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Review
The
Silence of the Security Council
in the 1990s
Why
did it fail to deal with the
most destructive conflicts?
By
Jan
Oberg
TFF director and
co-founder
Thirty-one year old Virgil Hawkins'
dissertation is a treasure of information and solid
analysis at a time when the largest reforms of the United
Nations since its establishment are being discussed.
Although not his aim, Hawkins's book could be said to
make the case for the most important UN reform of all:
learn from earlier mistakes and get engaged in the most
important conflicts; take on the conflicts that cost many
human lives and make, finally, the UN an organisation for
all humankind not just for the few.
The truth Hawkins tells us is this:
the Council has failed miserably to respond to the
conflicts that cost most lives and concentrated on minor
ones - because of members' narrow interest policies.
Globalisation takes place in the economic and military
spheres of international society - but there is not yet
anything resembling a globalised ethics or
conflict-management.
Peace
enforcement and the definition of war
By peace enforcement Hawkins means
the use of limited force (or the threat of force) to
coerce parties to a conflict to abide by their agreements
or UN Security Council resolutions. His focus is the
conflicts in the 1990s, i.e. the period in which this
tool became more available to the Council.
And his basic assumption is that a
conflict's importance should be measured by, broadly
speaking, the number of people who perish over time. His
definition of conflict is close to that of SIPRI's but
differs from it in that he includes also non-violent
conflict-related deaths, i.e. not only those killed by
bombs and bullets but also the victims of, say,
conflict-related starvation and disease - in other words,
war's long-term social or societal function. This is
important because we know from cases such as Somalia and
the Sudan that the use of starvation as a weapon in war
zones is important.
Also different from other studies,
Hawkins counts deaths cumulatively rather than the number
of deaths or wars per year. And then he goes meticulously
through the difficulties in getting reliable data and
comparing them. For instance, he points out, that when
NATO rallied support for its bombing of Yugoslavia in
1999, the U.S. State Department implied that the number
of Kosovo Albanian casualties at the hands of the
Yugoslav army, police and militia was between 100,000 and
500,000. Five months of investigation after the bombing
revealed 2,018 bodies. So war propaganda is another very
important factor to take into account - which is the
reason that Hawkins bases his study on an impressive
amount of different data (and sums them up in original,
illustrative self-made graphics at the end).
Which
were the really serious conflicts in the
1990?
So what does he tell us? That 89%
of the war dead in the 1990s were found in Africa, 5% in
Europe, 4% in Asia, 1% in the Middle East and 1% in the
Americas. More than 5 million people died in the wars in
Africa, 1,3 million in the DRC and 1,1 in the Sudan
alone. Says Hawkins, "Conflicts consistently portrayed in
the media as major conflicts, such as those in Kosovo
(8,000-9,000 deaths, 2,000 of which occurred prior to the
NATO bombing), Israel-Palestine (2,710 deaths), East
Timor (1,000 deaths), Northern Ireland (fewer than 400),
were in fact, relatively speaking, extremely minor. The
level of deaths in some of these conflicts is less than
one-thousandth of that in some of the major wars."
The Great Lakes was, he says, "the
most conflict-prone region based on the level of conflict
in terms of deaths" anywhere in the world. And this is
how the conflicts can be ranked:
DRC, Sudan, Rwanda, Angola,
Somalia, Zaire, Burundi, Bosnia, Liberia, Algeria,
Afghanistan, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Tajikistan, Russia
(Chechnya), Ethiopia, India (Kashmir), Sierra Leone, Sri
Lanka, Iraq (Gulf War), Azerbaijan, Turkey, Peru, Congo,
Columbia and Croatia - the latter being so central for
European affairs, media and the UN.
Blurred
mandates, national interest and other causes of the
malaise
The reader will gain many insights
from Virgil Hawkins's careful study of the Security
Council, the level of its responses, the mandates given -
and not given - to deal with the world's conflicts. His
discussions - partly based on interviews with diplomats
at various missions to the UN - of issues such as
unrealistic mandates, the (mis)use of force and what is
called mission creep, all land at the right spot. Here is
an example of Hawkins' style and punch:
"The Security Council did an untold
amount of damage to the credibility of the UN
peacekeeping operations by adopting mandates that sent
peacekeepers into conflict zones in which there was no
peace to keep; the deployment of peacekeepers into an
active conflict is obviously a contradiction in terms.
This was particularly the case in Somalia and Bosnia,
where the situation demanded mandates for peace
enforcement, and the presence of peacekeepers were
clearly inappropriate. On the consequences of such a
decision, General Sir Michael Rose noted, "Where
conditions for peacekeeping are not met, but peacekeeping
as opposed to a peace enforcement operation is mounted
anyway, there is the very real danger that the result
will be, at best, 'mission creep' in its worst sense, and
at worst, paralysis [sic] and accusations of
impotence being levelled at the commanders on the ground
and at the UN as a whole." UNPROFOR in Bosnia suffered
from both results." (p. 106). And about the peacekeeping
mission in Sierra Leone in 1999, immediately after
Kosovo, Hawkins says that it showed "how little it
[the Security Council] had learnt from its
troubled experiences in blurring the line between
peacekeeping and peace enforcement."
