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An outstanding article run in the Ottawa Citizen:
http://server09.densan.ca/archivenews/050906/cit/050906bn.htm
Peacekeeping, R.I.P.: Lethal force is often necessary to quell today's conflicts. It's not enough just to stand between opposing sides any more.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KINGSTON - In the summer of 1992, a Canadian soldier wearing a blue helmet and equipped with a sniper's rifle engaged and killed armed belligerents intent on interfering with UN forces who were securing the Sarajevo International Airport. The soldier's battalion had recently forced its way from Croatia to Sarajevo by threatening to assault, using armoured vehicles and missiles, defended roadblocks placed in its path by various factions in the three-way civil war. The Canadian battalion in Sarajevo was provided with access to the aerial striking power of an American aircraft carrier cruising the Adriatic Sea, if required.
In the spring of 1993, the Canadian Airborne Regiment, an aggressive light infantry unit structured and trained to parachute into enemy rear areas, deployed to Somalia with elements of an armoured regiment to coerce local forces in order to facilitate the delivery of food in that starving country. Dubbed The Clan that Never Sleeps by the locals, the Airborne Regiment, conducting air-mobile operations with Twin Huey and Sea King helicopters, established a heavily armed presence in Belet Huen north of Mogadishu, disarming local forces and protecting relief efforts.
Despite the fact that Canadian government officials and media of the 1990s called the operations in Bosnia and Somalia "peacekeeping missions," they were something very different from Cold War-era peacekeeping. The UN Protection Force II (UNPROFOR II) in Bosnia and the United Task Force (UNITAF) in Somalia were something new, something for which there was, at the time, no agreed-upon lexicon in the Canadian Forces, the Department of National Defence, or any of the other national-security policy bodies in the Canadian government. At best, UNPROFOR II and UNITAF were akin to "armed humanitarian interventions." But they were not UN peacekeeping missions. They were the prototypes for what the new 2005 Canadian international-policy statement ("A role of pride and influence in the world") calls "stabilization operations."
Why, exactly, are these distinctions important? Are not all Canadian military personnel "peacekeepers"? Has UN peacekeeping not been the stock in trade for Canadian soldiers since Lester B. Pearson invented peacekeeping in 1956 during the Suez Crisis? Isn't our national identity based on the fact that we do peacekeeping while others fight wars? Are we not morally superior because Canada engages in peacekeeping? Will we lose that moral superiority if we engage in operations other than peacekeeping?
There are inherent dangers in an unhealthy adherence to mythology. Mythology distorts. Mythology pigeonholes. Mythology produces blinders, it limits action. In the 1990s, the mythology of Canadian peacekeeping produced unrealistic expectations that, when they could not be met, merely produced obfuscation and disillusionment.
Images on television readily distorted the complexities of military operations in the 1990s. If it wore a blue helmet and drove around in a white vehicle with black UN markings on it, it was a "peacekeeper." If it handed out teddy bears to starving children, it was conducting "peacekeeping." How, people asked, could UN peacekeepers in Rwanda not stop the carefully organized rampage against the Tutsis? How, the people asked, could peacekeepers be handcuffed to Bosnian ammunition dumps and used as human shields? How, they wondered, could the peacekeepers not bring peace?
What the people didn't understand, and nobody was willing or able to tell them, was that UN peacekeeping as it emerged during the Cold War was obsolete, ineffective, and inoperative in the post-Cold War era. It was as "done" as the Soviet empire, except nobody had stuck a fork in it until Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda.
Those who propagate the mythology of Canadian UN peacekeeping focus exclusively on the year 1956. Ostensibly, a neutral, impartial Canada decided to lead the international community in stopping imperialist aggression undertaken by Britain and France against helpless Egypt, a situation that threatened to bring the world to near-nuclear war when the Soviets prepared to intervene. Mild-mannered Canadian diplomat Mike Pearson saved the day with a speech in the UN General Assembly proposing that a UN force be interposed between the belligerents. Thus UN peacekeeping was born and Canada / the Liberal Party had the key role in its creation.
This fairy story might make a nice Heritage Minute and it might be easier to impose on Canadian students than explaining to them the dangerous nature of the Cold War, Canada's deep involvement with nuclear weapons and the finer points of NATO strategy to stave off Communist totalitarianism.
UN peacekeeping was used during the Cold War to freeze a conflict between two countries in place. This was so the conflict in question would not escalate and produce superpower involvement. Superpower involvement could have nasty ramifications, like nuclear war. Indeed, and it is clear from declassified Canadian policy documents of the day, UN peacekeeping during the Cold War was used to fill power vacuums in the decolonizing Third World to stave off Soviet and Chinese influence. UN peacekeeping was an adjunct to Canada's NATO geopolitical strategy.
