoice - and so it has come to pass. Trying to implement Dayton has brought Croatia to the gates of the European Union; trying to spoil it has led the Bosnian Serbs into one blind alley after another. Perhaps any agreement which might stop the killing is worth a try. As Evan says (on page 36), “low levels of violence in the post-agreement phase are not inconsistent with the creation of durable peace, provided that this violence does not escalate into a full resumption of the war.” (italics added) Perhaps we can estimate that the post-agreement violence in the Balkans is of the former type, while post-agreement violence in the Middle East nearly always does signal a resumption of some sort of warfare. The distinction is important, but it is a very fine call, and it may take years and much patience before judgment can be passed. And it is just this sort of patience which neither governments nor media ever seem to have, which is just one reason why we so often get this wrong, as we are, perhaps, about to do in Afghanistan.

One section of the book leads in our opinion into some highly questionable practices for mediators. This is where it is stated (on page 24) that “If it is judged that there is a power imbalance between the parties, then the mediator should take steps to balance the power in order to improve the prospects that a balanced agreement will be reached.” The tactics to achieve this include, inter alia, “urging the less powerful side to take more territory”, and “supporting military interventions which favor the weaker party”. We think immediately of the Middle East, and wonder how long any mediator who tried that would be given to pack. But then we think of Bosnia Hercegovina in 1995, where just this was done:

The imbalance of power among the three communities (Croatia, Serbian and Muslim) was a major stumbling block on the way to Dayton in 1994-5. Franjo Tudjman, the President of Croatia and, like Milosevic for the Bosnian Serbs, the patron of Bosnia Croatians (the Muslims were pretty much entirely on their own), was beginning to flex the muscles of the new army which had been trained for him by an American private military training firm, Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI). The Krajina Serbs, in their Croatian enclaves, had seriously misjudged the balance of power and/or the support they could expect from Belgrade, and were acting as prespoilers, and something had to be done. If the ball were to continue to move towards Dayton, the playing field would have to be leveled, and would have to be seen to be so. Pressed for a go-ahead for military action by the Croatians to clear the Krajina, the last (except for Eastern Slavonia) sizable concentrations of Serbs in Croatia, Holbrooke (in his own words) “told Tudjman that the offensive had great value to the negotiations. It would be much easier to retain at the table what had been won on the battlefields … I urged Tudjman to take Sanksi Most, Prijedor, and Bosanski Nova (all in Northwest Bosnia Hercegovina). If they were captured before we opened negotiations on territory, they would remain under Federation (Croatia and Bosnia Hercegovina) control.”(2) And so in 1995, Croatia unleashed Operations Flash in Western Slavonia in April, and Storm, in the North and South Krajine in August, and at least 170,000 Croatians, ethnic Serbs, were driven from land their forefathers had occupied for almost as long as Europeans had been in North America. Incidentally, four UN peacekeepers were killed and 16 were wounded. (3)

In this case, the “mediator”, Holbrooke, had done just as Evan recommends: he took steps to balance the distribution of power, he urged the less powerful side to take more territory, and he supported military initiatives which favoured the weaker party.

Is this mediation? It is a little hard to imagine that mediation process having continued if this prompting by the “mediator” were known in Belgrade, but it is nearly as hard to imagine that it wasn’t. So somebody wasn’t negotiating in good faith, if indeed anyone was, and the two negotiating partners and the “mediator” all had rather crudely hidden agendas – but this is hardly what this book is about, nor has this sort of table talk anything to do with sound mediation practice. This practice of the mediator leveling the playing field is in our opinion not mediation at all, it is power brokering, and is a typical American practice, which seldom results in a durable peace; in the Middle East and in South Asia it has so far resulted in no peace at all. “Levelling the killing fields”, Sir Douglas Hurd (then British Foreign Secretary) called it. If this book is ever re-issued, this section needs to be re-thought.

And there is something else that might be revisited: later in the book (page 40), Evan reveals the thinking which led him to this highly interventionist role for the mediator: “Because balancing the power between the parties can threaten the mediator’s perceived neutrality, … mediators may need to sacrifice their neutrality.” And here we do definitely disagree. The mediator is in our view like an umpire: less concerned with outcomes than devoted to the rules of a process. While the mediator and the negotiators may have had equal or nearly equal roles in the design of the process and the attendant rules, the content of an agreement is almost entirely the responsibility of the negotiating “partners”. On the other hand, the integrity of the process is the responsibility of the mediator. And, by the way, it is seldom that the long-term implementation of an agreement is the responsibility of the mediator, but is usually that of some other external agency, such as a peacekeeping or enforcement mission.

Evan Hoffmann has produced a model of brevity, while dealing with some bewilderingly complex issues and situations. Some of this needs to be re-thought; we await a second, revised edition. We only wish we had had some such training, or at least a book like this one, when we were, for better or worse, doing this sort of thing for a living.

Endnotes

1. “The Secretariat must tell the Security Council what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear … Security Council mandates, in turn, should reflect the clarity that peacekeeping operations require … “ Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, http://www.un.org/peace/reports/peace_operations, (retrieved 12 September 2010)

2. Holbrooke, Richard, To End a War,The Modern Library, New York, 1998, page160. Speaking of this, Ivo Daalder (who uses the same chapter title as did Holbrooke in describing these events: “The Western Offensive”), quotes Robert Frasure as saying, “We thought we needed a fundamental reshuffling of the deck.” See Daalder, Ivo, Getting to Dayton: The Making of America’s Bosnia Policy, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, 2000. Page 121-2.

3. See Arbuckle, James V., The Level Killing Fields of Yugoslavia; An Observer Returns, Pearson Press, Cornwallis, N.S., 1998, pages 1-3.

INTERAGENCY COMMUNICATIONS AND CO-OPERATION IN COMPLEX EMERGENCIES:THE ROLE AND INFLUENCE OF CULTURES

2010-06-06T08:48:00.000-07:00

- by Jamie Arbuckle, presented to the Workshops on Diversity and Global Understanding, Vienna 2 June 2010

Introduction

A thoroughly modern complex humanitarian emergency typically is a multi-agency operation, involving a vasty array of organizations: international, regional, local; governmental, non-governmental; civilian and military. All have a contribution to make, and some will be vital, but none of them can work alone. Meshing their capabilities to avoid duplications and omissions, is a major challenge for what, begging your pardon and for lack of any better term, I will call the international community. Collectively, they pose a staggering range of diversity, and they present the most complex operating environment I have ever encountered. It is therefore on this, the humanitarian emergency, on which I will now focus. The challenges arising from the organizational and cultural diversity of international and local actors in this type of peace operation are poorly understood, but the problems are so well-known as to have become like Dr Johnson said of the weather: more productive of conversation than of knowledge.

Thomas Weiss has described one well-known example of this complexity in the following words:

Last week (1994), I was talking to a couple of colleagues just back from Kigali. I learned that there are at least 150 international NGOS in Kigali tripping over one another, vying for turf, looking for resources. I have described this effort as like trying to herd cats. (1)

Actually, Weiss’ information was not quite accurate: others subsequently estimated at least twice that number of NGOs in Kigali in 1994 – but no one was quite sure. Five years later, in Kosovo, which is a box about 100 kilometres on a side, some estimated there were about 500 NGOs in the province – but no one was quite sure. And this was in a mission area more or less dominated by the UN, leading the “four pillars” (if you can lead a pillar) of the United Nations Secretariat, the UN High Commission for Refugees, the OSCE, the EU and, as an adjunct, the NATO-led KFOR. The landscape was crowded – especially on that moral high ground - and the architecture was ad hoc and complex.

While the UNMIK operation in Kosovo did eventually sort itself into a climate of reasonable cooperation among the various agencies and with the emerging local government, it will be no surprise that this is more usually a recipe for organizational nightmares.

In this paper, I will describe the problems of interagency communication and cooperation as I have experienced them, and as they have been related to me. Following this description of the problem I will present a short analysis of the origins of the problems, and I will provide a very brief prescription for alleviating these symptoms of disarray. Description, analysis, prescription, then: shut up, and leave time for me to hear from you.

I am constantly reminded that this is as much a learning experience for me as it is for you, and just before lunch I met one of your number who will in the course of this summer do exactly what I am recommending everyone of you should do – I'll tell you more about him as I get to the end of this presentation.

Description

I will begin this description of the problem with a vignette. What I describe here actually happened, and was reported to me in almost exactly this form by a woman who was drafting a portion of an East Timor mission report to the Secretary General of the UN, and was furious that this incident had been excised from the final report (not the first nor the last time that drafting of such reports was distinguished more by what was left out than by what was put in). So you’ll have to take my word for what happened there; here is what was left out of that report:

The UN CIMIC (Civil-Military Cooperation) Team had to intervene a couple of times to explain to INTERFET (Intervention Force in East Timor ) the fundamental principle that military resources should complement, not replace civilian resources. In one particular incident, a national military contingent performed an excellent job in cleaning up and restoring a hospital. However, before the riots that hospital had been run by MSF (Medicins sans Frontiers), and the MSF team were now ready to return, but were barred by their charter from working alongside armed military personnel. MSF therefore requested the UN CIMIC Team politely to persuade the military to relinquish the hospital and start working at a nearby military hospital instead. Fortunately, the military contingent agreed and the matter was resolved amicably. (2)

It was reported that, notwithstanding the above, “The humanitarian agencies fully shared the opinion of the Force Commander that the primary need was for combat forces, so that security and humanitarian access could be restored without delay”. It would seem, however, that in this case the military had gone a bit too far – they were actually providing aid - but “the matter was resolved amicably”. The report does not record how the MSF expressed their gratitude to the military who first saved and then restored “their” hospital. This case does raise the interesting possibility, however, that some are making distinctions their “beneficiaries” would not: the locals likely do not care, may not even know, of these differences among the foreign community – it may be, it probably is, of very small matter to them who helps them, still less who gets the credit. I will return to that issue.

At about that time, in the autumn of 1999, I was in Kosovo as a member of the Secretariat of the OSCE in Vienna, to check up on how we had been doing with our job of training folks for the OMiK mission. One morning, I met on the streets of Pristina a Canadian friend, who was in Kosovo as the regional chief of a major NGO. I had just come from a very impressive “information day” at the newly established joint UN-KFOR Civil Military Operations Coordination Centre. There had been several very interesting presentations concerning security, mines, communications, weather, whom-to-call-for-whatever, and the states of several complimentary aspects of the operations largely just beginning. I told my friend he should take advantage of this. His answer didn’t surprise me – he rejected vehemently any suggestion that he should have anything to do with, or that he might in any way benefit from, association with such a “military organization”. Knowing something of the recent history of his and other NGOs in Kosovo, however, I found the attitude revealed here a little hard to understand.

Nearly all of those agencies, principally the OSCE (the Kosovo Verification Mission) and an accompanying flock of NGOs, had entered Kosovo in late 1998 after the Rambouillet Accords (which had been incorporated into UNSCR 1199). The “Accords” quickly collapsed – they were never accepted by Serbia – and as the violence in Kosovo escalated, in the spring of 1999 the OSCE and all of the NGOs withdrew from Kosovo, and NATO launched an air campaign in Kosovo and Serbia which lasted from 24 March to 10 June. Those who had left Kosovo came back in the late summer and early autumn of the year, because the arrival in Kosovo of the NATO-led peace enforcement mission created and guaranteed the security environment which was essential for their reentry, and for their continuing presence in the province.(3) And it was they who had established the CMOCC in which this NGO would not set foot.

Nevertheless we hear, so often, that a humanitarian mission has been militarized, as though it had been thereby hopelessly corrupted – one NGO has complained of humanitarians tarred “with the security brush.” (4) If you had been injured in Haiti in January of this year, and your life was in danger, it is likely that the first medical treatment you received might have been from Medical Corpsmen of the U.S. Navy – would you mind, terribly, if this were to happen? Would you really object to surgery on board a vessel of the U.S. Navy? Apparently, some might so complain – on your behalf, of course.

It seems that the surest way to create divisions among the international agencies, who are supposed to be cooperating , and who must cooperate, is to have similar organizations pursuing similar goals – we lose no time in running Occam’s Razor down nearly invisible lines, separating from each other elements which are more alike than they are different. This happens most often in the civil-military interface; one example of this is de-mining: is it humanitarian or operational? (5) And why, for heavens’ sakes, should this be a conflict? We have already noted this conflict in, of all places, the medical efforts. Is the similarity of roles itself a threat, making competition a perceived imperative, like the territorial behaviour of humans (as well as other animals)? Is it, on the other hand, a basic dissimilarity in goals, which, despite the similarity in means, are the fundamental conflict? Do we need conflict with other agencies to maintain the cohesion of our group? Perhaps our most serious differences will indeed arise when we do the same or nearly the same things for different reasons. This has been described by Sigmund Freud as “the narcissism of small differences”, and is in fact the source of much of the conflicts and misunderstandings which bedevil inter-agency relations.

It is therefore imperative that co-operation among agencies and organizations be initiated at the highest levels – mandated specifically from the outset, and thereafter maintained as a central goal of management at all levels. Bottom-up co-operation is fragile and episodic, depending almost entirely on personalities and having little corporate longevity. “Grass roots” learning is seldom transportable to a new or another mission, even where the new mission may be – it usually is - staffed with experienced persons. It is common that co-operation in a new mission, despite the collective experience levels of the members of the various organizations and agencies, is very slow to develop: as Sir Michael Rose observed, it took two years (1992-94) before the NGO community learned to trust and to work with the military in Bosnia Herzegovina. However, despite hard-won local achievements, co-operation, especially between the military and the NGOs, reverted to near zero with the arrival (in 1996) of the NATO-led IFOR in Bosnia. Those start-up periods are simply not available to be wasted re-learning lessons so expensively, often so tragically, already learnt elsewhere – but gone missing in transit. The record so far in this regard, is one of lessons not learnt. (6)

I don’t want to present this as a military-civilian conflict, although there is plenty of that around. I also don’t want to target NGOs as models of non-cooperation – but there’s enough of that to go around, as well. (For more on this, read my book, No Job for a Soldier?) The problem is both more general and more widespread than that: the interrelationships among the specialized agencies of the UN – UNHCR, UNDP, UNESCO, WHO - are no less fractious than the relationship of the military and the NGOs, or of the Breton Woods institutions (the IMF, the WB). The interrelationships among the various agencies who make up “the international community” are marked by poor communications, plus competition for access, resources and recognition, and all these are exacerbated by stereotyped perceptions and misperceptions of each others’ roles, capacities and intentions. This makes for a routinely stressful and often inefficient operating environment, where competition for resources and recognition can be extremely wasteful of time and efforts which would be better spent on the management of conflict, and/or the relief of distress. Although things seem now to have smoothed out in Haiti, a story in the South African Mail and Guardian of January 18th of this year, “Squabbling hinders aid effort in Haiti”, sounds awfully familiar. Inter-agency conflicts are not going away. The era of modern peace operations dates from the end of the Cold War, almost two decades ago, and it is high time that we find some new ways to deal with this now-chronic dysfunction.

Analysis

When we prepare for a mission, one of the most important aspects of our preparation is to ready ourselves for what may be a challenging cultural environment, and we will be aware that this encounter may be absolutely critical to our operation. We will inform ourselves as best we can of historical, religious, economic, dietary and gender issues. We may have to learn how to sit, what not to eat or serve, whether or not alcohol has a place. If we are in a former colony, we will need to be aware of their view of their history. Gender issues can be major problems for a mission. We need to know the history of the conflict thoroughly, and have an appreciation of all sides of some extremely complex and divisive events. If there is time, we will try to acquire some facility with the language (in Namibia, until English was adopted, there were about 18). Cross-cultural training may be far and away the most important aspect of our mission preparations.

When it comes to the other agencies we will encounter and with whom we must work, we spare them not one single thought – unless to hope they might not show up, and that is if we even know who they might be.

If we treated our “hosts” in this cavalier fashion, we wouldn’t last a month.

Why, I have repeatedly asked myself, do we not consider organizations as cultures, and apply to them the skills in cross-cultural appreciation on which we otherwise so pride ourselves? Why did members of UNFICYP who would take Greek dancing or cooking lessons, never open the UN Charter? For that matter, how many peace operators have even read the Charter of the UN or of the AU or of NATO or the Decalogue of the OSCE or the Treaty of Rome, or done any research into the cultural and historical background of the Red Cross or of MSF? I won’t ask, and you don’t need to tell, but we all know the answers to those questions, don't we?

Organizations are or they become cultures. Charles Handy has written that

organizations are as different as the the nations of the world. They have differing cultures – sets of values and norms and beliefs – reflected in different structures and systems. … Strong pervasive cultures turn organizations into cohesive tribes with distinctive clannish feelings. The values and traditions of the tribe are reinforced by its private language, its catch-phrases and its tales of past heroes and dramas. The way of life is enshrined in rituals so that rule books and manuals are almost unnecessary; custom and tradition provide the answers. (7)

An approach to more mature and empathetic relationships among the various agencies - civilian, military, international, regional, national and non-governmental organizations – will develop naturally when the diverse agencies are understood as cultures: having histories and doctrines, comprising social mechanisms and consisting, above all, of people.

It has been said that “culture comprises a set of ideas, beliefs and symbols that provide a definition of the world for a group or organization and guides for action”. (8) We may also differentiate between informal and formal culture as, for example, the corporate culture which consists of policies and doctrine, and the informal which consists of legends, history and shared beliefs. We saw the force of this informal culture in the US military’s reaction to gays and women in their service, and we see it today in Austria in widespread opposition to anti-smoking regulations. In fact, I suggest that it is the informal culture which is the most enduring, and, subjectively, the most revealing of the organization as a culture.

Culture, then, is like a rule-book, and the rules may be written or unwritten, but they will powerfully influence the lives and the conduct of individuals, of groups – and of organizations. Our friend Willi Scholl, one of the most experienced UN officers I know and a former CAO of the Haiti mission, has said that culture is “the software of the mind.”

The influence of this software may be overt and acknowledged, or it may be subliminal to the point that it is barely if at all acknowledged – but it is always there.

Prescription

The strategic requirement is for the application of the principles and methods of cross-cultural training and education, to the challenges of inter-agency cooperation.

Training generally imparts skills and knowledge, and trainers will usually be comfortable with programmes for motor (skills) and verbal (knowledge) responses. They are often extremely uneasy with attitudinal responses, which are indeed more properly the subject of education. Nevertheless, trainers and educators alike are very uncomfortable with any attempt to influence what learners may think, and educators will only gingerly approach how they may think.

One important result of this is that attitudinal responses are seldom if ever directly the subject either of training or of education. Attitudes are of course influenced by training and education, but that is almost never the intention. Yet it is precisely in attitudes that culture resides, and it is attitudes which determine whether culture will be a barrier or a window, an obstacle or an opportunity. This is the challenge of education - and almost no one is doing anything about it.