Hawkins' analyses lead him to
conclude that what most often stand in the way are
national interests among powerful member states -
interests in getting the UN engaged (and making it fail
by blurred mandates and making ridiculous insufficient
contributions to the decided missions, one may add) and
interests in avoiding that the UN, i.e. the world
community and conscience, gets involved in a conflict.
And then there is sheer ignorance and indifference,
particularly when it comes to conflicts in Africa, as
shown above.
Media
at war
Hawkins also discusses the
so-called CNN Factor. His conclusion is that the media
cannot change priorities of governments but reinforce
them beyond proportions and they can also, by neglecting
certain facts, perspectives and whole conflicts, add to
the world body's indifference vis-à-vis human
suffering. Generally, the media focus intensely on only
one or two conflicts, and those which are of political or
other interest to leading Western countries and where
they are engaged. The out-of-any-proportion media
attention to Kosovo in 1999 at a time when wars were
about to rage or actually raged in the DRC,
Ethiopia-Eritrea, Sierra Leone speaks for itself, and is
backed up by both reference to media analyses elsewhere
and Hawkins own study of the coverage of these conflicts
at the time in the New York Times.
Here, perhaps, one would have liked
to see a deeper account of what might be called the
military-government-media complex, encompassing the ever
increasing influence of "consultancy" forms and marketing
corporations that are paid to take part in psychological
warfare and drive public opinion into support of this war
or that. I am inclined to think that Hawkins here
underestimates not the media but the use by various
actors of the media. Anyhow, this is not a study of media
and war.
The UN
must choose, but not on these criteria
Be this as it may, Hawkins does not
- naively - arguing that the UN could get engaged in all
conflicts around the world and succeed, if only. There
are many reasons why the world, including the UN, is not
a perfect place, and probably cannot be. All problems and
conflicts can not be addressed and solved so selectivity
can hardly be avoided. One reason is that it is hard to
strike a balance between peace and justice. Another is
physical, practical limitations, lack of the necessary
resources such as airlift capacity and logistics.
Countries that "ought" to accept UN peace operations on
their troubled territories tend to not do so because of
being afraid of losing their sovereignty (and, we may
add, their war leaders fear losing their power). If we
think of a ratio of, say, two to six peacekeepers per
thousand inhabitants, about 40,000 should be deployed to
Angola and over 200,000 to the DRC, etc. It is simply not
possible. But we could do better than we do, Hawkins
reminds us.
His excellent book raises the
question, therefore: given that we can't do everything we
should in all the trouble spots of the world, what should
guide us instead of the present narrow(minded) national
interests among the strong, biased media attention and
sheer ignorance about the proportions of human
suffering?
If we begin to grapple with that
question, there would not only be a discussion of reforms
of the UN but also of reforms within each member state -
on how to honour its commitment to the world body and its
visionary Charter. And that would change the world.
Six
excellent proposals for a better UN: Will anybody listen?
Fortunately, Hawkins towards the
end of the study - which, by the way, is about half
analyses and half documentation of the conflicts, the UN
mandates and SC resolutions - draws some excellent
conclusions. But not only that - where most PhDs stop -
he moves on to offer six very well argued and, I think,
wise recommendations:
1. Greater utilisation of
diplomatic power by members of the Security
Council.
2. Greater development of
regional peace enforcement capabilities.
3. A more balanced handling of
foreign affairs in the news media.
4. Greater use of 'celebrity'
peacemakers.
5. Cautious use of robust
peacekeeping.
6. Robust capability before
robust mandates.
The conclusions of this study are
sad: the world community's leading decision-makers
operate on indifference to human suffering where it
matters most and use the UN peace-making role mainly for
their own purposes.
Given this fact, Hawkins
recommendations seem to me to be a new and much better
Agenda for Peace than the old one that did, in effect,
lead to so much of the intellectual and moral trouble for
the UN the 1990s by blurring the distinction between
peace-keeping (basically non-violent) and peace
enforcement (bombing powerful actors don't like, to put
it crudely).
The world should listen to the
message of this little-known study from Osaka University
by an Australian who now serves as adviser to NGOs such
as the Association of Medical Doctors of Asia and
presently serves as a humanitarian worker in Zambia, in
Africa, the place we should all pay much more attention
to - if human suffering and peace is important to
us.
Virgil Hawkins
The Silence of
the UN Security Council.
Conflict and Peace Enforcement in the 1990s
European Press Academic
Publishing, Firenze, Italy
ISBN 88-8398-026-3
316 pages, 30,00 ¤
Order the book from the
European
Press Academic Publishing.
©
TFF & the author 2004
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