The withdrawal of the Communist empire, however, left local power brokers to their own devices. These individuals capitalized on the potential for violence between ethnic groups and actively stimulated ethnic warfare in bids for power. The first to go was the Balkans, followed by the Horn of Africa, and Cambodia. UN forces brought in to monitor separation agreements found themselves caught between heavily armed warring factions that reported to no internationally recognized authority.
At the same time, changes in information and media technology brought these situations into Western living rooms with minute-by-minute coverage. The ability of interest groups to manipulate and mobilize public opinion had a dramatic effect on demands for international intervention, particularly the humanitarian variety.
In many cases, the UN forces were outgunned and hampered by restrictive rules of engagement. The Cold War peacekeeping mentality -- that is, freeze the situation in place -- didn't work, nor did the use of military force as a blunt instrument against what amounted to dispersed, heavily armed local microgovernments. Diplomacy could not work: there was no state to deal with.
In addition, strategic objectives and alternatives were not thought through, particularly in Somalia. Once the forces were deployed and were in the process of coercing the factions, what next? Was the UN supposed to make the country a protectorate? Was it supposed to hold elections and turn the country over to the winners? Or was the UN supposed to withdraw its forces once public opinion was distracted with some other tragedy?
In many cases, the UN forces came under fire and either stood in place and took casualties, or departed, taking casualties on the way out.
The problems in Bosnia and Somalia were bad enough, but then there was Rwanda. A UN disengagement monitoring force, established between a government and a rebel group, was swept up into an ethnic war that in days escalated to genocide. The UN mission was not equipped or mandated to stop genocide. The unwillingness by the international community to reinforce it or send in an intervention force, particularly after the debacle in Somalia, meant that the follow-on mission was merely there to clean up the bodies.
Unlike Bosnia and Somalia, Rwanda had no Cold War context: There was no power vacuum. This was a straight-out ethnic fight, in a non-strategic area, with UN forces caught in the middle.
By 1995, therefore, UN peacekeeping was as dead as the victims in Rwanda or Srebrenica. These new missions, mistakenly labelled "peacekeeping," were lumped into the mass grave of history.
The replacement for UN peacekeeping was, however, born out of the ashes of Bosnia. A NATO-led force called the Implementation Force (IFOR) moved in to take over from the exhausted and overrun UNPROFOR. IFOR was, using the terminology of the day, "robust." It had firepower and was willing to use it. It had mass. It was equipped to coerce armed factions. It was logistically supportable.
IFOR brought reconstruction co-ordination with it as well, and its successor organization, Stabilization Force (SFOR) developed a long-term strategy to disarm, rebuild and reintegrate Bosnia. IFOR and SFOR imposed peace and brought about stability.
So far, the most successful stabilization mission is SFOR in Bosnia. It took 14 years to get to the point where SFOR could be withdrawn in the fall of 2004. The lesson to take from the SFOR experience is that there are no short-term solutions.
But contrast this to peacekeeping in Cyprus. Established in 1964, the mission still exists, but there has been no movement, no solution. The situation is still frozen in place. Why is it a more complex, more violent situation like Bosnia can be brought to some form of positive resolution and a comparatively minor situation like Cyprus cannot?
Are stabilization operations more dangerous than Cold War-era interpositionary peacekeeping? The record would suggest that Cold War-era peacekeeping was a hazardous undertaking: Canadian soldiers were killed by mine strikes, vehicle accidents, beatings, outright assassination or casual shooting by belligerent forces.
On the whole, Canadian forces engaging in stabilization operations face a far more lethal environment in terms of belligerent armament, but they are in a position to take pre-emptive action and respond to threats with lethal force, unlike those serving in UN operations in the 1950s and 1960s.
On the other hand stabilization operations are less passive than peacekeeping, which increases exposure to risk by enemy action as well as transportation accidents.
Canadians, I hope, understand that today's operations require the use of lethal force and are no longer beguiled by the passive nature of "peacekeeping." Indeed, the new policy documents recognize this shift in attitude. Though there are some aficionados who are nostalgic for the salad days of UN peacekeeping and wish to bask in past glories, the rest of us have moved on and do not wish to be handicapped by mythology.
The acceptance of stabilization operations as accepted Canadian policy is indicative of a more mature Canadian approach to the lethal word that we live in, and not some utopian UN fantasyland. It is gratifying to see that the Canadian government finally thinks so, too.