Most cross-cultural training never refers to organizational problems, and I have seldom heard a trainer refer to an organization as a culture. (9) Cross-cultural trainers usually describe a general problem in general terms: religion, language, customs, history; it is then up to individuals to decide what they make of that, and how they might apply that very general description of a potential problem to their own specific situation, experience and expectations. Moreover, cross-cultural training is almost always aimed to prepare a mission member for encountering the host nation culture; such training is almost never aimed at preparing one to encounter the culture of the other organisations in the mission area, but that is where the most critical and problematic relationships will be built – or will not.

Our relationship to our culture, and our encounters with other cultures, are largely a function of attitudes. The best preparation for coping with this diversity, and making it work for us instead of against us, will be education. A particularly important aspect of this education will be information about the organizational cultures we may encounter: the diverse histories, doctrines and structures of other organizations we will encounter, and with whom we should work. The aim will be to replace ignorance with knowledge, and thereby replace antipathy with empathy. These organizational cultures then should be at the centre of cross-cultural training – but this is almost never the case.

NGOs will protest that they have neither the time nor the money for training and, as currently provided in their culture, that is frequently indeed the case. NGO workers are usually contracted for specific missions and periods; outside those mission assignments they are often unemployed. But money the NGOs do have: one UN official told me that he considered the NGO community to be collectively one of the largest unregulated financial institutions in the world. In 2000, the ICRC estimated that the NGOs spent/distributed more money than the World Bank, and the EU stated that 2/3 of its international aid was distributed by partner NGOs. Money they have; but none – and no time – for training. This – among other things - must change.

The requirement, then, is for members of the various agencies to train together as they expect to work together. The mutual learning experience inherent in such training and education will go far to achieve the desired attitudinal responses – it is nearly impossible for people who have successfully trained together not to work together successfully.

The gentleman I met here today, just before lunch, embodies in his own person and his plans exactly what I am advocating for all: an African journalist, he will this summer undergo two weeks of intensive civil- military operations training at the Austrian Army Peace Operations Training Centre just outside Vienna, and then he will look for a position in a peace operation. He is making himself into just the sort of partner you want to meet when you get off that plane to Elbonia, and I only wish I had met more like him in my own active peacekeeping experience.

Conclusions

Anachronistic stereotypes, prejudices, cultural conflicts, historical apocrypha – these are usually central to the conflicts the international community has intervened to treat, to resolve. Importing similar conflicts of our own is neither professional nor workable. If the various agencies are to function as well as they can, as well as they must, in humanitarian operations, their capabilities and their limitations must be clearly understood by their potential partners. I have suggested that this will be most effectively accomplished, and enduring and trusting relationships built, by organizational cross-cultural training and education. This is the best, if not the only way for us to move beyond the Freudian narcissism of minor differences, to a point where not minor differences but close similarities are the common perception, and these similarities are perceived as enabling cooperation, rather than compelling us to competition.

Creating and sustaining empathetic relationships among agencies, and replacing the ill-informed, adversarial relationships which have seemed up to now to dominate the scene, clearly must be a mutual affair. The people we say we have gone out to help are usually in urgent need of our help, and there is no time for the pettiness which has informed too many of our experiences, still less are their emergencies our learning opportunities – any longer.

I am advocating, in other words, that your response to the challenges of diversity, must be diversification: of your reactions, of your attitudes, of your expectations, of your understanding. In other words, to paraphrase Genesis, “Go forth and multiply”- yourselves.

We have now been at this for almost a generation, and it is time for us to act like it.

------------------------------
Endnotes

1. Weiss, Thomas G., "The United Nations in Civil Wars," in The New Peacekeeping Partnership, ed Alex Morrisson, The Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Centre, Cornwallis, N.S., 1995, page 78.

2. “CIMIC in East Timor: An Account of Civil-Military Co-operation, Co-ordination and Collaboration in the Early Phases of the East Timor Relief Operation”, drafted for a Report to the Secretary General, UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Geneva. Italics added.

3. Something like the reverse of this might be occurring now in Chad, where the imminent withdrawal of MINURCAT “could leave a security vacuum in the east, where aid workers face constant attacks by bandits …” Both Amnesty International and the UN USG for Humanitarian Affairs have expressed these concerns. See http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ghbVx14r-Z0F9Eye1a8JKBge, 5/27/2010. This may be a somewhat more authentic, even if unintended, portrayal of the relationship between security and humanitarian agencies in relief operations.

4. Orbinski, Dr. James, Nobel Lecture, Oslo, 10 December 1999, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1999/msf-lecture.html: “When one mixes the humanitarian with the need for public security, then one inevitably tars the humanitarian with the security brush.” “Tarred with the brush” is a racist epithet, most frequently associated with Imperial India, used to describe persons of mixed race. (The idiom first appeared in print in 1818, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Rob Roy: “They are a’ tarr’d wi’ the same stick — rank Jacobites and Papists.”) MSF has been squabbling with the UN force in Haiti for years ( see http://www.dwb.org/news/article.cfm?id=1561&cat=filed-news).

5. The UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA) complained (in 1997) that “operational” and “humanitarian” mine clearance operations were inherently in conflict, especially in Cambodia, Mozambique and Angola, and called for a comprehensive humanitarian mine action capability, “and not subverting this endeavour to help in the achievement of mission objectives.” See Arbuckle, James V., Military Forces in 21st Century Peace Operations: No Job for a Soldier?, Routledge, 1999, page 108 (and fn).

6. There are some possible exceptions to this apparent rule that “what we learn is that we do not learn”: it seems that UNTAES did learn from UNPROFOR (but it seems that OHR, the OSCE and IFOR et al in post-Dayton Bosnia did not); UNMIK appears to have learned from UNTAES. Just how and, more often why not, missions learn is an area requiring further research: why does individual knowledge, experience, learning, seem to have collectively so little and infrequent effect on the performance of subsequent similar missions? One possible, partial explanation is the lack of institutionalised professional education, indeed the lack of any concept or culture of collective professionalism, for international aid and care workers. This is an important component of the military culture – the officer factories, the staff colleges, the promotion examinations – manifest a culture of learning, even if, at least until recently, the military scholar would have been more directly concerned with studying war, than peace.

7. Handy, Charles, Understanding Organizations: How Understanding the Ways Organizations Actually Work Can Be Used to Manage Them Better, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, pp. 180-183.

8. “Military Culture and Strategic Peacekeeping”, by Christopher Dandeker and James Gow, in Peace Operations Between War and Peace, Ed. Erwin A. Schmidl, Frank Cass, London, 2000

9. My daughter, Stephanie, a busness consultant and project manager, in reviewing this said that, “I do hear the word cultures and organizations spoken of together. As in, ‘it’s just not a part of our culture’, to explain the use of inferior technology, or lack of process. Usually presented as irrevocable.” This use of “culture” describes the box, or the comfort zone, which no one there wants to leave. This is culture as a barrier rather than a window – if you can call this culture.

Light Candles or Curse the Darkness: East Timor Turns the Century

2010-04-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

“Militaries that are doing something bad sometimes go into their shell. It’s them against the world.”

- Admiral Dennis Blair, CinC U.S. Pacific Command, on the Indonesian Armed Forces, in 1999.

“ … cutting off contact with Indonesian officers only makes the problem worse”

- Paul Wolfowitz

“Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”

- Confucius

- a book report by Jamie Arbuckle for Peacehawks:

If You Leave us Here, We Will Die – How Genocide was Stopped in East Timor, by Geoffrey Robinson, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2010, 317 pages, $35

INTRODUCTION

This book tells of the terrible and the wonderful events in East Timor, centred on but not limited to the years 1999- 2000, and of the candles that were lit then. For us the messages in this book are three, and they bear directly on our central belief that peace must be maintained at least as robustly as it is violated. These three messages concern:

1. The uses of humanitarian intervention, and the military role in such interventions;

2. The issue of consent, especially that of the Security Council, of the major powers and of the “host” government, to an intervention;

3. The relationship of peace to justice – can there be one without the other?

Geoffrey Robinson is that most valuable combination of practitioner and academic, and his book is given dramatic thrust by the fact that he was an eye-witness to much of the action of that critical year, as he was at that time a political affairs officer with the UN mission in East Timor. Reading between his lines with your accustomed skill, you will infer as did we that he and his colleagues were brave to a degree way beyond his spare descriptions of the hazards they faced. He is in “real life” a professor of history at UCLA, and he was six years with the headquarters of Amnesty International in London. He is thus well able to zoom in for the detail, and then back seamlessly out to the wider time-frame and perspective. He is a superb writer, and this book is both an invaluable reference, and a cracking good read.

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

The UN had established an observer mission in East Timor, UNAMET, on 11 June 1999. This mission was entirely unarmed, which made them a subject of mockery to the local militias and the Indonesian soldiers. As security had been left in the hands of the Indonesian armed forces, the UN was soon unable to cope with the rising tide of violence which was orchestrated by the very people charged with preventing it, and the mission had to be evacuated on 13 September. By that time, 1,500 East Timorese had been brutally murdered, at least 400,000 had been forced from their homes, and over 70% of the country’s infrastructure had been utterly destroyed. Two days later, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1264, acting under the provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter, authorizing a multinational peace enforcement mission – the International Force for East Timor (Interfet). Led by Australia, with contingents from New Zealand, Malyasia, Thailand and the Phillipines, the Force began to deploy within one week and, in Robinson’s laconic words, immediately began “rounding up militias, and in some cases killing them.” By the end of the month, the violence had largely ended. Eventually 22 nations contributed to Interfet, which grew to over 11,000 strong. Five months later, on 28 February 2000, Interfet handed over to the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET).

These events of 1999 were in many respects a continuation of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in November 1975, as a result of which in the next four years nearly one-tenth of the East Timorese population (of about 1 million) died by violence. In addition, by 1979 nearly one half of the population had been forcibly relocated to “secure” camps, where they were being starved and worked to death. That 1975 invasion was itself a continuation of an “anti-communist” campaign unleashed by Suharto in 1965, in which nearly 1 million Indonesians and East Timorese died and over 500,000 were imprisoned. All this, in the 60s and in the 70s, was met with the ringing silence of the “international community.” Both these holocausts more than justified the use of the term genocide, but that was not to be the last genocide on which the world kept silent. Robinson leaves us in no doubt what the consequences of further international inaction in East Timor would have been.

Robinson delivers an excellent “both sides now” summary of the arguments for and against intervention, especially with a military component: some “take the view that military force is never an appropriate means to achieve humanitarian objectives”; others “claim that the use of military force may be the only meaningful way to ensure an effective humanitarian response and prevent a government from abusing people under its sovereign control.” (italics added) Adapting the definition of a complex humanitarian emergency as violent conflict resulting from natural or man-made disaster, Robinson notes that such events are seldom entirely natural; more often they are “bound up with questions of political and military power.” The argument then develops further along the lines of those who, on the one hand, would defend state sovereignty from dilution, as they contend it would be in the case of unwanted external intervention, versus those on the other hand “who see … the constraint on state sovereignty as a positive development.” Robinson tentatively concludes that “the opponents of intervention may be missing the point”: while the arguments for and the conduct of intervention may be misguided, it does not follow that all interventions “are morally wrong or examples of neoimperialism.” He concludes by asking if the genocide of the 1970s is “really preferable to the intervention of 1999?” In other words, where there is a question of power, whose power is preferred: that of the perpetrators, unchecked, or that of the international community, appropriately mandated and controlled?

There were two other popular perceptions acting as a brake on high-level backing for a military – i.e. a peace enforcement – mission: the first was the assumed time lapse before deployment might be completed; the second was the efficacy of external military forces in a humanitarian operation. As we have seen, both of these turned out to be misperceptions.

Robinson concludes: “… the evidence from East Timor serves as a reminder that one of the few demonstrably successful mechanisms for bringing an end to mass violence, including genocide, is direct military intervention by outside powers.”

But Robinson is realistic, and he stresses how delicate and rare might be the political conditions for launching such an intervention, so we will turn now to discussion of the consent issue.

THE CONSENT ISSUE

Ingrid Lehmann has written (Peacekeeping and Public Information – Caught in the Crossfire) that, “in the new, complex operations, consent implies popular support or acquiescence, even in non-democratic or transitional societies”. She adds that there are at least three areas in which consent – i.e. general support for a peacekeeping operation – should exist for it to be carried out successfully, and these are in the countries in which the UN force is deployed; in the troop contributing countries; and in the countries that pay the largest share of the bill for peacekeeping. Until the terrible events of September 1999, with East Timor threatened with another round of genocide, none of the above forms of consent had been available in any form in any organization or nation – not in 1965, and not in 1975.

Already in the case of the clearly apprehended genocide in 1974-75, several major nations had conspired to remain publicly silent, and passively (by their silence) or actively (by their continuing support) signaled to the Indonesian government that “its unlawful intervention would bear no serious political or economic cost.” Australia was explicit: speaking in Parliament in August 1975, the Prime Minister voiced his government’s understanding for “Indonesia’s concern that the territory (East Timor) should not be allowed to become a source of instability on Indonesia’s border.” This in fact provided Indonesia with the rationale they would adopt to justify their “intervention.” But the Americans then went further than that, as Robinson makes clear. In a meeting in Jakarta in December 1975, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger assured President Suharto that they “understood Indonesia’s ‘problem’ and ‘intentions’ in East Timor, and would not object if Indonesia found it necessary to take ‘drastic action’ there.” Kissinger discussed with Suharto how “we” might evade U.S. law which explicitly forbad arms sales to Indonesia; those sales quintupled in 1974-75. Finally, Ford and Kissinger discussed with Suharto how this might be “spun”, by refraining from action until Ford and Kissinger returned to Washington and could prevent “unauthorized” discussion of the issue. Indonesia launched its invasion and unleashed its genocide in East Timor 24 hours after that meeting.

In 1975 the Americans were also active in the UN to avoid any obstacles there to Indonesian action in East Timor. Daniel Moynahin, who was the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. then, wrote in 1976, “The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” (Moynahin had in the Sixties coined the phrase “benign neglect” for his then boss, Richard Nixon.) As we know, American suppression of UN discussion of another genocide would recur 20 years later, with similar odious results.

By 1999 the United States had still not entirely lived down their debacle in Somalia in 1993 (when a group of U.S. Rangers and Delta Force troops died in an attempt to capture Mohammed Farah Aidid); even blaming it on the United Nations didn’t really help. This experience, combined with memories of Vietnam, was described by Richard Holbrooke as the “Vietmalia Sydrome”. This we define as distorting the facts, drawing the wrong lessons and sticking to them no matter what. No one who has studied or been close to the American military around the turn of the century can have been in any doubt about their loathing for “peace support operations” (the term peacekeeping having been explicitly forbidden).

The Vietmalia Syndrome found official expression in the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine. Jointly authored by Secretary of Defence Weinberger and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Powell, this consisted of an ultra-conservative body of checks on the use of the U.S. military, which was formalized as Presidential Decision Directive (P.D.D.) 25 on 3 May 1994. Very briefly, P.D.D. 25 demanded that a military deployment advance U.S. interests, and be a response to a valid threat to international security. In the case of a peacekeeping operation, there should be a cease-fire and the consent of the parties in conflict; in the case of a peace enforcement operation, there must be a significant threat. Adequate means to support the operation must be available from the outset, the consequences of inaction must be clearly unacceptable and –the bottom line - there must be a realistic criteria for concluding the operation (the exit strategy). The problem with this neat formulation is that a complex humanitarian emergency is so complex just in that there are seldom any clear answers to most of the above points. One analyst called it “a checklist for doing nothing”, and that is just about how it worked in Rwanda in 1994, and in East Timor up to September 1999.

The United Nations, for their part, expressed their traditional horror of non-consensual peace operations – to them, especially in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), which was where that buck would stop, the consent of the “host nation” was the sine qua non of an operation, even one launched as peace enforcement. This was sound doctrine, and true in the majority of cases, but over the years it had become dogma, which is something else. As dogma, the consent issue had been cast in stone, and non-consensual operations were simply unthinkable to the theologians of Turtle Bay. DPKO called such an operation, that is, the deployment of peacekeepers without Indonesian consent, “impossible” and “unrealistic”. The more “cost effective approach”, New York patiently explained, was “to insist that the Indonesian authorities live up to their obligations for maintaining peace and security.” When their UN Secretariat rivals in the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) circulated a planning document in July 1999, DPKO insisted on the deletion from it of all references to peacekeepers. No such operation could be undertaken without Indonesian consent, they said, and at any rate a peacekeeping force could not be deployed in less than three to five months. That it was also largely beyond the competence of DPKO to mount and to control such an operation unfortunately needed no debate. The Americans, clutching their PDD 25 like a missal, said as late as August that “peacekeepers were not an option.” This, coming from a Permanent Member of the Security Council, was a clear sign of an intention to veto any UN action; this was almost always enough to prevent any discussion of the issue.

But, as we know, one month later a peace enforcement mission was deployed, having moved in and set up in about one week; one week after that, and the violence was mostly in check. What happened, and so quickly, to change so many so firmly buttoned down minds?

Firstly, there was a reaction to the Vietmalia Syndrome, and it might be called the “never again” movement – the collective conscience of the international community, and indeed of some of its most powerful members, remained profoundly disturbed by memories of Srebrenica and Rwanda, and there had been some pretty hard-nosed action over Kosovo that very summer. This latter action, despite the controversy over the lack of a UN mandate, had almost certainly prevented a genocide there and led to the establishment of a UN peace mission in Kosovo.

Secondly, the chiefest leader of the never-again faction was the charismatic Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, who fearlessly and tirelessly expressed his “strong belief that claims of national sovereignty must not be allowed to stand in the way of effective international action in defense of human rights.” Indonesia was urged to accept the “help” needed to bring the situation under control and to avert further tragedy.

Thirdly, journalists and NGOs around the world reported a ground swell of public revulsion against Indonesian actions in East Timor, and this fed and reinforced the more formal power structures and figures at the UN and in critical member states. The Secretary General referred specifically to this phenomenon, speaking on 10 September of “the thousands of messages I have received from all over the world in the past few days, that many people believe the United Nations is abandoning the people of East Timor in their hour of greatest need. Let me assure you emphatically that is not the case”. (The Australians for their part needed little persuading; they were so quick off the mark with their Interfet contingent in September because they had been preparing their troops since July.)

