UNITED NATIONS AND MODERN CONFLICTS
The United Nations has had a troubled life so far. The international organisation of states was founded in 1945 as a method of facilitating cooperation between states and the advancement of international security and peace. Sixty years on the UN does not appear any closer to this goal than it did at its conception, and the UN has continued to become increasingly incapable of addressing modern conflicts. The post-Cold War time period has been notably difficult for the UN. With the demise of the Soviet Union, it was asserted that this was the UN’s opportunity to take on it’s role as the “guardian of international peace and security” now that the Soviet Union was no longer hampering efforts. The rhetoric was described as being “euphoric, utopian and short” . The following two decades saw a notable increase in the number of UN peacekeeping missions – with a massive financial and human expense and very few positive results to show for it.
One of the issues faced by the United Nations now, however, is that the nature of conflicts has changed drastically since the Cold War days. First termed by Mary Kaldor, The New Wars Theory suggests that there is a quantifiable difference in warfare before and after the end of the Cold War. Whereas “Old Wars” revolve around the struggle to control territory, resources and the expansion of a state’s ideology, “New Wars” focus on the struggle to control the identity of the state and its people New Wars are low-intensity conflicts that involve a vast range of transnational connections, non-governmental actors and new strategies of warfare.
The UN has only recently been able to put itself in a position where it is capable of handling Old Wars. It has taken the UN over thirty years of effort to even define what interstate aggression really is, and even now the UN is sporadic at best when it comes to condemning cases of aggression between states . The UN is acknowledged as being least effective in disputes when the two belligerents are non-aligned states, where there is a high international acceptance of these conflicts to continue without external interference. Conversely, the United Nations is generally the most effective in cases where the belligerent is a Western state (The big exception being the United States) initiating a dispute with a non-aligned state . If the UN is still struggling to piece together how to best deal with State vs. State aggression, it is difficult to believe it will be capable of keeping up with the rapidly changing dynamics of modern warfare. The UN, founded in the age of state vs. state conventional warfare, is now faced with conflicts it was never designed to handle where there are “No fronts, no campaigns, no bases, no uniforms, no publically displayed honors, no points d’appui (starting point), and no respect for the territorial limits of the state” .
This means there is a critical issue within the United Nations Peacekeeping program, where there are often no long-term solutions in place by the time the peacekeeping force arrives. The UN peacekeeping solutions are often “short-term Band-Aids on deep wounds that have been festering for generations” . By the time a peacekeeping force has had boots on the ground long enough to truly understand the issues involved, they are almost at the end of their operational deployment . This means that there is a failure for the UN peacekeeping forces on the ground to truly understand any of the issues at stake at any level, and they will struggle to help solve conflicts that have their causes rooted in deeper grievances or issues than a simple land grab.
Compounding the inability of the United Nations to administratively and conceptually deal with New Wars, the UN lacks any sort of hard military power necessary for peacekeeping operations. Many states simply refuse to contribute military power to the UN missions out of a general distrust to the UN and NGO’s in general. It has been noted that UN peacekeepers “are traditionally too lightly armed to outfight the combined forces of every regional warring faction in the mission area. Consequently, they exercise no real coercive or punitive power” . The top contributors to UN Peacekeeping missions are in fact Bangladesh (10,736 personnel), Pakistan (10,691), India (8,935), Nigeria (5,709) and Egypt (5,458) . This is an interesting situation, because the top military contributors to the UN are states that are very rarely known for their military prowess. It has been suggested that most major contributing states are not doing so for the sake of the UN mission, but are doing so for the financial reasons and for the diplomatic benefits of earning prestige within the UN system . The UN pays out a set amount of money to contributing nations for each soldier contributed, which poses two challenges. Firstly, a number of poorer states may deploy personnel to UN Peacekeeping operations as a method of turning a profit, as the UN pays states $1,028USD per soldier . The second suggestion is that with such a meager compensation from the UN, more wealthy countries will be unwilling to contribute professional soldiers to peacekeeping operations.
The United Nations has also been heavily criticized for it’s bureaucratic inefficiencies. Roméo Dallaire was the Commander of the ill-fated UNAMIR mission to Rwanda in 1994, where an understrength contingent of UN peacekeepers was unable to intervene during the Rwandan Genocide because of its limited jurisdiction and mandate to act. It took the UN Security Council six weeks to adopt a resolution which provided aid to the UNAMIR force, but by that stage it was too late, and a failure of the UN to act quickly resulted in the mass murder of up to 800,000 Rwandan people. Dallaire has been particularly outspoken in his criticism for the UN, which he describes as being completely different to any he had ever encountered in the military before:
"He told me the UN was a 'pull' system, not a 'push' system like I had been used to with NATO, because the UN had absolutely no pool of resources to draw on. You had to make a request for everything you needed, and then you had to wait while that request was analyzed...For instance, soldiers everywhere have to eat and drink. In a push system, food and water for the number of soldiers deployed is automatically supplied. In a pull system, you have to ask for those rations, and no common sense seems to ever apply."
During the Sierra Leone Civil War, failure on the United Nations’ part to act resulted in the Sierra Leonean government hiring a Private Military Company called Executive Outcomes to contain and prevent the human rights atrocities being committed by the RUF during the war . Despite it’s huge successes, Executive Outcomes was forced out of the country due to political pressure from the UN. It is worth noting that the largely successful Executive Outcomes was costing Sierra Leone (And by proxy, the International Monetary Fund) $1.8 million a month. By comparison, the failed UNAMSIL Peacekeeping mission cost $51 million a month . When EO left the country, it left the largely untrained, unprepared and unwilling UNAMSIL contingent in sole charge of the conflict. What followed was a brutal rout in which the RUF seized control of the country, humiliating the international community and the UN. It was not until the return of the private soldiers and the British military that the UN mission was fulfilled.
Simply put, the United Nations is incapable of undertaking military action under it’s own banner as long as the contributing states can only provide poorly trained, equipped soldiers who have little understanding or direction in the conflict they are ordered to contain. UN operations have a history of being hamstrung by bureaucratic inefficiencies and an inept military force. While past conflict involved clear distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, the UN is now facing situations where there are no distinctions at all, and warzones are rife with criminals, paramilitaries, terrorists and mercenaries. The UN has not proven to be able to rapidly evolve to meet the changing dynamic of warfare, and as a result it is an outdated state-centric organisation is a very different environment. The UN is better suited to act as a forum for international diplomacy and cooperation between states rather than as an international interventionist military force.
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