Fourth, President Clinton (the same one who had five years before issued PDD 25), undoubtedly influenced by the apparent success-in-progress in Kosovo, plus all of the above, made his turn-around on 12 September, stating that the US was prepared to support an international armed force in East Timor, announcing the suspension of all military relations with and supplies to Indonesia, and threatening to withhold US support for International Monetary Fund or World Bank assistance to Indonesia. He accused the Indonesians directly of aiding and abetting militia violence in East Timor. This was of course a major policy change by a major actor, which signaled clearly that the previously unthinkable was that no longer.

Fifth, the international community felt keenly the insult of assaults on a UN mission, and the betrayal of solemn undertakings of the Indonesian government to respect and support the United Nations.

But one of the most critical components of the turn-around was the simple courage of the East Timorese, who so impressed the UN personnel in East Timor that they refused an 8 September order from New York to evacuate the mission, which would have entailed leaving behind some 1,500 East Timorese who had taken refuge in the UN compound in Dili - "If you leave us here, we will die." But this was not the Hotel Rwanda, and the UNMET staff did not leave for Darwin until 13 September, with the 1500 . This was mutiny, and it paid off.

It might be said, then (but it was not said by Professor Robinson), that the East Timorese were saved by the Bosnians, the Rwandans and the East Timorese.

And so it developed that, like Slobodan Milosevic earlier that summer, President Habibie of Indonesia had overplayed a weak hand. On 12 September, the day of the Clinton turn-around speech, he urged his senior officers and his cabinet to accept international intervention, and on that same day he formally notified the Secretary General of his government’s decision to “invite” an international peacekeeping force to enter East Timor “to assist in restoring security.”

Ironically, the Interfet operation was undertaken with the consent of the “hosts”, but this only serves to illustrate our point, made elsewhere, that consent is not an absolute, nor can it be taken to arise only spontaneously and voluntarily. Consent may have to be created, it may be induced, it may even have to be coerced – and all of the above seem to have been applied to arrive at Indonesian government consent to external “assistance.”

THE JUSTICE OF THE PEACE

There is a view that peace must be more than the absence of war or fighting, and that peace must include justice. There is a contrary view that the search for justice holds open or re-opens old wounds, provides no incentive for the accused to accept peace as a solution and may indeed re-ignite conflict. This dichotomy was enacted dramatically in East Timor.

Robinson describes how the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR), mostly working through various Community Reconciliation Process (CRP) local hearings, much preferred restorative to retributive justice. The aim of this form of justice was to allow perpetrators to make amends for their crimes in order that they might be reintegrated into their communities, rather than to live as outcasts, and to allow the community to heal and to regain cohesion. This was said by those who participated in these processes to have indeed been important to and largely successful in healing, forgiving and moving on.

Not all felt this way, however: those who had suffered from the more serious crimes of kidnapping, mutilation and murder (of friends and family) were often not satisfied with the relatively mild punishments handed down by the CRPs. There was deep resentment that the CRPs had tried smaller, local fish, while the overall perpetrators of the campaign of violence, who were mostly Indonesians of high civil and military rank, walked free. The Commission of Truth and Friendship (CTF), ostensibly established to heal relations between East Timor and Indonesia, was derided as a whitewash, and was largely shunned by many local organizations and by the United Nations. Surprisingly, however, the CTF final report did not grant any amnesties. Nevertheless, there have been to date no prosecutions for crimes against humanity in East Timor, and the international community is most uneasy with the signal that may be sending to current and future perpetrators of outrages. Robinson makes compellingly the case for an international criminal tribunal “to try those responsible for the crimes committed in East Timor between 1974 and 1999.”

Restorative justice is a laudable approach, especially at the community level. There will remain, however, the need to enact a higher, stricter form of justice, in no small part to reinforce respect for laws and norms vital to peace and security – pour encourager les autres. Peace is more than the absence of war, it must include justice – and justice carries a sword.

CONCLUSIONS

The state of Indonesia had not failed in 1999, but the state of Indonesian governance in East Timor had failed utterly. The responsibility of the international community to protect the people of East Timor from the depredations of Indonesia went beyond knee-jerk defenses of sovereignty, or equally shallow indictments of intervention. Indonesian “sovereignty” over East Timor, as it has elsewhere so often been, was simply a blind behind which the East Timorese were cruelly exploited and would have eventually been destroyed – another genocide was clearly in the making in East Timor in 1999. A world so conscience-stricken over Bosnia and Rwanda nearly slipped up again. That we did not do so holds many lessons, and this book is just one of those candles that have been lit for us. By that light, Professor Robinson leads us to a more nuanced and better structured discussion of intervention, especially using military force, he shows us how complex and fragile the consent issue can be, and he brings us to think perhaps more carefully than we have about the relationship of justice to peace.

We should be deeply grateful to Geoffrey Robinson and his colleagues for representing what is best in us, and for matching up to the courage of the East Timorese. It is too painful to think how easily it might have been otherwise, and how very nearly we let it be so.

NOT BY DOVES, BUT BY HAWKS – PEACE GETS A CHANCE IN SIERRA LEONE

2010-03-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

As the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) comes to a close at the end of this year, it may serve as a model for successful peacekeeping, as well as a prototype for the UN’s new emphasis on peacebuilding.
- From UNAMSIL: A Success Story in Peacekeeping, from “End of Mission Press Kit”, December 2005, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/past/unamsil/Overview.pdf

A book review, by Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks:

Operation Barras: the SAS Rescue Mission, Sierra Leone 2000, by William Fowler, Cassell, London, 2004. 211 pp, $9.95 (pb)

Introduction

In the summer of 2000 things just couldn’t have been much worse for the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). Since February, 1998, nearly 650 persons – peacekeepers, relief workers, priests, nuns, diplomats, and normal people whose luck had run out – had been kidnapped, and 19 of them had been murdered. 575 of those taken were Blue Berets, the equivalent of a whole battalion. By late summer of 2000, about 600 persons had been released, including all of the UN peacekeepers. But about 50 were still captive and, when 11 British soldiers were seized on 25 August, things were getting pretty serious. Yet, less than two years later, the civil war had ended (and seems to have stayed that way), and in 2003 the Kimberly Process virtually ended traffic in the “blood diamonds”, which had been used to finance the rebels. In 2004 the disarmament of the rebel factions was completed and a war crimes tribunal was convened. At the end of 2005, just five years after that nadir of 2000, the peacekeeping mission was being phased out to a peacebuilding mission, and the close-out briefings in New York were presenting this as the poster child of a successful mission.

What happened to make such a difference so quickly to such a dismal situation? Well, a lot of things, but the main thing was that about 600 British soldiers happened, and they made most of that difference in a matter of a few short weeks. This book, Operation Barras: the SAS Rescue Mission: Sierra Leone 2000, by William Fowler, is about what and why and how they did all that. Fowler seems well equipped and prepared for this work: he has been writing on defense policy and technology issues since 1972, and his writings have appeared in international defense magazines. He is the author of a previous book on the Commando action at Dieppe in 1942. He has been a long-serving officer with the British Reserve Army, and served in the first Gulf War.

It must be said at the outset that we found it difficult to determe just what was the author’s central thesis – why was this book written? The author tells us only that “This book is about a post-Cold War African conflict.” We thought that Operation Palliser was about much more: we thought it was a striking example of how economical and decisive military action might be, and indeed should be – but commonly is not, and the contrasts between Operation Palliser and UNAMSIL needed more consideration than they have been given – in this book and generally. Throughout this review, then, we will be drawing lessons and conclusions which the author did not – which is just why we thought this review was necessary.

Background

This is a book review, not a history of Sierra Leone, but some sort of chronology might have been more helpful of our understanding, than Fowler’s “novelistic” cutting and chopping, backwards and forwards in time for dramatic effect – and confusion. Chronology might also have been a better way to introduce the players and their intended parts. (An index would also have been a big help, but we again find none in a book we are trying to review.) So we need to digress now, to set the principal events of this book into a context which is altogether lacking in the structure of the book.

Establishing context is not easy here: events such as coups and interventions and counter-revolutions recur with dizzying frequency and similarity. It is no wonder that the Duke of Wellington disparaged attempts to write a history of the Battle of Waterloo, saying, “The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball.” However, events in Sierra Leone in the last decade of the last century were slightly more important for who did what, than on exactly what date the event occurred.

We can start with independence for Sierra Leone on 27 April 1961. As the initial optimism waned, Sierra Leone began for the next thirty years the all-too-common trajectory into indigenous misgovernance, with coups and counter-coups and extra-judicial executions and elections more bitterly contested in their outcomes than in the actual campaigns. The denouement came with the eruption of more or less full-scale civil war in 1991 when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) began a campaign against “government corruption.” The RUF campaign was characterized by a degree of brutality unusual even for the setting, and was supported by Liberia and by Libya, and paid for by the RUF in blood diamonds, the RUF having largely secured to themselves the diamond mines of Sierra Leone.

In 1990, as the civil war in Liberia spread into Sierra Leone, the Sierra Leone Army (SLA) proved largely ineffective. A Nigerian-led ECOMOG (Economic Council of West African States Observer Group) force, already in Liberia, entered Sierra Leone under the terms of a mutual defense agreement. However, the Nigerian forces were over-stretched and over-committed, their campaigns were costing Nigeria a fortune they could not afford, and they were soon forced by their government to withdraw from Sierra Leone.

In 1996 after another of the nearly countless coups, the “veteran politician” Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was elected in an internationally supervised election said by observers to have been “as fair as you could expect.” Kabbah had been a colonial administrator under the British, and had subsequently been employed by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) until 1993, serving in New York, Tanzania and in Lebanon. (He was said to have become a friend of Kofi Annan.) There followed then a period of uneasy stalemate, maintained after their fashion by a private security firm, Executive Outcomes (South Africa), who had been operating in Sierra Leone since 1995.

In November 1996 Kabbah succeeded in negotiating a cease-fire with the RUF on the condition, inter alia, that the private security firms would leave Sierra Leone, and Executive Outcomes left the country in January 1997. Their Parthian shot: “Rest assured, in less than a hundred days, the RUF will welsh on the deal”, was only slightly off: a violent coup on 27 May 1997 toppled the Kabbah government and ended 16 months of democracy in Sierra Leone. This set the stage for what was to happen for at least the next five years, which may be seen generally as an international effort to restore and sustain the Kabbah government.

With that brief background, we can turn now to who did what, and with and to whom. (This information is scattered among the 19 pages of endnotes which are nearly 10% of this book. Many will find this somewhat inconvenient; such important information would have better been presented in the body of the text.)

African Interventions in Sierra Leone

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), acting under the auspices of the (then titled) Organization for African Unity (OAU –now known as the African Union – AU) fielded various “observer groups” in Sierra Leone, starting in 1990. These forces were led by and largely consisted of Nigerians. Nigerians were prominent and extremely violent in their enforcement of a 1997 UN embargo of oil and arms being brought into Sierra Leone. Nigerian forces attacked suspected blockade runners with naval gunfire, and warehouses and ships in harbour thought to be holding contraband were attacked by aircraft. These attacks caused widespread damages and civilian casualties, and led to an exodus from Freetown of over 200,000 frightened civilians.

In February of 1998 the former President Kabbah was reinstated as the President of Sierra Leone and the ECOWOG force handed over to a United Nations peacekeeping force.

During most of the period of its ECOWOG operations, Nigeria was under suspension of its membership in the British Commonwealth due to its human rights violations.

The Sierra Leone Army (SLA)

The SLA had never been a very effective force for anything but the aggrandizement of its various commanders and their aspirations, but was completely ruined when in 1991, in an effort to increase its strength, the government began to recruit drug addicts, unemployed youth, rural and urban vagrants and petty criminals.

The British Army began the training of the SLA in July, 2000. Initially, they trained individuals in basic infantry skills; by mid-2001 they had trained 8000 troops and officers. Their problem was to instill public confidence in a force best known for corruption, abuses and coups. As well there were shortages in vital equipment, the command structure was deficient, and there was virtually no logistic support capacity.

This, worrisome as it was in so threatened a society, still does not fully describe the magnitude of the problems of training a force with nowhere to go but up. The author of this book seems to accept at face value the numbers trained; we cannot, for there is far more than this to training an army.

While soldiers can be basically trained in about six months, it really takes at least a year to produce an infantry soldier, and at least another year to produce any of the array of specialists needed by even the most basic force. In that same two year period, one can, if selection criteria are carefully enforced, train junior officers. Advisors such as those British officers can substitute, discreetly, for the field officers and staff officers which it will in fact take the best part of a decade to produce. But, even with all that in place, they were only half-way there, because there was at the outset of the training almost no NCO corps, and without them – and they must be indigenous and it would also take almost a decade to produce them – there just was no army. So from the time the training began – and those clocks seem to have begun running in 2000 – it would have taken until about now to have a reliable force.

The Revolutionary United Front (RUF)

The RUF began its campaign ostensibly as “anti-corruption”. Like the SLA of the period, it had no real political goals and was contesting only for the spoils of chaos. Wide-spread poverty and unemployment plus frequent defections from the SLA provided an almost inexhaustible source of recruits. Initially trained in and supported by Libya, they quickly gained control of the hinterland of Sierra Leone, which also meant control of the diamond fields. At one point they were stealing and selling to pay their supporters in Liberia and in Libya 90% of the diamond revenues of Sierra Leone.

To broaden their recruiting base, the RUF recruited “Small Boy Units”, of children as young as seven years of age, but usually with “adult leadership.” One of the most notorious of these was The West Side Boys (WSB); they were the kidnappers of the 10 British and one SLA soldiers on 25August 2000, and it was they who were attacked in Operation Barras on 10 September.

United Nations Forces in Sierra Leone

Following upon the successful reinstatement of the Kabbah government, in July 1998 the UN approved an observer mission to Sierra Leone, to be known as the United Nations Observer Mission in Sierra Leone (UNOMSIL). Its authorized strength was initially set at 70, which was later raised to 210. However, fighting broke out again in December, forcing the evacuation of UNOMSIL; ECOMOG returned and again reinstated the legal (Kabbah) government.

In May of 1999, President Kabbah was able to open negotiations with the rebels, and a cease fire went into effect on 18 May. On 7 July the Lome Agreement was signed, with provisions for power sharing, a constitution, a military structure, human rights and implementation measures. One of the required implementation mechanisms was thought to be a stronger UN presence. In July 1999 the Security Council approved the establishment of a peacekeeping force, initially with a strength of 11,000 personnel, later raised to 17,500, to be known as the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). The mandating Security Council Resolution was enacted specifically under Chapter VII of the Charter; this was in very plain fact a peace enforcement mission.

UNAMSIL troop contributors were Bangladesh, Bolivia, Canada, China, Croatia, Egypt, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, Malaysia, Nepal, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Sweden, Tanzania, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay and Zambia. Police contingents were contributed by Australia, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Canada, Gambia, Ghana, India, Jordan, Kenya, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritius, Namibia, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Russia, Senegal, Sri lanka, Sweden, Tanzania, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In the course of its five-and-one-half year deployment the force suffered 192 fatalities.

However, by the spring of 2000, and barely nine months into their mandate, the UN force was in serious trouble. Kidnappings were widespread and seemingly set to continue without relief. The RUF again predictably reneged on their Lome undertakings. Naturally morale in the UN force was very poor: the Force Commander complained that his troops simply lacked the moral fortitude for their mission, and tended to surrender either their equipment or themselves under any threat, thus allowing the rebels a moral ascendancy and emboldening them to take further liberties. Despite efforts made to promulgate rules of engagement, the Nigerian government later claimed that it believed itself to be functioning as a classic, Chapter VI peacekeeping force, thus eschewing the more powerful responses which were in fact available to and expected of a peace enforcement mission (these were the people who just three years before had bombed and strafed indiscriminately in enforcing the UN embargo on Sierra Leone). And the RUF was once again advancing on Freetown.

British Forces in Sierra Leone

In 2000 the British launched two combat operations in Sierra Leone. These were:

• Operation Palliser: 7 May to 15 June. About 600 men of the Parachute Regiment landed at Freetown to secure the airport and to evacuate British and Commonwealth civilians. The Paras were replaced on 26 May by about the same number of Royal Marine Commandos, who had arrived with an amphibious force.

• Operation Barras: Of the eleven British and one Sierra Leonean taken prisoner on 25 August, six Brits and the Sierra Leonean remained in captivity on 10 September when a combined Para-SAS rescue mission was launched. The operation was completed in just over two hours. The actual rescue, which was completely successful, lasted only 20 minutes.

We now need to review in a bit more depth the events leading up to these two operations.

British relations with Sierra Leone had never been simple. Freetown was purchased and built by the British in 1787 to resettle freed slaves (the British having themselves just given up the trade) and, over the next nearly two centuries the country progressed through the stages of Crown Colony (1808), Protectorate (1896), to independence and membership in the British Commonwealth (1961). That Commonwealth membership was suspended from 1997-98 during one of Sierra Leone’s several periods of military rule.

And with the young UNAMSIL in such a tailspin in May 2000, the Secretary General of the UN informally requested troops of France, the U.S. and Great Britain. As it turned out, they thought he was asking rather a lot.

The issue of national contingents operating in tandem with but not under the control or command of a U.N. mission was (and is), to put it simply, fraught. The American Ranger/Delta Force operating almost completely at cross purposes with but almost entirely unknown to the U.N. force in Somalia in 1993, had developed into a legendary cock up with considerable loss of life. The French Operation Turquoise operated in a very similar mode, and equally to the detriment of another troubled UN force, in Rwanda in 1994. And Turquoise exemplifies another awkward issue which was, and still is, the perceptions, internationally and locally, of a former colonial power returning in arms to an African theatre.

All three countries declined the Secretary General’s request.

The British had second thoughts, however - at least the Foreign and Defense Secretaries did. There were a large number of British and Commonwealth citizens in grave danger in and around Freetown, and the government of Sierra Leone was in no position to offer them any protection. This could be made to fit Annan’s plea that Britain would provide only technical and logistic support to the UN forces. The British would launch a non-combatant evacuation mission, but there was (perhaps deliberately) nothing said about what, if anything, the British force would do when that mission was accomplished. And so, on 5 May 2000, on the very day when a Zambian battalion of UNAMSIL was ambushed and captured with all its equipment, it was announced that Britain’s recently formed Rapid Reaction Force would be dispatched to Sierra Leone for the evacuation of threatened non-combatants. Operation Palliser, as it was named, was underway.

48 hours later, 600 paratroops of the Parachute Regiment, with two Chinook Heavy Lift Helicopters, arrived in Freetown and secured Lungi Airport and a nearby hotel where many had sought refuge. By 12 May, over 350 persons had been evacuated, and a further approximately 450 elected to remain. There seems to have been only one serious clash when, on 17 May, a group of about 40 RUF attacked a platoon of Paras, leaving twenty rebel dead and no Para casualties.

The initial deployment of the Paras had been a difficult decision for the British. Airborne forces possess great strategic mobility – they can be moved long distances at short notice and in very little time. They lack tactical mobility, however – once on the ground, their relative lack of firepower and paucity of service support render them vulnerable, and that vulnerability increases sharply over a relatively short time. Full combat effectiveness for the longer term is actually realized more quickly by seaborne forces, who travel much more slowly and take longer to arrive, but once deployed are much more flexible and sustainable than are airborne forces.

But the situation in May 2000 would permit no delays, and the Paras would clearly be “firstest with the mostest.” At the same time, on 7 May, the British warned and prepared the Amphibious Ready Group (ARG), which consisted of the helicopter carrier HMS Ocean with 600 men of 42 Royal Marine Commando embarked, the frigate HMS Chatham, a resupply ship and two landing ships. The Group, then at anchor in Marseilles, carried a total of ten helicopters. They sailed immediately, arriving in Freetown on 13 May. Meantime, on 9 May the British Foreign Office reiterated that the British forces were not combat troops, and were there only to evacuate non-combatants and to secure the airport for the arrival of the promised 3,000 UN reinforcements. The Royal Marines came ashore to relieve the Paras on 26 May; the Paras were withdrawn to the U.K.

In the meantime, further announcements from the British Foreign Office and MOD were including such off-hand phrases as “performing protective operations” and “provision of aid to UNAMSIL.” The troops’ “position” would be evaluated on a “day-to-day” basis, and British officers were being integrated into the UNAMSIL command structure, providing clearly sorely needed guidance and expertise. How could the British leave? And what would happen, to Sierra Leone and to the UN force, if they did? But British public opinion was very much against a long-term commitment of this sort, and the Prime Minister was under considerable pressure to limit the deployment and bring the troops home. The compromise was to terminate Palliser, which was done on 15 June 2000, but without a total withdrawal of British forces from Sierra Leone. A stand-by force of 200 Royal Marines remained embarked offshore, a 90-person team continued the training of the SLA, and the British established a Joint Headquarters “permanently” in Freetown, operating separately from but in close cooperation with the UN force HQ.

It is perhaps typical of operations in that part of the world that knowing who the players are is a challenge; in this case even knowing who the outsiders were is neither easy nor simple. It is to his credit that Fowler is able to keep the Paras, Royal Marine Commandos and Special Air Services reasonably straight, but the relationship of the various British Forces to each other, and to the United Nations Forces and the UNAMSIL mandate was, to say the least, not very clear. The issue was perhaps deliberately obscured by the Secretary General of the UN and by the British Government. Regrettably, this book doesn’t do much to sort out “the friendlies.” Just who, for example, were those British soldiers who were captured on 25 August? Almost as soon as their capture was known in HQ UNAMSIL, the Force Commander (probably with thoughts of “Blackhawk Down” dancing in his head) contradicted the British Forces statement that they were on an “authorized mission” – whatever that might have been. He added, “ … the British may have a tendency to shift the blame onto the UN troops …” However, the Force Commander was right: those soldiers were in fact not members of his mission, but were part of that British Army Training Assistance mission which had been left in Sierra Leone when the British terminated Operation Palliser on 15 June.

Throughout the British deployment in Sierra Leone, neither the UN nor the British government showed any inclination to question or to explain publicly the British role in Sierra Leone. We can speculate that the UN was embarrassed at having to watch a large peacekeeping force being rescued by a very small British force, and for sure the British government wished not to draw public attention to their deployment of Paras, Commandos and SAS in “support” roles. Later, in the aftermath of Operation Barras, the rescue operation which is the subject of this book, the British government went to extraordinary lengths to conceal altogether the role of the SAS in the rescue. An issue of the magazine Soldier, the demi-official journal of the British Army, carried a full account in the SAS role in Operation Barras. The British MOD ordered the magazine recalled, and about 90,000 copies were pulped. A censored version, with no reference to the SAS, was then distributed; to this day many think the rescue operation was carried out by the Paras.

The UN says of the Operations Palliser and Barras only that “The United Kingdom, which had sent a force to restore peace following RUF’s breach of the ceasefire, later started restructuring the army while UNAMSIL and other international partners concentrated on training the local police force.” Aside from cryptic references such as this to the British Army’s training role in respect of the SLA, there is no further mention by the United Nations of the British forces in Sierra Leone; it seems the British were not unhappy with the omission.

And so a force of never more than 600 light infantry, whether Paras or Commandos, in seven weeks rescued a peacekeeping force, but more than that, they rescued a peace process and an entire country – rescued them from failure, disgrace, renewed civil war, and delivered all those to cessation of fighting, maintenance of democratic processes, disarmament of belligerents – peace. 600 soldiers and seven weeks – how was that possible?

Lessons Learned, or Déjà vu all over again?

Christopher Bellamy of Cranfield University has written:

To ensure the success of … peace support operations, armed forces with the ethos and physique of war-fighting soldiers have to be recruited and trained. No-one else can be relied on if peacekeeping suddenly regresses into civil war, .. and no-one else gets the necessary respect from the people … the warrior ethos must remain, … imbued with flexibility and humanity … It is possible to mix combat readiness with humanity, and that is the challenge for … armed forces …

As these modern peace forces deploy into a fragile peace, or no peace at all, and must restore even a limited security, they must be able to restore the monopoly on force lost by their “hosts”, as governance failed or may have deceased altogether. They will do so only to the extent that they are generally able to seize, restore and maintain that monopoly, against any challenges, from any and all “parties”. Clearly and self-evidently having that capability, they may be the less called upon actively to exercise it. To the extent that that capability has been denied them, and that falsity in their position quickly and widely perceived, their lives will be the nightmare of 1990s enforcement operations, and their memories will be of similar humiliations and failure.

The willingness to use power is as important as the capability, and is just about as quickly known to the local parties, as demonstrated by the distinctly aggressive behavior of the RUF in the face of the Nigerians’ apparent confusion over their rules of engagement

In Operations Palliser and Barras, it was just because these Paras and Commandos were so obviously capable, that they were so infrequently challenged. This overwhelming impression of their capabilities actually allowed them to minimize the force they were required to use. But it was those British forces, operating outside the UN structures, limitations and culture, who were the true enforcers of the peace, and it took astonishingly few of them an incredibly short time to succeed, where so many have failed. Fowler summed up the moral ascendancy of the British troops on Operation Palliser: the operation “had been a demonstration of military power untrammeled by the UN’s rules of engagement and complex and inflexible chain of command. … the RUF and other militias realized that the British Forces in Sierra Leone were not to be provoked or humiliated.” And as he later said of Operation Barras, “Realizing that they were not up against the nervous or compliant UNAMSIL troops but rather the overwhelming but controlled violence of professional soldiers, many of the West Side Boys fled …

Looking Ahead

William Fowler tells us little about the true aftermath of the events of 2000 (his book was published in 2004). His “Aftermath” chapter is largely devoted to the British efforts to suppress the role of the SAS in Barras, and the long wrangle to secure a widow’s pension for the partner of the only British fatality. But we will have noticed the almost clock-like regularity with which things in Sierra Leone have fallen apart just after an intervention, and we will have noticed as well how little the previous interventions, whether by ECOWOG or Executive Outcomes, cared about nation or even institution building. And now the whole audience must be asking, “Was this one any different? How? Why?” True peace is not just the absence of fighting, and we will have to look well beyond the frame of this book to see how – and if - things are still being worked out.

In May 2002 there were presidential and parliamentary elections in Sierra Leone. There was no violence, the voter turnout was 81% and the elections were supported by UNDP and monitored by the EU, OAU, ECOWAS and the Carter Center. The incumbent, Kabbah, was re-elected.

By 2004 the Sierra Leone diamond industry, which in 2000 had sunk to production worth only USD 10 million, had soared to over USD160 million, now controlled and legitimized by the Kimberly Certification Process. Also in 2004 the War Crimes Commission commenced the trials of the first of 13 indictees.

In 2005 the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission completed its work. In that year the completely re-formed and re-trained National Police Force reached its pre-civil war strength of just over 900, of whom 15% were women. Also in 2005 a public opinion survey conducted by Yale and the Community College of New York, having polled nearly 1000 persons, reported that 100% said that the security situation had greatly improved, 71% wanted UNAMSIL to remain (it was due to cease operations at the end of 2005), 84% approved of the disarmament process and 98% reported the work of the UN in Sierra Leone as good or very good. All those polled were lavish in their praise of community development and repair projects undertaken by agencies and individuals.

At the end of 2005 UNAMSIL completed its mission, and handed over to the United Nations Integrated Office for Sierra Leone, UNIOSIL. That office had as its general mission to help the Government to strengthen human rights, realize the Millennium Development Goals, improve transparency and to hold free and fair elections in 2007. (The elections were held on 17 September, and Ernest Bai Korona, formerly leader of the opposition, was elected president.) The UN office was also to work together with other UN missions in the sub-region and provide security for the Special Court. It continues to date to discharge these functions, and works closely with the UN Peacebuilding Commission, promoting good governance and the rule of law, combating illicit drug trafficking, and addressing youth unemployment.

And this is peacebuilding: building and maintaining indigenous capacities, mentoring, assisting, advising – all the soft power measures of true nation building. What nations and societies recovering from violence and terror need to maintain their recovery is the sort of power which does not grow out of the mouth of a gun, but which takes root and grows in the hearts and minds of the people. The hawks gave peace this chance, but hopefully their time is past in Sierra Leone, and the real challenges of building a society of laws, of education, of poverty – these will best be addressed by the people of Sierra Leone, who will nevertheless need all the help they can get. As they say, “It’s your United Nations.”

Conclusion

This book suffers from a number of weaknesses. The scrambled chronology, the long and overly detailed end notes and the lack of an index, make this book difficult to use as a reference. The structure of the book, centered on a single incident which lasted about two hours and has little to do with the larger issues with which such a book ought to be concerned, is disappointing. In Operation Barras, the world’s finest soldiers attacked and defeated a lightly armed mob of mostly children. There was a lot more going on in Sierra Leone in 2000 and shortly thereafter, but this author does not synthesize these other events and wider issues, and leaves us to infer the larger lessons which the events of that year and its aftermath ought to illustrate.

This is a blinkered book – the information is all there, but there is no “so what.” Only if we read carefully and diligently between the lines, might we see that the way to peace in Sierra Leone was opened not by doves, but by hawks. We just wish someone would write that book.

Mao Zedong famously said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” This linkage of armed force and politics is not new, but the lesson cannot be taken for granted. The power of those with the weapons cannot be ignored, nor may it be conceded to the Tigers and the Technicals and the Attaches and the West Side Boys – or we all stay home and let the blood flow and the flames roar – as we more or less have done in Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia, or as we might as well have. So the lesson here seems to be: in emergencies, act quickly, powerfully and in good company – and don’t screw it up.

Trackless Diplomacy - At Play in the Fields of the Lord's Resistance Army

2010-02-24T07:49:00.000-08:00

… the peacemaker must ‘wage’ peace.
- Ben Hoffmann

- by Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks

Peace Guerilla – unarmed and in harm’s way, my obsession with ending violence
By Ben Hoffmann, Ph.D.
The Canadian International Institute of Applied Negotiation, Ottawa, 2009
206 pp., $12.96 (Cdn)

This book is the story of Ben Hoffman’s efforts to end a nineteen-year old war between Sudan and Uganda. His chief instrument in this was the Nairobi Agreement, which had been mediated by former President Jimmy Carter in December, 1999. Ben, working on behalf of the Carter Center (http://www.cartercenter.org/homepage.html), was to oversee the implementation of the Agreement. To do so, he would have to end the guerilla war being waged by Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army against the Government of Uganda, from safe areas within and with the support of Sudan. Kony’s LRA was an especially vile band, kidnapping children for “warriors” and “wives”. Kony himself, as Ben makes graphically clear, was mad, bad and dangerous to know. And get to know him Ben did, with all that entailed. If you take nothing else from this reading, you will empathize with the courage and the self-reliance required for this sort of intervention.

Ben Hoffmann is one whom we unhesitatingly call brilliant. We have worked and learned with him on occasions precious to us, and regard him as one of the best leaders we have ever followed. We had long respected his intellectual courage, and this book makes clear as well his physical courage. The story is told with cinematic sweep and a sense of excitement and adventure, and indeed Ben’s negotiations with Kony to free the kidnapped children are to be encapsulated in a movie, “Girl Soldier”, which is based on another book, Stolen Angels, by Kathy Cook (Penguin Global, 2009).

Ben was eventually forced to concentrate his efforts on ending Sudanese support for Kony and his LRA, and this was achieved. He later concentrated even more fully on negotiating the peaceful release of the abducted children, before overt military action against the LRA would result in a bloodbath of Kony’s “fighters” – who were those children. In this he was not successful, and the reasons for this go to the heart of essential limitations on what is called Track II Diplomacy.

What is now known generally as Track I Diplomacy is the recognized and traditional intergovernmental and diplomatic intercourse between and among states, either bilaterally or, often, multilaterally, through international bodies such as the United Nations, or regional organizations such as the EU or the AU. Track II , as it has come to be known, is on the other hand an informal diplomacy, usually by non-state actors, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academics, retired public figures, social activists – a variety of unofficial third parties, and that includes the Carter Center. As Diana Chigas has described it:

In this model, informal intermediaries act between conflicting parties either by hosting and facilitating talks or by providing unofficial shuttle diplomacy…. Former President Jimmy Carter and the Conflict Resolution Program at the Carter Center at Emory University are (an) example of mediation by non-governmental actors. Carter consults with governments, as well as relevant governmental and intergovernmental organizations, but acts in an unofficial capacity, albeit with official blessing. His status as a former president of the United States gives him legitimacy and entry at the highest levels. Yet acting as an unofficial mediator, he is free to initiate discussions, facilitate communication, and explore new ideas. (See Chigas, Diana . "Track II (Citizen) Diplomacy." Beyond Intractability. Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: August 2003 http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/track2_diplomacy.)

And in this very description lie the real limitations on Track II diplomacy, in the phrases “with official blessing", and “legitimacy and entry at the highest levels.” This was always shaky ground for Carter and for his Center, and there were abundant signs of that support waning throughout the period covered by this book.

Early meetings with the U.S. State Department were disappointing: “… we went away with little hope that President Clinton’s administration was likely to make the shift in policy that we called for … Albright’s promise of follow-up contact was never realized in the months of March and April 2000 …Carter was very disappointed.” Later in that year, Ben received a “discrete message that Canada was not happy with The Carter Center’s role as mediator, stating that we were a nongovernmental organization and not a state actor.” And shortly thereafter, “Egypt was … also making noise that perhaps The Carter Center was not a legitimate mediator between two nation states.” The U.S. Government’s reservations about Track II diplomacy were being registered by those and other Track I players, and the Carter influence was in fact shrinking; the levers were fewer and shorter than they had been at opening of play a year earlier.

Ben senses this almost immediately: “I was really being impeded by my own limitations as a mediator with no real clout to push these men and their governments to go where I wanted them to go.” And Carter also realizes that he needs greater legitimacy, and that the source of this can only come from the Track I diplomatic world. Admitting that he had earlier “struck out” with Madeleine Albright, Carter approaches Colin Powell with much more confidence, and their meeting in March 2001 seems to go well – there is talk of appointing an Envoy, and Carter seems a likely prospect for the appointment. This has a downside, however: it is made clear that if Carter is to be a Special Envoy, he will have to be “tied to the (State) Department” – “they did not want any ‘Lone Rangers.’” Doubts set in almost immediately on both sides: was this a viable appointment for a Republican administration? And in Atlanta the Carter Center staff was contemplating the impact of such an all-absorbing appointment on their other programmes.

But then came 9/11, and attitudes hardened, issues became more black and white, Vice-President Cheney talked to former President Carter and “it did not go well;” “Carter had been dismissed as a bleeding heart liberal”. And on the playing fields the clocks ran on into 2002, when it was decided to launch Operation Iron Fist: the Ugandan Army would, with permission, enter Sudan to “rescue” the children held by the Lord’s Resistance Army.

If there is one clear lesson to be drawn from this tale, it is this: Track II diplomacy succeeds only when it is a continuation of, and supports and is supported by, official international, Track I, diplomacy. Where Track I diplomacy is clear and resolute, Track II diplomacy can play a valuable supporting role; where Track I leadership is absent, Track II can annoy and worry the target, but is usually little availing. Warned off the course by the American, Canadian and Egyptian governments, and finally more or less abandoned by the Bush administration, somebody at the Carter Center should have been in a position to recognize the sounds of silence – they were Track II dips, and they were on their own in a very bad neighborhood. Ben recognized the seriousness of their second strike-out in Washington: “I felt checkmate.” But immediately, and characteristically of him, he wonders, “Could we do anymore? Could we do any different?” It is perhaps revealing that Ben, who surely knows all that we have said here, never mentions Track I or Track II diplomacy (there is no index in Peace Guerillas, so we might have missed it).

The contrast between Carter’s efforts in Sudan, on the one hand and, on the other, Richard Holbrooke’s “mediation” which led to the Dayton Accords in Bosnia Herzegovina, are striking, especially in the degree of support (and direction) Holbrooke received from those “highest levels” of the U.S. Government. Although the comparison is less than totally precise, as Holbrooke was with the State Department at the time of his appointment, Holbrooke was granted by the U.S. Government just that recognition and legitimacy that was later denied Carter, and you don't have to be a great Holbrooke or Dayton fan to recognize that the respective conduct and outcomes of their efforts reflected these differences.

Ben has written an outstanding book: it might have been an adventure novel, except that it is an utterly convincing, because utterly authentic, real life account of what might usefully have been more clearly recognized as Track II diplomacy. The pity of these brave and bold efforts is that the author of the Carter Doctrine of 1980 did not realize the fragility of his efforts twenty years later. The Carter Center surely ought to have realized the duality of the challenges they faced: the most obvious one was of course in Africa, but of equal if not primary importance was the challenge in Washington to which, as Ben said, “all roads lead.” It was just that theirs didn’t.

The United Nations Today - As Good as it Gets?

2010-02-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

The United Nations Today: As Good as it Gets?

- by Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks

What’s Wrong With the United Nations, and How to Fix It
By Thomas Weiss,
Polity Press, 292 pp., $19.45, 2009

The UN … is essentially the collective agent of its member states. Many of the UN’s organizational incapacities could be corrected by additional resources from its member states, who devote but a tiny fraction of the resources they spend on national security to collective action under the umbrella of the United Nations.
- Peacemaking and Peacekeeping for the New Century, Ottunnu and Doyle, Rowan and Littlefield, New York, 1996

This is an interesting book about the United Nations, and an impressive effort to get beyond the usual procedural and structural tinkering which has characterized and limited most efforts to “improve” the U.N. Thomas Weiss is certainly well qualified to write this book. He combines the skills and the background of a practitioner and a scholar: he served with the U.N. Secretariat for a decade, but has also distinguished himself as an academic for over 25 years, during which he has been a profound student of and a prolific writer, researcher and teacher about, the U.N.

Sir Brian Urqhuhart, in his foreword, tells us that Weiss has come to the “bold and original conclusion” “that world government is the necessary conceptual basis for adequate future management of the major problems of our planet.” Weiss’ solution is actually much more cautious and nuanced – and realistic - than that.

Weiss makes it clear that he considers a preoccupation with sovereignty as a major problem in taking concerted action to confront global challenges: “… treating traditional sovereignty as a cornerstone for the United Nations is a fundamental structural weakness in urgent need of replacement.” He goes on: “The shortcomings of sovereignty and the ill-health of the UN system for the human rights arena can be illustrated with several examples …”. “Westphalian sovereignty impinges directly on more robust action by the United Nations in protecting the human environment.” Weiss concludes that “Westphalian sovereignty is … a chronic ailment for the United Nations, and perhaps a lethal one for the planet …”

But Weiss leaves us under no illusions that sovereignty is any less likely to be the basis for whatever international order may obtain, now or in the near future: “… the state remains essential for national, regional and global problem-solving, and nothing in this book gainsays this stark reality.” And then Weiss turns the corner, and tells us what he really means:

Yet put simply, states and their creations in the form of the current generation of intergovernmental bureaucracies cannot address the transnational problems confronting the world. As a result, and ironically, we have embraced global governance.

Weiss thus distances himself from the chimera* of global government and advocates instead global governance; governance being a more qualitative term, which Weiss defines as

… the totality of institutions, policies, rules, practices, norms, procedures, and initiatives by which states and their citizens try to bring order and predictability to their responses to such universal problems as warfare, poverty, and environmental degradation.

The last two decades in the life of the United Nations have been characterized by almost constant pressure to “reform” the world body: the Security Council, the General Assembly, the veto, the Secretariat, the Office of the Secretary-General, peacekeeping, humanitarian relief, sustainable development, climate change. All have been subject to the most searching scrutiny, lengthy reports have been tabled before august bodies and September bodies: Brahimi, Volcker, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, the Millennium Declaration Goals – all have been received with acclaim, all have been solidly embraced by an overwhelming majority of members. For goodness’sakes, even Newt Gingrich promised “major U.N. reform” - and the needles on those dials have stayed just right where they were.

And the United Nations remains the indispensable body, the conditio sine qua non of whatever international order there is or which may from time to time be brought into existence. Those who try to go without the U.N. – and that usually means the United States – always eventually turn back to it, whether in Kosovo or in Iraq or in Afghanistan, as they inevitably rediscover the limits on force, the need for allies, the skills and the soft power resources needed for post-conflict progress, the need for some authority other than their own. And the United Nations is always there, largely un-reformed, little respected and often blamed for anything and everything that goes wrong – but there after all.

What is it about the United Nations that is so urgently in need of “reform”? Or, in other words, just what is the example to which the U.N. is being held? Is it the United States Congress, where the 28,000 “aides” nearly equal the entire U.N. Secretariat? Weiss makes abundantly clear that he is no defender of the U.S. government; might a successful football team be a better example? Bayern Muenchen, an international power house, finished last year in eighth place in the Bundesliga. When one of their best players told a Munich newspaper why that had happened, he was fined 50,000 Euros by his club for having done so – talk about lessons not learned! Or perhaps the flight crew of a commercial passenger aircraft might be a micro-example of maximal efficiency – except for that crew that overslept their destination last autumn, and had to be wakened by a stewardess to turn back for their landing – they had apparently exhausted themselves trying to understand a recent management directive. Isn’t absolute organizational efficiency somewhere between an oxymoron and a lost cause? We usually don’t expect too much from organizations, and among the skills most of us sooner or later develop is to get things done not because of the organization, but despite it.

Perhaps the United Nations we have today is as good as it gets; as good as it’s going to get.

And once we turn the proposition around – not what’s broken, but what works – then we have a completely different view. For one example:

Chapter VIII of the Charter, “Regional Arrangements”, was written, as was the entire Charter, in 1945, to describe the manner in which the U.N. might cooperate with “regional arrangements or agencies” for the maintenance of international peace and security. However, there was at that time only one regional organization in the entire world, and that was the Arab League. It was to be more than a half-century later that a truly international-regional peacekeeping mission came into existence, when the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) was formed, with “pillars” contributed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the European Union (EU), the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE, which proudly proclaimed that it had been founded “as a regional arrangement in the sense of Chapter VIII of the Charter”) and, as adjunct members, NATO (which led and largely manned the Kosovo Force – KFOR). However cautious we might be in calling a peacekeeping mission a success, the cooperation of those “pillars” under that “umbrella” (not to mix a metaphor) was just about all that might have been expected by those ancients who had drafted Chapter VIII in the first place. And, given that degree of cooperation at the “operational level”, there was noticeably less of the usual bickering among the inevitable cat herd of NGOs.

There is in this book very little mention of regional capacities to contribute to crisis management or conflict resolution. In fact, it seems that the United Nations has inherited some of its worst headaches from failed or absent regional efforts, whether in former Yugoslavia or in Africa – it is hard to say whose intervention has been more disastrous: the EU in Yugoslavia or the OAU/AU in Rwanda and in Sudan. But managing regional problems with regional resources and authorities, under a UN mandate, has got to be the eventual way ahead.

Weiss’ discussion of this is pretty much limited to the requirement for “other powers” to – you will stop me if you’ve heard this one before? - do more “burden sharing” vis-à-vis, of course, the United States. Weiss admits that the Europeans have been making progress here. In fact, there has been an ongoing process, since at least the turn of the Century, of Europeans unsnarling themselves from the U.S.-dominated NATO, and transferring assets and capabilities to EU forces. At the same time, the EU members have been professionalizing their armies, providing better soldiers and more flexible response forces.

The picture is of course quite different in Africa, but there as well, a lot is being done to address their problems. For two examples: the Peace Support Operations Centre in Addis-Ababa (which subsumed the former OAU Conflict Prevention Centre in January of this year) is intended to provide strategic planning, mounting and direction to AU forces, and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana provides individual training to military and civilian staff for peace operations.

Weiss deals rather perfunctorily with another major problem at the UN, and one that is not inherently structural, but is essentially cultural, and this is the shabby state of internal cooperation within the UN, among the specialized agencies of the UN and indeed throughout the international community. But Weiss says that

Eyes glaze over at the mere mention of “coordination” because it amounts to wishful thinking about improved effectiveness without the power of the purse to compel working together.

Weiss cites as the most egregious case of this the wrangling among UNHCR, WFP, UNICEF and Interaction (a conglomerate of NGOs), over the issue of who would exercise principal responsibility for the care of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). All of the above, as Weiss relates, “sensed a threat to their territory.” The problem is larger and more deeply rooted in the culture of the various organs of what we call, optimistically, the international community. All of these “organs”: the specialized agencies, the international organizations, the NGOs and the host governments are eager to assume the mantle of a leading in role in whatever, all are intensely territorial and all are constantly arrayed for turf wars; their common culture is hard wired for conflict – with each other. Another aspect of this problem is a high-level hypocrisy, where cooperation is confessed and professed by the princes of the church, who know full well that nothing of the sort will happen in the field. At the same time, working level staff are always knitting together shaky partnerships which must not be found out in Pristina or Windhoek or Zagreb. Jamie was once sharply reprimanded for unauthorized cooperation with the European Community Monitors in ex-Yugoslavia; Ingrid was once reproved for too-close cooperation with the military in Namibia. The solution to this is going to involve breaking some heads – but that’s not in the culture, either. Maybe it’s no wonder Weiss didn’t spend much time on this one.

Weiss’ discussion of the state of the international civil service, the Secretariat, or the “Second United Nations” (the first being the member states) touches on a major issue. If there is one major problem with the Secretariat, it is member states’ – the “First U.N.” – interference in the hiring and employment of Secretariat personnel – the “Second UN”. This is not a complicated issue, and there is a simple solution: the unexceptional enforcement of Article 100 of the Charter, which provides inter alia that

the staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or …. authority external to the U.N. … Each Member of the United Nations undertakes to respect the exclusively international character … of … the staff and not to seek to influence them in the discharge of their responsibilities.

Were these provisions to be respected and enforced, the problems might be solved rather quickly. But we’re not holding our breaths on this one.

Weiss also provides a most useful review of the scope and the effects of U.S. power, and the challenge to “keep the U.S. in the tent.” The past two decades bear eloquent evidence that appeasing American bullying and blackmail is no solution to that challenge. Some tough love is in order – the international community does Americans no favours when it bows to the Boltons and their ilk, nor does it make it any easier for other friends of the UN to stay their courses. It seems abundantly clear that the Europeans – whose population and wealth make them the only regional block which might rival the US - must support the UN, even at the expense of their bilateral relations with the US. And the UN must, if it is attacked, defend itself, and that defence may include a counter attack. For example, throughout the 1990’s, a period marked by the most serious American government criticism of and interference with the work of the UN, the US was very much in arrears in its financial contributions. This was not accidental; withholding or threatening to withhold contributions has been a frequent tactic of the Americans. Article 19 of the Charter provides that a member two years in arrears in its contributions “shall have no vote in the General Assembly.” Fear of the U.S’. reaction to such a suspension froze everyone in their tracks, but that was scarcely an excuse for doing nothing. We don’t actually see Article 19 suspension as a practicable way ahead, and we suspect that Americans will stay in the tent exclusively on their own terms, and the UN will continue to pull their irons out of the fire. But Article 19 is out there, and it ought not to be forgotten – least of all, by the Americans.

We think it not so surprising that the U.N. has its faults, we think it a miracle that it exists at all. And doesn’t an organization which has survived a Reagan, two Bushes, Newt Gingrich and John Bolton, demonstrate a certain robustness, a degree of flexibility and a considerable measure of survivability? Is it therefore useful to speculate on enlarging the Security Council, restricting the veto, getting the specialized agencies to stop their bickering – or blaming the U.N. because none of the above is even remotely likely to happen?

So we see a much more pragmatic way ahead – the UN is not broken, but it is not without flaws. There are quite a few things about the Charter which have been working well for a very long time – after all, the Charter has been amended only three times since it was first promulgated (and one of those amendments concerned the now-toxic issue of Security Council enlargement). We see the Charter as a toolkit, with which some of those flaws might be fixed; for examples:

•Regional capacities are vital, and everywhere need support and enhancement. Chapter VIII of the Charter provides the architecture and the goals.

• The Secretariat must be freed from interference by member states and their governments, and that means Article 100 must be enforced at any costs.

• Bullying and blackmail by powerful members must be resisted by the less powerful. Especially the blackmailers must be reminded from time to time of the provisions of Article 19 of the Charter.

The United Nations is, as Ottunnu and Doyle have said, “essentially the collective agent of its member states.” We would go further than that: the UN is the mirror of the cultures and societies – the civilization – from which it is sprung. While we consider ourselves optimists, we are compelled by our experiences to be realists. We do not therefore expect in the foreseeable future that the member states nor “the peoples” will become collectively more altruistic, less selfish, longer sighted. We have then to work with a United Nations which is probably “as good as it gets” – and we need to consider carefully how to ensure that it stays good enough.

Despite some flaws, this is a very useful book about the United Nations, and it might be the book to read if you were only to read one book about the UN this year. And perhaps you might fairly judge – you always judge fairly – that we have here told you more about the book we wish had been written, instead of describing the one Weiss did write. All right, then: we do wish someone would write a book which could be entitled,

What’s Right about the United Nations, and How to Keep it That Way.

* The chimera was a monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent. John Bolton probably couldn’t have described it better.

National Sovereignty, Domestic Jurisdiction and Consent

2010-01-24T01:21:00.000-08:00

Presentation to the Blue Helmet Forum Austria
4-6 June 2009

National Sovereignty, Domestic Jurisdiction and Consent:
The Last Refuges of Scoundrels[1]

By James V. Arbuckle, O.M.M., C.D.

Shall I say what I mean?
Mean what I say?
- Marianne Faithful

Introduction
This paper is NOT JUST about peace operations in Chad; rather it is about ALL peace operations throughout the history of peacekeeping:

The issue of consent to an operation is central to the mandating and the conduct of all interventions. The post-Cold War surge in intra-national conflicts has increased the importance of this issue, as interventions almost inevitably encounter issues of national sovereignty. In Sudan, especially in the West Darfur region of Sudan, we see today most clearly the ongoing struggle between, on the one hand, national sovereignty, domestic jurisdiction and “host” consent and, on the other hand, a clear case of a need – some would say a responsibility – for outsiders to intervene.

The Sudanese government has for four years delayed where practicable, and prevented where possible, international action in a case which entirely justifies the full weight of the international community’s responsibility to protect the victims of state-sponsored and -abetted violence. Sudan has throughout this period continued to resist the implementation of the Security Council mandate, has contested the facts of a man-made humanitarian emergency and has debated the role and the equipment of the U.N. force. To date the Sudanese government continues to exercise what it perceives to be its sovereign right to obstruct and to oppose the deployment of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Darfur - UNAMID, withholding its “consent” to Force composition and structure, to the freedom of movement of the Force, and has continued to support and to sanction violence against civilians. Meanwhile, the conflict has spread into neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic, especially the former, where the Sudanese government-sponsored Janjaweed have pursued refugees from Darfur well beyond the international border. The requirement for the protection and eventual repatriation of the Sudanese refugees, especially those in Chad, has led to the formation first of an EU force, now a UN peacekeeping mission, with an enforcement mandate under Chapter VII of the Charter. Thus the mission in Chad and the C.A.R. is essentially a spill-over mission, and although operating with an apparently high level of consent in the countries in which it is based, its operations are to a very large extent dependant on events in Sudan, where consent hides behind the usual array of excuses. This cross-border factor complicates the operations in the entire region – consent withheld in Sudan negates consent granted in the CAR and Chad.

Nor can the appearance of consent in Chad and the C.A.R. be taken entirely at face value: the United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad - MINURCAT, which inherited from European Force - EUFOR - responsibility for the civilians in danger, is not allowed to enter refugee camps in Chad. And as Dr. Winrich Kuehne has written for the Centre for International Peace Operations in Berlin:

Once again, mandate and capabilities are too weak due inter alia to a blunt refusal by Deby (in Chad) to accept a stronger and truly impartial force. This refusal … is a clear indication of his true intention: abusing the international presence to ensure his survival. The same basically applies to the Bozize regime in the CAR although it has pursued its interest less bluntly.[2]

So, to put it bluntly, consent can be faked, and it can be used to hide an agenda – we might call it shamming and scamming.

Just as, in May 2009, a UN team investigating possible war crimes in Gaza, led by Richard Goldstone, arrived in Gaza, via Cairo, because Israel refused to grant them visas to enter Israel. Of course, this would make it much easier to discount whatever the team’s findings might be, as they would not have been in Israel. The UN team, despite the leadership of Mr Goldstein, a respected war crimes investigator and a Jew, and before they had done or said anything, was judged by the Israeli government as singling out Israel unfairly, and of being a “masquerade.”

Following this introduction, I will discuss the consent issue under two headings:

The nature, varieties and qualities of consent;
The historic background to the consent issue, as it first arose in the case of the United Nations Emergency Force in 1956.

By the way, how many of you know how many peacekeepers it takes to change a light bulb? I have recently been experimenting with various solutions to this problem, and I have found that any number will do – but the light bulb has to want to be changed.

The Varieties of Consent

More than 60 years into the history of peacekeeping, and despite the apparent resurrection of Chapter VII of the Charter, the consent issue remains the principal factor influencing the maintenance of international peace and security. There are two Charter-based sources of this, and these are:

Article 2.1 of the Charter of the United Nations provides that:
The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members.

And Article 2.7 states that:
Nothing … in the … charter shall authorize the UN to intervene in matters … essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state …

It is just that “domestic jurisdiction,” plus “national sovereignty,” which seem to have fused into an inertia of rest, limiting where not preventing altogether international or regional intervention in the affairs of a member state of the United Nations, without the consent of the putative hosts. This consent, when granted, may be highly conditional, and it may be withdrawn at short notice and for very little reason, or for no discernable reason at all. The consent may be contested or not accepted by one or more elements of one of the conflicted parties (“I can’t control my people.”).

As I have written elsewhere, domestic jurisdiction has become, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, the last refuge of a scoundrel.

There is a nexus of issues surrounding that main issue of consent, and these sub-sets mutually influence the mission and each other. As Ingrid Lehmann has written, “in the new, complex operations, consent implies popular support or acquiescence, even in non-democratic or transitional societies”. She adds:

There are at least three areas in which consent – i.e. general support for a peacekeeping operation – should exist for it to be carried out successfully:
1. In the countries in which the UN force is deployed;
2. In the troop contributing countries; and
3. In the countries that pay the largest share of the bill for peacekeeping.[3]

Were she writing today, Lehmann would add to this list the consent of non-state actors: para-militaries, NGOs, academics who, despite or because of their status, may wield considerable power or influence.

I do not wish to imply that consent will come spontaneously into existence as a natural phenomenon, or that, where it does not, we are powerless to act. Thus it will often be the case that the creation of a climate of consent will be a major issue for an intervention mission. Nor is it unusual that there may arise the need to induce consent more forcefully, and/or to be able to use force to maintain consent once granted. As the Secretary-General of the United Nations has described it:

In any given case, blue helmeted soldiers are likely to encounter many persons who welcome the UN presence and many others who are highly resistant. … If consent carries with it certain rewards, and the failure to grant consent carries with it certain costs, this obviously affects the decision as to whether or not consent will be granted.[4]

The Secretary-General went on to distinguish between “positive” and “coercive” inducement: the traditional carrot and stick. There are, however, limits on the use of coercing consent: “the intimidation factor will erode over time”, its usefulness may be constrained by weakness in the consent of the sponsors (see Lehmann, above) and, most importantly, coercion cannot resolve conflicts. [5] And, again as Lehmann has pointed out, the consent of the people is no less important than that of their leaders, and creating a broadly based consensual environment in the civil society may be a challenging undertaking. Nevertheless, especially at the outset of an operation, as Richard Herzinger has said in Spiegel Online, “to seriously entertain the idea of intervening in a country against the will of the national government, (we) must accept both the necessity of military means and the risk of violent confrontation with local power holders.”[6] This is possibly setting the bar too high, and conjures up just the situation which typically results only in inaction. But no matter what sort of consent the situation may demand, and of whom, or how it is to be attained, the stakes here are very high: the success or failure of the mission will depend on this outcome more than on any other event in the life of the mission.

Time and space does not here permit me to pursue the development of a typology of consent in peace operations, otherwise I would describe more fully the freely given and faithfully maintained consent of the Government of Macedonia to the UN Preventive Deployment; the manner and method by which the Namibia mission created (induced) a climate of consent to the operation which, 20 years ago, secured for Namibia her independence; or of the consent more or less coerced in Eastern Slavonia in 1996 by a powerful U.N. military force which was determined to use all necessary means to achieve its mission of peace enforcement[7].

Suffice it to say at this point that this issue is so important, and is as much so today as it has ever been, we need to see how this issue first arose, and how it was treated then. To know where we are in this regard, it is especially important to see where we started. To do this we will visit the birth of peacekeeping, and the simultaneous birth of the consent issue.

The Suez 1956 - The Birth of Peacekeeping
So far, we have had to indulge very much in a somewhat extraordinary policy … taking step after step in an atmosphere of great ambiguity.
- Dag Hammarskjold, to the UNEF Advisory Committee, 1957
The circumstances surrounding the launch of the first modern peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Emergency Force in 1956, illustrate several facets of this central issue, many of them surprising at the time, and some still today not fully appreciated.

The developments in the Middle East, especially with respect to the closing of the Suez Canal by Egypt, the Franco-British military response and the resulting disarray in the international community, are well documented and need not be re-told here. For our purposes, we can begin on October 30, 1956, with the veto in the Security Council, by France and Britain, of a U.S.–sponsored resolution calling upon Israel to withdraw from territories she had occupied in the wake of the Anglo-French invasion. A Soviet amendment designed to dilute the force of the original resolution was also vetoed. The next day, the Yugoslav representative offered a resolution, framed under the Uniting for Peace Resolution[8], to move the issue to an Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly – as this was a procedural matter, it was not subject to veto, and was passed over the objections of France and Britain. The Special Session convened on November 1.

In discussing the growing Middle East crisis with the Secretary-General, the Canadian Permanent Representative, Lester B. Pearson, had already broached the idea of a peace force. Hammarskjold was initially sceptical, but allowed Pearson to go ahead. Pearson eventually proposed to the General Assembly on 4 November, the following resolution:

The General Assembly … requests … the Secretary-General to submit … a plan for the setting up, with the consent of the nations concerned, of an emergency United Nations Force to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities.The resolution was adopted.

But there were other things going on (there always are): on October 24th, at the “request” of
the Hungarian government, Warsaw Pact forces had entered Hungary and were converging on Budapest. The Secretary-General had since October 22nd been quietly preparing an observer mission to Hungary, to which the U.S.S.R. had strenuously objected as a violation of sovereignty (whose they did not specify, and they had at any rate the “consent” of Hungary for their intervention[9]). Quite naturally, they perceived the proposed intervention in the Middle East as a highly dangerous precedent that, if they could not prevent, they might effectively derail. At 0800 hours on Sunday 4 November, Radio Budapest called on the world for help, but help there was none, and Radio Budapest closed down – for the next 35 years.

On 5 November, in an apparent (but transparent) move to strengthen the action in the Middle East, the Soviet Union proposed that the intervention should be an enforcement mission under Article 42 of the Charter.[10] As this had only been done once before in the history of the U.N. (establishing the U.N. Command in Korea in 1951), it was highly unlikely in this context that the member states would authorize such a mission (there was indeed to be only one other – in the Congo – in the next 35 years). Clearly, the Soviet proposal was not intended to strengthen the prospects for peace, but was based on a canny appreciation of the then-limits on, and the critical importance of, consent.

At about this same time, word was received that Israel had refused her consent to the Force’s deployment on Israeli territory, a serious weakening of the Force before it even deployed.[11] This latter restriction, from the outset plainly compromising the Force’s image of impartiality, was to have more serious consequences when fighting again broke out in the Sinai in 1967 (see below).

But, as the Middle East Force was finally deploying, there came one more twist on the consent issue. Canada had agreed to provide an infantry battalion, and the battalion was duly moved from its barracks in British Columbia by rail, 4,400 miles to Halifax, where it was to take ship to the Middle East. On the eve of their sailing, however, Nasser learned from a press release of the name of the regiment from which this battalion was drawn: they were “The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada”. Nasser was not having anything of the Queen’s on his territory, and the battalion returned, sadly disappointed, to their barracks. It was apparently an unpleasant surprise to the U.N. to find that, having secured the consent to the mission, the composition of the Force could be just as contentious – as late as 10 November Hammarskjold wrote to the Foreign Minister of Egypt to insist that such consent could not reside with one of the “hosts” without seriously infringing his own authority.

These were not the Secretary-General’s final words on the matter, however: “ … obviously,” Urquhart wrote, “as a practical matter, the UN must give serious consideration to the views and wishes of Egypt … and give them full weight in deciding on the composition of the Force”. [12] Writing to Burns, the Canadian officer who was to command the Force, Hammarskjold pronounced what may stand as a fundamental principle of consensual operations:

I frankly fail to see how, as constructed, the UN force could be instrumental in forcing on Egypt a solution of the Canal question other than one freely negotiated.[13]

Much later, in his report to the General Assembly on 24 January 1957, Hammarskjold observed that “The use of a military force by the UN other than under Chapter VII, the enforcement chapter of the Charter, required the consent of the states on whose territory the force was to operate …”.[14]

Ironically, and tragically, this Force was to founder, 11 years later, on just the issue of consent. In finalizing the stationing of the Force, the General Assembly had entered into what came to be known as “The Good Faith Agreement,” which stated, inter alia, that the Force could not be “stationed or operate on the territory of a given country without the consent of the Government of that country”. Egypt undertook to “be guided, in good faith, by its acceptance” of that resolution. In the course of a period of rising tensions between Syria and Israel, which led in turn to tensions between Egypt and Israel, the Egyptian Government, on 16 May, 1967, requested the withdrawal of UNEF. In discussions at the UN, the Secretary-General reminded the UNEF Advisory Committee “that the Force was on Egyptian territory only with the consent of the government and could not remain there without it”. [15] A request that UNEF might deploy on the other side of the line was (again) refused by Israel. [16] Now having nowhere else to go, the Force completed its withdrawal by 17 June, but not before 15 UN peacekeepers had been killed in the fighting which had broken out on 5 June, in what came to be known as the Six-Day War.[17]

Thus this first modern peacekeeping force encountered nearly all the consent issues which affect such operations today: the fullest consent of the parties in conflict, of the Security Council members and by the governments of the troop contributors, was essential to any intervention. Other issues such as freedom of movement of the force, its composition, its right of entry into the area of operations, the extremely touchy issue of the sovereignty of the “hosts” – all these issues were played then, and almost none were, nor have they since been, entirely satisfactorily resolved. All have arisen afresh with each new operation, and all have been settled differently (or not at all), and at great cost to the efficiency of the operation of the peacekeeping forces. Only one thing seems to have been fixed in the corporate mind-set of the U.N.: the Organization will almost always yield to the demands of “the hosts”, and sometimes also to the demands of one or more of the conflicted parties.

Conclusion

In the end, the varieties and types of consent, and those who contribute or withhold consent, and how consent was secured, seem to matter far less than the general issue of consent, and how that basic conflict between intervention and sovereignty is resolved. The considerations are those of the mandate, a sound and proper structure (including major equipments), the right of entry, freedom of movement – to name but a few. To the extent that all these issues of consent add up, the intervention has every chance of success. To the extent that they do not, the intervention will have reduced, eventually no, chance to succeed. In other words, consent will not guarantee success, but its absence or weakness will probably, eventually, contribute to failure. And just where do we stand in this respect in Chad/C.A.R./Sudan?

And so the questions not answered of those “consensual” peacekeeping forces still bedevil the modern peacekeepers – especially the “peace enforcers” - of our post-Cold War era. Since then modern, intrastate conflicts have raised new issues, to be layered on those yet outstanding from that first half-century of peacekeeping. Nevertheless, the fact is that the U.N., and most regional organizations, are not yet prepared to move beyond an innate and overriding concern for the sovereignty of member states. Weight is added to this reluctance to intervene internally in the affairs of states by a traditional and equally weighted concern for consent, especially of the “hosts”, to a peace operation or an intervention of any kind. Indeed, the issues of consent, domestic jurisdiction and sovereignty have fused into an almost immutable inertia of rest. This tendency to inaction is exacerbated by another tradition, which is that international and regional organizations do not criticize their members. Madeleine Albright has written that the response of the Burmese government to the tragedy of Cyclone Nargis, and the world’s apparent acceptance of the Burmese rulers’ failure to protect their own people, “illustrates three grim realities today: totalitarian governments are alive and well; their neighbours are reluctant to pressure them to change; and the notion of national sovereignty as sacred is gaining ground …”[18]

But perhaps, as we are revisiting the origins of things, we need to re-read Article 2.7 in its entirety:

Nothing … in the … charter shall authorize the UN to intervene in matters … essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state …

but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.

It’s all there, in the Charter of the United Nations, just as it was written more than six decades ago.

But when we hear of missions under-funded because that is all the Vth Committee will approve, under-staffed because that is all the member states will contribute, with weak mandates because that is the best that could be negotiated with the “hosts”, we have to ask ourselves if the Brahimi Report has been read by anyone, or if Article 55 and 56 of the Charter, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like R2P, really mean anything at all? It seems to me that what we learn from peacekeeping is that we do not learn from peacekeeping

Have we indeed moved beyond the Age of Consent? Are UNSCRs to be binding on member states? Does peace enforcement mean the same thing on the international stage as law enforcement does to us? Is R2P an “emerging new norm”? Are governments – especially today’s crowd of Lords of Misrule - finally to be held accountable for their treatment of their own people?

The record, as I see it, says: NOT YET!

[1] This paper has also been published in Peacekeeping in Chad, Guenther Greindl (Ed.), Blue Helmet Forum Austria, Vienna, 2009 (see pp. 113-126).[2] Kuehne, Dr. Winrich, How the EU Organizes and Conducts Peace Operations in Africa: EUFOR/MINURCAT, Report 03/09, The Center for International Peace Operations (ZIF), Berlin[3] Canadian Defence Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2, Baxter Publications, Toronto, December 1995, “Peacekeeping, Public Perceptions and the Need for Consent,” by Ingrid A. Lehmann (page 18).[4] ‘Peace Operations and the United Nations: Preparing for the Next Century’, by Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, in Conflict Resolution Monitor, Issue 1, Summer 1997, Bradford University (see ). Italics added.[5] Ibid.[6] Speigel Online, “The Option to Protect: The New Terms for Humanitarian Intervention”, by Richard Herzinger, www.spiegel.de/international/europe/o,1518, 13 April 2009.[7] See Lehmann on Namibia, Peacekeeping and Public Information: Caught in the Crossfire, Frank Cass, London, 1999, pp 28-51; Arbuckle in The Level Killing Fields of Yugoslavia: An Observer Returns, The Pearson Press, Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, 1996, pp 19-21, and Military Forces in 21st Century Peace Operations: No Job for a Soldier?, Routledge, 2006, pp 106-108, and Sokalski, Henryk, An Ounce of Prevention, United States Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, 2003.[8] The Uniting for Peace Resolution is also referred to as “The Acheson Plan”, after its originator, who intended to strengthen the provisions of Articles 10, 11, 14 and 20 of the Charter. This resolution provides that “if the Security Council, because of a lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security … the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately …” (see Basic Facts About the United Nations, Department of Public Information, New York, 1998, page 7 [footnote]). Article 18.2 of the Charter of the United Nations specifies that “Decisions of the General Assembly on important questions shall be made by a two-thirds majority of the members present and voting”. (Italics added). Thus, given a quorum, absences and abstentions would have no effect.[9] In fact, the CIA helped promulgate the fallacy that “Prime Minister Imre Nagy had requested the return of the Red Army”. See The Atlantic Monthly, “Imperial Follies”, by Christopher Hitchens, January/February 2007.[10] Urquhart, Sir Brian, Hammmarskjold, Harper Colophon Books, Cambridge, 1972, page 180.[11] Urquhart, Sir Brian, A Life in Peace and War, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 1987, page 136.[12] Urquhart, Hammmarskjold, page 187. Several years later, in 1964, Archbishop Makarios’ objection to black troops for UNFICYP was, very quietly, allowed to stand. Makarios, who might have had much in common with Nasser, did not object to a Canadian battalion from the “Royale Vingt-dousieme Regiment du Canada,” which was later followed by the same Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, to whose inclusion in UNEF Nasser had objected.[13] Urquhart, Hammmarskjold[14] Urquhart, Hammmarskjold, page 205. (Italics added)[15] The Blue Helmets: A Review of United Nations Peacekeeping, Third Ed., Department of Public Information, New York, 1996, pages 41 and 54.[16] Urquhart, A Life, page 214[17] Blue Helmets III, pp. 54-5.[18] The New York Times, “The End of Intervention”, by Madeleine K. Albright, 11 June 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/opinion/11albright.html

Managing Public Information in a Mediation Process

2010-01-22T22:14:00.000-08:00

Managing Public Information in a Mediation Process

Buy or Download
Issue Areas
Conflict Management and Resolution
Mediation and Facilitation
Post-Conflict Activities
Centers
Center for Mediation and Conflict Resolution

February 2009 Book by Ingrid A. Lehmann

Those who mediate international conflicts must communicate publicly with a wide variety of audiences, from governments and rebel forces to local and international media, NGOs and IGOs, divided communities and diasporas.
Managing Public Information in a Mediation Process helps mediators identify and develop the resources and strategies they need to reach these audiences. It highlights essential information tasks and functions, discusses key challenges and opportunities, and provides expert guidance on effective approaches. Examples from past mediations illustrate how various strategies have played out in practice.
The handbook sets out six steps that can be undertaken by mediators and their information teams before, during, and after peace negotiations:
• Analyze the Information Environment
• Plan Early for Information Needs
• Design a Public Information Strategy
• Implement a Communication Program
• Engage Civil Society•
Monitor, Evaluate, Assess
Following Managing a Mediation Process, this volume is the second handbook in the Peacemaker’s Toolkit series. Each handbook addresses a particular facet of the work of mediating violent conflicts, including such topics as negotiating with terrorists, constitution making, assessing and enhancing ripeness, and Track-II peacemaking.

R2P vs State Sovereignty: The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

2010-01-22T21:20:00.000-08:00

Presentation to Canadian Studies Centre Symposium

The University of Innsbruck

12 November 2009

R2P vs State Sovereignty: The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

- by James V. Arbuckle

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.[1]

- Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1775

Introduction

The responsibility for the conduct of states towards their people has long been a subject of controversy. None of any outsider’s business, said Hitler in 1933 (to the League of Nations), and Stalin in 1948 (to the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). However, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the General Assembly (GA) of the United Nations on 10 December 1948, and changed forever the concept of the relationship of a state to its people, and its responsibility for them.

Despite the apparent ease of the Assembly vote on rhe UDHR (there had been abstentions, but no votes against), the subsequent approval, ratification and implementation by the member states was by no means a forgone conclusion (nor is it yet). The Soviet Union objected to what it saw as setting a precedent for outsider interference in its domestic jurisdiction. They and eight other members abstained from the General Assembly vote, and the USSR was never a signatory to the Declaration. A good many member states tacitly agreed – and do still - with the Soviet view that the UDHR was a potential threat to their sovereignty (thus coincidentally agreeing also with Hitler and Stalin); among them were the United States and China, indeed, all of the P5 agreed on that one thing, if on nothing else: their own sovereignty, and for Britain that included her empire, was their primary concern.

The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe was born of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which entailes a “comprehensive view of security”, giving human rights equal weight with the more traditional military and political factors of peace and security. Thus human rights, a long-standing taboo in East-West relations, became by virtue of the Final Act a legitimate subject of dialogue[2]; the peace agenda might never be the same.

In any event the appearance of a policy and associated doctrine had been established, and history unfolded into the Twenty-first Century with that altered background.

Discussion

It was in this apparently altered climate that the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) released its report in December 2001 (see Annex A for summary). Now generally referred to as The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the document ostensibly became U.N. policy when it was embraced by the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, and by nearly all member states of the U.N., in September 2005. That “policy” as it was written is largely based on military action in accordance with Article 42 of the Charter[4]. However, it is today very clear that the Security Council will seldom authorize a forced intervention in a member state – the issues of consent of the “hosts” and respect for their “domestic jurisdiction” are as strong as ever.

The issue of consent as a factor in launching and maintaining an intervention arose with the first peacekeeping operation, the United Nations Emergency Force. This Force encountered for the first time the several aspects of the consent issue (then principally concerned with the consent of the “hosts”); the quick-fix solutions to the problems raised by this became, almost inadvertently, doctrine. The jumble of ad hoc doctrines which thus arose contributed much to failures to prevent and to protect in Rwanda in 1994 (where the consent of the troop contributors – in actual fact, the absence thereof - was an important factor). These failures are being repeated today in Darfur and in Zimbabwe and for essentially the same reasons, the central one being the traditional concern for host consent to the intervention. However, in the latter two, in addition to all the other problems, there has been added the issue of Security Council consent, as China has continually threatened to use her veto in matters affecting her clients, which include Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Notwithstanding, the promulgation of the doctrine of a responsibility to protect seems to portend a significant shift in the perception of the role of sovereignty, explicitly describing the responsibility of the international community to judge if, and to act when, sovereignty should on humanitarian grounds be set aside. Nevertheless, there has as yet been no operational manifestation of a paradigm shift in this regard, and no effective intervention has yet been mounted in, for example, Darfur. The Sudanese government has been left to dispute, to block, to refuse to consent to, any useful interventions, and has continually meddled in force structure and methods of operation, including restrictions on or denial of freedom of movement. There has been no operational response at all to the catastrophe in Zimbabwe. Common to most failures to protect and to prevent are dispute of the evidential facts by the “hosts,” who are in clear point of fact the perpetrators of crimes against their own people . Also common to both Sudan and Zimbabwe has been the culpability of neighbours and patrons, as seen by their inability or their unwillingness to restrain those governments. And in common with both emergencies, only the pressure of international public opinion on patrons and neighbours has any hope of creating the climate necessary to a truly effective intervention, in these cases principally China and South Africa: China supports[5], and South Africa has shielded from criticism, inter alia, Zimbabwe and Sudan.

In a special article written for the Washington Post and appearing on 26th January 2007[6], Lee Feinstein, the author of Darfur and Beyond: What is Needed to Prevent Atrocities, observed that

More than a year ago the United Nations adopted the “responsibility to protect.” The General Assembly’s endorsement of this revolutionary principle removes blind reverence for national sovereignty as an excuse to look the other way when innocents are being wiped out. In elevating this principle, the nations of the world said that they prioritize the right of people to live over the right of states to do as they please. The question now is whether this pledge was humanitarian hypocrisy, or did they have something in mind?

Feinstein concluded that “Universal adoption of the responsibility to protect has begun to remove the classical excuses for doing nothing in the face of mass atrocities. What is needed now is the capacity and the political will to back it up.” We might not want to hold our breaths on this one.

In the Charter of the United Nations (1946), Article 55 provides that “… the United Nations shall promote … universal respect for, and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all …” Article 56 states that “All members pledge themselves to take joint and separate action in co-operation with the Organization for the achievement of the purposes set forth in Article 55.” Now “promote” is not a very hard verb, but “pledge” does seem to demand and to expect something from those pledged. Then why UDHR two years later? “This universal declaration of human rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society … shall strive … to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and … to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance , both among the peoples of the Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.” This astonishingly ungrammatical sentence has no action verb at all, and not surprisingly has resulted in little action. And so, more than a half-century later, R2P.

So when do we say what we mean, and mean what we say? It seems we already did place a limit on our concern for “the peoples”, when we set forth, in Article 2.7, that “nothing in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state …”. And that we really meant, and that holds true to this day: this is the norm for international relations and for the operation of the United Nations.

The bare fact is that the U.N., and most regional organizations, are not yet prepared to move beyond an innate and overriding concern for the sovereignty of member states. Weight is added to this reluctance to intervene internally in the affairs of states by a traditional and equally weighted concern for consent, especially of the “hosts”, to a peace operation or an intervention of any kind. Indeed, the issues of consent, domestic jurisdiction and sovereignty have fused into an almost immutable inertia of rest. This tendency to inaction is exacerbated by another tradition, which is that international and regional organizations do not criticize their members. Madeleine Albright has written that the response of the Burmese government to the tragedy of Cyclone Nargis, and the world’s apparent acceptance of the Burmese rulers’ failure to protect their own people, “illustrates three grim realities today: totalitarian governments are alive and well; their neighbours are reluctant to pressure them to change[7]; and the notion of national sovereignty as sacred is gaining ground …” Two centuries ago Dr Johnson said that, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. Today we might update that by saying that “Sovereignty is the last refuge of government by scoundrels.”

I want here to digress briefly to express my admiration for the R2P report – the Commissioners have done a bold and a fine thing in writing it, and I am very proud that it was from the outset a Canadian government initiative – governments generally do all too little for us to admire. In the same manner, I greatly admire the Charter of the U.N., and especially the U.D.H.R. I think the Brahimi Report of fundamental importance, and the most important thing I have read on peacekeeping since the Charter. But I have in my introduction modified the term “policy” with terms such as “ostensible” and “apparent”; I am under no illusions that official papers and statements necessarily constitute operational policy, nor is the UN visibly inspired by any of them to action – not words, of which there are plenty – but action which might get the undivided attention of this seriously divided world. Resolutions often do not equal resolve.

In its effects so far, R2P seems not to be a policy describing what will be done, rather it shows tyrants and dictators and other monsters what probably will not be done: the principle of non-intervention will not yield to the international responsibility to protect; state sovereignty may imply responsibility of a government for the protection of its people but that does not denote an accompanying accountability for its failure to do so; state sovereignty is not being redefined in any operative sense. No “new norm” has emerged from R2P. On the contrary, and as you will hear from others in the course of this conference, what instead emerges is a lack of the will to protect; indeed there seems evident a positive will to non-intervention, “a negative thrust”. As William Butler Yeats expressed it, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”.

Indeed, that is becoming my judgment of international law in general. I think I can come out here and say that I am the father of a lawyer, and he and I have had many debates on the subject. When he says, as many do, that there is no such thing as international law, I say, perhaps not yet. When he says, as many do, that unenforceable laws are not laws, I reply that much of our laws of today rest on precedents. We hope we are today setting precedents in international law which will someday become norms, and we have to start somewhere. But lately I am beginning to doubt even that.

I have begun to wonder if the term international community isn’t another euphemism become an oxymoron, like organized labour, or life insurance, or state religion, or received wisdom, or reality television, or rap music. And what of Kyoto? So how serious are the delegates to Copenhagen, and how likely is it that this process will result in “new norms”? It seems that there is more force to parking regulations in Innsbruck than there is to the entire Charter of the U.N. Here, if you mispark, you will be cited and punished. You can negotiate, but it is probably a waste of time and most just accept the judgment and the penalty. The existence of the law, its appropriateness and its enforceability are at any rate not at issue when parking or misparking in Innsbruck today. Yet it is precisely these issues – the existence and the force of laws - that Omar al-Bashir and Robert Mugabe have been allowed to make the subject of debate, while continuing to offend.

We can take neither pride nor solace in the existence of a policy which proclaims responsibilities we cannot – or we will not - honour. The most painful of our sins are those of omission – the things we didn’t do; the promises we didn’t keep. The Bible warns us specifically of this: “… the good that I would, I do not.” In that sense, the very existence of R2P actually shames us all, for we have admitted that we know better, we maintain that we have learned, we do know what happened in Rwanda and in Bosnia over a decade ago. Nevertheless, right before our very wide-shut eyes, never again is again becoming yet again. It is enough, it has been said, for the worst to happen, if the best do nothing.

Nevertheless, it is quite unrealistic to expect that the United Nations will exercise a quasi imperial power over “dominions”, the sort of power, for example, which the United States government might exert over the several states – and did in Arkansas in 1957 and in Alabama in 1963.[8] Who can imagine the Security Council finding the governance of a member so objectionable that it would ever use military force to effect regime change, or even modification? What international instrument or body might under any circumstances authorize such measures? Clearly, the United Nations will never act as did the Americans (with their small array) in 1999 and in 2002.

So what is to be done, aside from nothing?

Gareth Evans has rightly said that a major problem with R2P “is the one-dimensional perception that R2P is only about military coercion.”[9] Notwithstanding that the tone of the report is predominantly military, Evans is right: there are other ways. As an alternative to the unlikelihood of a military response to a “domestic” emergency, I suggest that diplomatic sanctions, as provided for in Article 41 of the Charter, could circumvent the consent issue, and could be applied without serious collateral effects, the apprehension of which is another major inhibiting factor. Sanctions under Article 41 of the Charter have a far lower threshold for action, can be undertaken at several levels “jointly and separately” with little risk or cost, and do hold the promise of effective intervention. Thus an offending government might, upon due process, most suitably by the Security Council, but also by the regional organization, best by both in concert, be banned from all non-material international and regional interactivity, especially cultural, athletic and military. These measures, which I call diplomatic, non-material sanctions, should be far more effective than R2P’s largely empty promise of military intervention to prevent and protect. Something like this was attempted, with varying effects and effectiveness, in the cases of the Olympics in Berlin in 1936 and in Moscow in 1980; such measures were eventually completely successful in the anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa[10]. Although some such action was much discussed in the period immediately prior to the Beijing Olympics, it was too little and too late. China was able to use the Games to political and economic advantage, and to suppress dissent.

(But it’s really never too late: in Montreal in 1976, 25 nations withdrew from the Games as the opening ceremonies began: 20 of the first 25 were already in Montreal, and Kenya withdrew as the ceremonies were under way. They were protesting the IOC refusal to ban New Zealand, whose rugby team was touring South Africa at the time – South Africa had been banned from international sport since 1964. As the Games were under way, seven more nations withdrew.)

Diplomatic sanctions as I propose them here would be contagious, that is to say, any state or organization failing to observe the sanctions would themselves be sanctioned, nor would any other state or organization be allowed any prohibited contact with a sanctioned state. In addition to sanctions against governments, corporations and individuals may also be sanctioned.[11]

That is applying sanctions at the macro level, but obviously micro sanctions, those by individuals following their consciences, may have their effects, as the pre-Beijing Olympic protests by Mia Farrow and (inspired by her) Steven Spielberg. And Jake Lynch, a respected academic, has called on his university in Australia to break off relations with two Israeli universities; as he says:

I’ve led a call for the University of Sydney to cancel institutional arrangements with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Technicon University, in Haifa. Though small in scale, these contacts are symbolic of a commitment to help Israel enjoy normal relations with the outside world, despite its record. For this to cease now would be our contribution, however minor, to raising the social, economic and political cost of militarism as an alternative to dialogue and negotiation.[12]

Public opinion on the issues surrounding intervention – sovereignty, consent, and the role of the Security Council – has been changing, and changing perhaps more fundamentally and rapidly than are the usages of international diplomacy. This was made clear in a report based on the findings of a world-wide survey on attitudes on important international issues, conducted by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and by WorldPublicOpinion.org. Their report was made public on 5 April 2007.

On the question of the U.N.’s responsibility to protect, 76% of Chinese and 74% of Americans agreed that the U.N. has a responsibility to use force to protect peoples from severe human rights violations such as genocide.

On the U.N.’s right to intervene in such cases, 83% of Americans, and 72% of Chinese agreed that the U.N. had that right. When the question was asked of Darfur, 83% of Americans, and 58% of Chinese, agreed that the U.N. had either a right or a responsibility to intervene there.

When asked about decision-making in the U.N., 78% of Chinese admitted that respect for U.N. decisions could mean accepting a policy other than that which the country may have preferred. Asked to express a general opinion of the U.N., the Chinese were among the most positive of nations polled.[13]

As we approach the Vancouver Winter Olympics and the Football World Cup in South Africa, the “international community” faces once again some hard choices – will scoundrels be welcomed? The international community, and/or individual members, might seek opportunities to express themselves rather more forcefully on the question – or they might not.

Conclusion

On 10 December, 2008, the world celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the promulgation before the General Assembly of the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In that same week, we could also have observed the seventh anniversary of the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty – but we had nothing to celebrate. The stark fact we must instead confront is that, in those seven years and since, not one afflicted person of Myanmar nor of Zimbabwe has been helped by our new perception of an international responsibility to intervene in the affairs of any state. Although both an African and a concurrent U.N. mission have been launched in the Sudan, the Sudanese government has been allowed to bicker it into a state of general impotence to act at all effectively. Little does it matter how dismal, how criminally negligent, the “domestic” affairs of a “sovereign” state may be, the inertia of domestic jurisdiction, of equal sovereignty of states, and the fear of unintended consequences will yet withstand whatever pressures we may imagine we may bring to bear. We are not superior to those who failed to intervene effectively in Rwanda or in Bosnia. Indeed, the moral weight of our omissions today is greater and more serious for us than in those earlier cases, just because we have admitted that we understand the need for and the problems of intervention, and we pretend to know fairly precisely what it is that we should do – but are once again neglecting to do. Are our failures to protect fellow humans chronic? Is this the best we can do – is this the best we can be?

Gareth Evans has said:

It has taken the world an insanely long time, centuries in fact, to come to terms conceptually with the idea that state sovereignty is not a license to kill – that there is something fundamentally and intolerably wrong about states murdering or forcibly displacing large numbers of their own citizens, or standing by when others do, and that it is unacceptable for the rest of the world to allow that to happen.[14]

Brave words for a new century, but Madeleine Albright is closer to the mark when she says dictatorships are alive and well, the neighbours’ tolerance for domestic injustice is nearly boundless, and the inertia of state sovereignty has never been stronger. The bar for nonconsensual military intervention is still too high. Article 42 is not a practicable response to the obligation to protect. This sort of quasi-imperial power will not in any foreseeable future be exercised by the United Nations. But Article 41 may be a more flexible and effective response. Soft power resolutely applied may yet be more effective than the reluctant and sporadic application of hard power. I have interpreted the former to include measures which might create the essential consent to an intervention, and could include precluding an offender from all non-material intercourse among nations, especially cultural, athletic and military. This is what worked to end apartheid, and was quite probably the only thing which could have so succeeded. Non-material sanctions would be contagious, with the result that violators of sanctions would themselves be sanctioned.

I hope that I have in this presentation made it clear that I admire the spirit of R2P as much as I admire the efforts of the Commissioners who drafted it. I do however think it regrettable that the document, and the body of policy which it recommends, is so clearly concerned above all with non-consensual military intervention. That interpretation, which at least Gareth Evans has so eloquently regretted, is nevertheless an inescapable product of the Commissioners’ use of language. It is indeed regrettable that more consideration has not been given to “measures not involving the use of armed force”; I have suggested how that might have been, and may yet be, the operative application of R2P.

Ninety years ago, the Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats surveyed the Versailles Treaties with foreboding. Eventually, Winston Churchill would come to share his pessimism, describing the Treaties as too harsh to reconcile , but too weak to enforce. In 1919 Yeats wrote:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery

Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

The night can sweat with terror as before

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

And planned to bring the world under a rule…Perhaps the best we can say of R2P is that it is prescriptive – describing what should happen – and not yet descriptive – of what will be done. But we’ve been saying that about UDHR for over 60 years – as Gareth Evans has said, an insanely long time indeed

We may not really have a policy, but clearly we do now have some choices.

[1] Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was a philosopher, essayist, and author of a monumental English dictionary. He was in this case referring to American colonists, then loudly proclaiming their patriotism, and who would a year later declare their independence of Britain.[2] The Soviet Union abstention on UDHR was “nullified” by its accession to the Final Act, which embodies UDHR.[4] See Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, “1. The Policy Challenge”, paragraph 1.38 (“By far the most controversial form of … intervention is military, and a great part of this report necessarily focuses on that”), and “7. The Operational Dimension”, with sub-headings “Preventive Operations”, “Planning for Military Intervention”, “Carrying Out Military Intervention”, “Following Up Military Intervention” and “A Doctrine for Human Protection Operations.” Thomas Weiss, writing for the Academic Council on the United Nations System, says that ”the ICISS (report) was … a snap shot of issues surrounding non-consensual military action …” (The Academic Council on the United Nations System Informational Memradum, No. 60 – Summer 2004). Many of the study members, among them Gareth Evans, now seek to distance the Report from military actions: “Trouble comes from those … who play into the hands of the ideological critics … by being far too ready to think of R2P situations only in military terms … “ Gareth Evans Offers Five Thoughts for Policy Makers on R2P”, http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/index.php/eupdate/932 , 3/20/2009.[5] When touring Africa in April 2006, Chinese President Hu Jintao said that China will make “business deals without any expectation that governments will improve democracy, respect human rights or fight corruption. He told reporters in Nairobi, the last stop of his tour, that China follows ‘a policy of noninterference in other countries' internal affairs’." See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061201506.html, 13 June 2006. In 2008, China’s trade in Africa increased by 45%.[6]The Washington Post, “Beyond Words: Building Will and Capacity to Prevent More Darfurs,” by Lee Feinstein, January 26, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/. (Italics added)[7] An AU Summit resolved on 3 July 2009 that “The AU member states shall not cooperate … for the arrest and surrender of Sudan President Omar al-Bashir” (http://www.mg.co.za/, 4 July 2009). Thirty African states have signed the Rome Statutes, and are by this declaration in violation of their treaty obligations. Botswana is not one of them: "The government of Botswana does not agree with this decision and wishes to reaffirm its position that as a state party to the Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court (ICC) it has treaty obligations to fully cooperate with the ICC in the arrest and transfer of the president of Sudan to the ICC," said Foreign Minister Phandu Skelemani (http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-07-06-botswana-says-albashir-must-stand-trial-at-icc, 6 July 2009)
The more rational (that is, the least irrational) arguments against executing the ICC warrant on al-Bashir are just those reasons given for the non-arrests of Karadzic and Mladic in 1995-96 and ever since (see Arbuckle, James V., The Level Killing Fields of Yugoslavia: An Observer Returns, Pearson Press, Clementsport, Nova Scotia, 1998, pp 24-26.). Karadzic remained at large until his surrender in 2008; Mladic is at this time (July 2009) still free.[8] In both cases, forcing a defiant state government to accede to school integration.[9] The New York Times, “When to Step in to Stop War Crimes Causes Fissures,” by Neil MacFarquhar, www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/world/23nation.html, 24 July 2009[10] See Annex B[11] On July 16, 2009, The UN Security Council banned travel by and froze the assets of 10 North Korean individuals and businesses. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/16/AR2009071602417_p, 7/17/2009.[12] http://www.transcend.org/tms/article_detail.php?article_id=1311, 2 June, 2009[13] http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/incl/printable_version.php?pnt=340
[14] Gareth Evans, “The Responsibility to Protect: Creating and Implementing a New International Norm,” address to the Human Rights Law Resource Centre, Melbourne, 13 August 2007.

Annex A

to Presentation to Canadian Studies Centre Symposium

The University of Innsbruck

12 November 2009

The Responsibility to Protect

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) released their report in December 2001. Now generally referred to as The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the document became U.N. policy when it was embraced by the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations and the “new norm” was endorsed by 150 members of the General Assembly, in September 2005

R2P rests on two basic principles, and these are:

State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself; and
Where a population is suffering serious harm as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.The policy has three essential elements, and these are:

The responsibility to prevent;
The responsibility to react; and
The responsibility to rebuild.

R2P postulates three principles for military intervention:
The Just Cause Threshold. These just causes include large scale loss of life and large scale ethnic cleansing.
The Precautionary Principles. There are four: right intention; last resort; proportional means; and reasonable prospects.
Right authority. The Security Council is the only appropriate body to authorize a military intervention for human protection purposes.On the subject of military force as a last resort, the ICISS Commissioners observed that
the Charter’s strong bias against military intervention is not to be regarded as absolute when decisive action is required on human protection grounds. … members of the broad community of states do have a responsibility to protect both their own citizens and those of other states as well. … Military action can be legitimate as an anticipatory measure in response to clear evidence of likely large scale killing. Without this possibility of anticipatory action, the international community would be placed in the morally untenable position of being required to wait until genocide begins, before being able to take action to stop it. … military coercion can only be justified when the responsibility to protect has been fully discharged. This does not necessarily mean that every such option must literally have been tried and failed: often there will simply not be the time for that process to work itself out.[

Thinking of Haiti in the Night I am Robbed of Sleep

2010-01-22T21:12:00.000-08:00

THINKING ABOUT HAITI IN THE NIGHT I AM ROBBED OF SLEEP[1]

By James V. Arbuckle, O.M.M., C.D.

Introduction
The Haiti earthquake is not quite the greatest catastrophe, natural or manmade, which has occurred since World War II: the death tolls in Bangladesh in 1970, China in 1976 and 2004 and on the Indian Ocean in 2004, probably exceeded the presumed deaths in Haiti this week[2]. Much has or should have been learned form these earlier tragedies about disaster relief and about reconstruction, and these early days of inevitably and excusably frantic and uncoordinated efforts must now be giving way to more effective and sustainable programmes. Detailled planning for the next stages must begin now.

We have learned in the course of that calamitous 20th Century to think of disaster response as having three phases:

Rescue;
Relief; and
Reconstruction.

The distinctions among these phases may be less apparent than conceptual; certain it is that each is heavily influenced by the others and that they must be planned with this interdependence in mind. Indeed, it will be useful if planning for all three phases begins immediately and concurrently.

Before we proceed to examine each of these clusters of issues, we need to pause to take cognizance of four Leitmotifs which will run throughout this article; these are:

Security. This is no longer a chicken-or-egg question – restoring and maintaining a positive security environment, without which all efforts may be frustrated, and will at least be severely hindered, will be a vital function of the intervention.

Interagency Cooperation. This is neither the time nor the place for the various agencies who will respond to the emergency to compete with or attempt to ignore each other. Still less may they take the time and the effort to jockey for position or a share of the limelight. This is an extremely complex situation, and it can only be approached in a spirit of collegial cooperation and effective coordination of resources and capabilities. The grim reaper has no sympathy for omissions or for duplications. And the people care very little who helps them.

Indigenous Capabilities. These can neither be ignored nor romanticized. Haiti has not had in the best of times a very effective government, nor for that matter much else in the way of functioning institutions. This is not to deny the courage and the intelligence of many Haitians, and individuals will have much to contribute. Collectively, however, Haitian society is a very different story. The most should be made of local institutions, but they must be viewed realistically.

Public Information. Much harm can be done in the very early stages of the intervention by poor passage of information, especially to the local population, and this is exacerbated by the collapse of the infrastructure. Nevertheless, disinformation, rumour and unrealistic expectations are the vermin which emerge spontaneously at the scene of a disaster and, like vermin, these must be brought under control from the very outset. The overall coordination of the information programme must be done by the highest level of authority in the country.

Rescue
Timely and effective reconnaissance will be essential to the entry and operations of rescuers, and their findings will also heavily influence subsequent relief operations. Of course Haiti is well known – the U.N. has been operating there since 1994, and satellite imagery of the current situation has been shown on television around the world. Clearly however there is no substitute for detailed on-site reconnaissance of harbours, landing fields and roads. Whatever the urgency of the situation, it makes little sense to dispatch supplies which cannot be delivered effectively and quickly, nor stored securely. Most importantly, the capacity of Haiti to absorb aid, which was in normal times limited, was assuredly severely downgraded by the damage sustained, and this does not appear to have been initially as realistically considered as it ought to have been. The saying, “Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted”, has as its corollary that time not spent in reconnaissance will almost always exact a price later, and the price of rushing in unprepared can be very high.

Rescue operations will also normally take place in three stages; these are:

Surface Casualties. These will be those on the surface to whose rescue and removal there are few or no physical obstacles. This in no way indicates the seriousness of their situation: surface casualties may have fallen there or been injured by falling rubble, and they may have been or be in danger of being injured by more falling debris.

The Lightly Trapped. These casualties are usually on or near to the surface. Again, they may be very severely injured or dead, but they can usually be removed by manpower with simple tools. Great care must be taken in this rescue, which may be the first entry into the rubble, not to trigger secondary collapse.

The Heavily Trapped. These casualties will usually be fully buried. Their location may not be immediately apparent, their rescue will usually involve tunneling, and major equipment and specialist personnel will be needed. These more heavily trapped may, on the other hand, have escaped serious injury in the initial disaster, but their enemies are nevertheless shock and dehydration, and these may alone prove fatal.

Although the media initially made much of supposedly declining survival rates after 72 hours, and speculated about bulldozing the ruins at about that time, this was simplistic and premature. In the event, there were two successful rescues on Day 10, on 22 January, another on Day 11 and as we go to press on 28 January there has been one more live rescue on Day 15. In the Day 11 rescue, the man had been doing maintenance work in a hotel which collapsed on him. He was not seriously injured and was working in the hotel storeroom; he survived on beer and coke.

In fact, not all collapsed buildings collapse alike, and spaces and shelters will exist depending on the type and nature of the collapse.

This is not the place to elaborate on the architecture of collapse. Suffice it here to say that floors usually do not simply descend as parallel layers, but they fall at angles, forming spaces and shelters, such as close to a wall or a doorway, or under a stair well. A building plan will indicate to an experienced rescuer where these pockets might be, and will form the basis of the entry plan.

Too soon, however, the line on the chart indicating diminished life expectancy of those still trapped, will intersect the line indicating rising probability of disease due to decomposition, and it may be necessary for that and for other reasons to commence clearing the rubble. Although several rescue organizations have vowed to continue searching, that point of diminishing returns for effort appeared to have been reached on Day 11, 23 January, and that might well be the end of large-scale rescue operations.

Relief
Apparently, the rescue phase has now ended, but even before that, relief efforts will have become the dominant theme and activity. It is now that such issues as public information and inter-agency coordination will become most important, and the relations with the host country which are formed in this phase will be critical to the longer and more difficult reconstruction phase. There are already signs of strains and worse in several aspects of coordination and public information management: bickering and blaming, mostly to the media, about any aspect of the effort judged by someone to be somehow inadequate, are becoming a staple of the homeward appetite for bad news. Now is the time to establish clear guidelines for coordination and management of relief efforts, and not only for relief efforts, for relief and reconstruction must be a continuum, and the management architecture established now must be effective for the very long term. Coordination, probably best by the U.N., must be “true and comprehensive”, not just as a mediator among the NGOs and U.N. agencies, who are already squabbling among themselves and bashing the Americans, especially the American military. It seems at this time of writing that the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is moving into this role. It will be here that the long-term role of and relations with the Haitian government will take shape, and it is important to that relationship that it is clear that the international community is in this for a very long run. It is just as important that the Haitian authorities are prepared to accept what will at least at the outset amount to tutelage.

The “take-over” of the airport by U.S. military forces was immediately the subject of resentment and criticism, even though it was done at the urging of the President of Haiti. Nevertheless Brazil and France lodged official protests with Washington after US military aircraft were given priority at Port-au-Prince's congested airport, forcing many non-US flights to divert to the Dominican Republic. Brazil warned it would not relinquish command of United Nations forces in Haiti (this had not been suggested by anyone, and Brazil does not at any rate “command” the peacekeeping force), and the French Foreign Minister complained that the airport had become a “US annex”. The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières also complained about diverted flights.

It is not recorded that any of these complainers addressed their complaints to the U.S. forces in Haiti – most seemed content to speak about the U.S. forces rather than to them. Said Jarry Emmanuel, air logistics officer for the World Food Programme, to the New York Times, "… most of those flights are for the United States military. Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync." [3]. Just so, but what the critics seem to have missed was that, as of Day Four, there were over 100 landing slots per day at the airport, compared to about one-third that number in normal times. By 22 January, OCHA reported that that figure had again risen to 150 landings per day, although there were on that day over 1000 aircraft waiting to land. U.S. Engineers had by that time cleared the harbour of its most severe damage, and were receiving up to 250 containers per day; that figure is expected to rise to 350 per day by 25 January. Moreover, it seems that all-weather, day-and-night landings and take-offs, not normally available in Haiti, were being controlled from the U.S.S. Vincent. Finally, the priorities established by the U.S. military were 1) water, 2) distribution equipment, 3) food, 4) medical personnel and 5) medicines. All of which makes perfect sense, and it is unlikely that anyone else – French, British or, for that matter, the Brazilians – would have done it much differently. It is at any rate just this sort of direction which is vital to any operation, let alone one this complex, and it really matters much less who issues the direction than that there is effective direction. And of course to the people it matters not in the slightest who is in charge.

Coordinating mechanisms for multi-agency operations in a humanitarian emergency are entirely consensual and rely on the good will of the actors. Not surprisingly, such mechanisms are quite fragile. Interestingly, the United Nations had early and successful experience of this, inter alia in Haiti; as I wrote in my book:

The CMOCC (Civil-Military Operations Coordination Centre) of the United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH, 1994-99) was housed in a hangar at the airport, and was like a trade fair: one entered the hangar to find an information desk, a diagram of the Centre’s layout, and around the hangar were the booths of all the organizations and agencies who wished to be there. The area was secure and you could drink the water. Each day there were completely open briefings which might be attended by almost anyone who had any business there at all. At those briefings one might hear the most frank and intimate details of such issues as road and bridge states, de-mining, and health and security issues.[4]

If there is not at this moment a functioning CMOCC in Haiti, it is high time to reinvent it. It is hard to imagine anyone serious about their work who would stay away from that party.[5]

Clearly, a vigorous and pro-active public information campaign will be vital. There are already signs of the frustrations which arise from unrealistic expectations, which are the principal bugbear of a mission start-up. Inevitably this mission will like others before it suffer greatly from misapprehensions of what is intended and achievable, and in what time frames, and according to what priorities. People to whom nothing is happening at the moment tend to conclude, in the absence of information to the contrary, that nothing is just what is happening. If they happen to have their feelings of neglect and helplessness confirmed by the media – and there have already been more than enough media stories to just that effect – their patience may be the more quickly exhausted. The Americans especially are rather vulnerable to retellings of their history in Haiti, and those who usually do not want to see a relief operation “militarized” may at the same time question why the military are not doing more and doing it sooner. Thus an American military operation in Haiti must take great care with its message, both to the local and to the international audiences.

An important aspect of relief and reconstruction will be financial, and the international community, governments, NGOs and charities of all sorts are raising large sums, and there is confidence that this will be well spent and accurately accounted for. I will return to this last issue under “Reconstruction”. We must also however consider the matter of diaspora remittances.

Diaspora remittances around the world average from 10-25% of GDP in several developing nations. They often amount to over 80% of official development assistance. Migrants typically may be sending 10-15% of their incomes to their relatives. In the case of Haiti, about one million expatriates, 99% of whom earn less than $35,000 per year, remit $1.5 Billion annually, or nearly 30% of the GDP of Haiti; it is estimated that one in five Haitian households receives money transfers from overseas.[6] At the moment, these transfers are interrupted, and it is vital that they be resumed. However, the institutions making the transfers are unofficial, and not subject to regulation as banks are. But people who live below the poverty line do not deal with banks, and those with whom they are forced to do business charge commissions which can reach 20%. The movement of these remittances is now slowly recommencing, , but there are reports that the transfer agencies are charging a special "danger" transfer fee of 10%. Serious consideration should be given to some form of regulation of the transferring agencies, the largest of which is in fact an American company.

It is in this stage of operations that the relationship between the hosts and guests will have to be worked out, for it is these relationships which will largely determine the form and the scope of the reconstruction. For certain, the Security Council must consider carefully the direction to be given to operations in Haiti. The role of the peace force in subsequent operations must be considered carefully: a peace force has a very minimalist structure and a very specific mandate – need these be changed, and how? Now is the time to resolve these issues, carefully and objectively – this is not the time for ad hoc structuring, nor for mission creep tasking.

Reconstruction

Haiti is a failed state. We have known this for several years, and Haiti is not the only failed state in the world. However, the international community, despite its awareness of the problems of work in failed states, has not formally defined this term, there is no typology of failed or faltering states, nor is there any real set of procedures for working with such a government. Attempts to graft the necessary institutions onto a weak or non-existent government are usually sooner or later met with a “host” demanding respect for their “sovereignty” or their “domestic jurisdiction”, even – perhaps especially – when those terms have quite ceased to have any real meaning. The media will often take this up with cries of neo-colonialism or cultural imperialism. As host consent to operations remains the sine qua non of any intervention[7], the international community will demand of the intervention agencies that they respect and utilize indigenous capacities, often with no realistic appreciation of just what those capacities might – or might not – be. The catastrophe here has not been entirely natural – it has been exacerbated, and relief efforts are being hindered, by local government incompetence and corruption. The intervention agencies, if denied a realistic appreciation of their starting point, may find themselves in a can’t-get-there-from-here situation. When there is nowhere to go but up, having your feet on the ground is better than having your head in the clouds.

There is an urgent need to decide on the overall goals for the reconstruction of Haiti, and these goals are at the moment more important and more urgent than finances or time lines or – for goodness sake – exit strategies[8]. How would you rebuild Cite-Soleil? What model would you use? Who would live there? For that matter, where should Haitians live: in cities or in the countryside? Can the urbanization of Haiti be reversed? Can agriculture recommence? Can deforestation be reversed?

And it is here that we can use Jeremy Occam’s Razor for the first time, for it is just those foregoing questions which must be answered by the Haitians themselves. The Haitians must create of themselves a steering body to select and maintain the objectives of reconstruction. They must decide if and how the mistakes of the past may be set right, and how their recurrence can be avoided. Just how this is to be done – how financed and administered, how controlled and assessed – will at least at the outset be the tasks of outside agencies. But this work should also be a training vehicle to create indigenous capacities, with the outsiders eventually working themselves right out of their jobs. The key will be that Haitians do what they can, and outsiders do what they must, and neither does more of either.

There must be a fully independent and totally transparent, water tight accounting and auditing programme, to be set in operation very soon and operating for as long as reconstruction takes. Neither the United Nations nor any of its members need another Oil-for-Food Programme, but the sums to be spent in Haiti over the next decades will dwarf Oil-for-Food. A vigorous anti-corruption campaign will be an essential component of reconstruction. There must be an end to flaunting of building codes, and over-building on unsafe sites - whether this results from corruption or incompetence, or both, construction standards must be clear and clearly enforced.

The reconstruction of Haiti, founded on such tragedy and suffering, offers challenges and opportunities which will never come again.

Conclusions
Haiti has about the same population as New York City, where 3,000 died in the 9/11 attacks. If, as is currently being estimated, 200,000 died in Haiti, that is almost 70 times the 9/11 casualties. The Haitian holocaust will mark and shape this nation and these people for all time – but in what shape? and with what markings? What models will be adopted, what goals will be pursued, what means will be employed? These are the vital questions, not what will it cost, how long will it take, when will it end – still less: who will take the credit, who will get the funding, who will have the jobs for their people. The Haitian people have a duty to themselves, to select and to maintain appropriate goals and programmes to rebuild a country they will take pride in forever. The international community has an obligation to help them to achieve these goals, this reborn Haiti. Whatever it takes, for however long it takes.

Perhaps that might be the pledge that Haitians and their supporters around the world would exchange:

Whatever it takes!

[1] With apologies to Heinrich Heine, Nachtgedanken, 1843
[2] Thanks to Don Jazey for providing me with details of these earlier disasters. Of course, China and India have more than 150 and Bangladesh almost 20 times Haiti’s population. Moreover, as Tom DeFaye has pointed out, the disasters on the Indian Ocean and in China were in a relatively small portion of the country, and government, communications and infrastructure remained elsewhere and near at hand to function at their normal effectiveness. The 2004 Tsunami caused about 800,000 deaths in eight Asian and Southern Asian and four African countries whose populations total 1.75 billion. Current estimates of killed, injured and homeless in Haiti equal 25% of the population.
[3] See for example Squabbling hinders aid effort in Haiti, The Mail and Guardian, South Africa, 18 January 2010
[4] Arbuckle, James V., Military Forces in 21st Century Peace Operatons: No Job for a Soldier?, Routledge, Oxon, 2006, pp. 6-7.
[5] … but it has happened: NGOs stayed away in crowds from the UNMIK-KFOR CMOCC in Kosovo in 1999 (see Arbuckle, op. cit., page 7.
[6] Orozco, Manuel, Understanding the remittance economy in Haiti: An Inter-American Dialogue Paper, the World Bank, March 15, 2006
[7] See Arbuckle, op. cit., pp 102-8
[8] The Canadian Defence Minister has estimated that the Canadian Forces relief mission in Jacmel will last a maximum of two to three months.

Introduction to Peacehawks

2010-01-22T08:16:00.000-08:00

Peacehawks is a mom-and-pop academic ngo, founded by Ingrid Lehmann, Ph. D. and Jamie Arbuckle, O.M.M., C.D. Peacehawks is based on the principle that international peace can and must be enforced, just as are national and local laws. The international community has the firm obligation to protect the rights of peoples as defined by customary international law, taking "all necessary measures" to ensure the safety and security of nations and peoples, and "to maintain international peace and security."

It is clear that, in the long term, interventions will require the consent of the "hosts", however "all necessary measures" must be taken to include the creation of a climate of consent, whether by carrot or stick; consent may and sometimes must be induced. There is thus a requirement for muscular peacekeeping, and many occasions when nothing less will do. When peace descends, it is to be treated with respect, hence our logo (for which many thanks to Jason), which shows a hawk with an olive branch, and our motto:

Whatever it Takes!

About Ingrid

Ingrid A. Lehmann is the author of Peacekeeping and Public Information: Caught in the Crossfire (London: Cass, 1999) and many articles on issues of international political communication. She is a practitioner who worked in the United Nations Secretariat for over twenty-five years, including service in the Department of Public Information and in two UN peacekeeping missions. Ingrid has an MA in history from the University of Minnesota and an MA and a doctorate in political science from the University of Berlin. In 1993–94 she was a fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University; in 1996–97 she was a researcher at Yale University’s UN Studies Program; and in 2004 she was a fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. Ingrid now lives near Salzburg, Austria, where she has been teaching in the Department of Communication Science of the University of Salzburg.

About Jamie
Jamie Arbuckle is a Canadian but, like a lot of Canadians, he wasn’t born there. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, the result of an earlier Dayton Agreement. At 18 he immigrated to Canada and joined the Black Watch, as a private. Three years later, having become a Canadian citizen, he was commissioned a 2Lt in The Royal Canadian Regiment. He retired from the Canadian Army in 1995. In his 36 years in the Army, he served in airborne, mechanized and light infantry units. He served 12 years with Canada’s NATO Brigade in Germany, including two postings with the Bundeswehr. As a peacekeeper, he served three tours with the United Nations Forces in Cyprus (UNFICYP), and with UNPROFOR in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia in 1992.
Jamie was a member of the Faculty of the Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Nova Scotia from 1995 – 1999. From 1999 to 2003, he was a member of the Capacity Building and Training Section of the OSCE in Vienna. He was in that period principally responsible for assisting in the design and delivery of the New Member Induction Programme for the OSCE. He also delivered seminars on Conflict Management for the OSCE Secretariat in Vienna and for missions in Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania, as well as at the Austrian Peace Support Command, the German Foreign Ministry Training Centre in Bonn and at York University in the UK.
Jamie has written several articles on military issues for professional publications, and a book entitled The Level Killing Fields of Yugoslavia: An Observer Returns, published by the Pearson Press in 1999. He was the English copy editor for the Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations, published by Kluwer Law International in 2002. His book on the military role in humanitarian operations, entitled Military Forces in Twenty-first Century Peace Operations: No Job for a Soldier?, was published by Routledge /Taylor and Francis in 2006.
Jamie lives in the Salzkammergut in Austria.