Sean M. Maloney teaches in the war studies program at the Royal Military College of Canada.
The full text of this article appears in the September issue of Policy Options (www.irpp.org).
PUBLICATION: The Ottawa Citizen
DATE: 2005.09.06
EDITION: Final
SECTION: News
PNAME: Arguments
PAGE: A17
BYLINE: Sean M. Maloney
SOURCE: Citizen Special
DATELINE: KINGSTON
Does anyone need anymore explanation why traditional peacekeeping is extinct?
http://server09.densan.ca/archivenews/050906/cit/050906bn.htm
Peacekeeping, R.I.P.: Lethal force is often necessary to quell today's conflicts. It's not enough just to stand between opposing sides any more.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KINGSTON - In the summer of 1992, a Canadian soldier wearing a blue helmet and equipped with a sniper's rifle engaged and killed armed belligerents intent on interfering with UN forces who were securing the Sarajevo International Airport. The soldier's battalion had recently forced its way from Croatia to Sarajevo by threatening to assault, using armoured vehicles and missiles, defended roadblocks placed in its path by various factions in the three-way civil war. The Canadian battalion in Sarajevo was provided with access to the aerial striking power of an American aircraft carrier cruising the Adriatic Sea, if required.
In the spring of 1993, the Canadian Airborne Regiment, an aggressive light infantry unit structured and trained to parachute into enemy rear areas, deployed to Somalia with elements of an armoured regiment to coerce local forces in order to facilitate the delivery of food in that starving country. Dubbed The Clan that Never Sleeps by the locals, the Airborne Regiment, conducting air-mobile operations with Twin Huey and Sea King helicopters, established a heavily armed presence in Belet Huen north of Mogadishu, disarming local forces and protecting relief efforts.
Despite the fact that Canadian government officials and media of the 1990s called the operations in Bosnia and Somalia "peacekeeping missions," they were something very different from Cold War-era peacekeeping. The UN Protection Force II (UNPROFOR II) in Bosnia and the United Task Force (UNITAF) in Somalia were something new, something for which there was, at the time, no agreed-upon lexicon in the Canadian Forces, the Department of National Defence, or any of the other national-security policy bodies in the Canadian government. At best, UNPROFOR II and UNITAF were akin to "armed humanitarian interventions." But they were not UN peacekeeping missions. They were the prototypes for what the new 2005 Canadian international-policy statement ("A role of pride and influence in the world") calls "stabilization operations."
Why, exactly, are these distinctions important? Are not all Canadian military personnel "peacekeepers"? Has UN peacekeeping not been the stock in trade for Canadian soldiers since Lester B. Pearson invented peacekeeping in 1956 during the Suez Crisis? Isn't our national identity based on the fact that we do peacekeeping while others fight wars? Are we not morally superior because Canada engages in peacekeeping? Will we lose that moral superiority if we engage in operations other than peacekeeping?
There are inherent dangers in an unhealthy adherence to mythology. Mythology distorts. Mythology pigeonholes. Mythology produces blinders, it limits action. In the 1990s, the mythology of Canadian peacekeeping produced unrealistic expectations that, when they could not be met, merely produced obfuscation and disillusionment.
Images on television readily distorted the complexities of military operations in the 1990s. If it wore a blue helmet and drove around in a white vehicle with black UN markings on it, it was a "peacekeeper." If it handed out teddy bears to starving children, it was conducting "peacekeeping." How, people asked, could UN peacekeepers in Rwanda not stop the carefully organized rampage against the Tutsis? How, the people asked, could peacekeepers be handcuffed to Bosnian ammunition dumps and used as human shields? How, they wondered, could the peacekeepers not bring peace?
What the people didn't understand, and nobody was willing or able to tell them, was that UN peacekeeping as it emerged during the Cold War was obsolete, ineffective, and inoperative in the post-Cold War era. It was as "done" as the Soviet empire, except nobody had stuck a fork in it until Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda.
Those who propagate the mythology of Canadian UN peacekeeping focus exclusively on the year 1956. Ostensibly, a neutral, impartial Canada decided to lead the international community in stopping imperialist aggression undertaken by Britain and France against helpless Egypt, a situation that threatened to bring the world to near-nuclear war when the Soviets prepared to intervene. Mild-mannered Canadian diplomat Mike Pearson saved the day with a speech in the UN General Assembly proposing that a UN force be interposed between the belligerents. Thus UN peacekeeping was born and Canada / the Liberal Party had the key role in its creation.
This fairy story might make a nice Heritage Minute and it might be easier to impose on Canadian students than explaining to them the dangerous nature of the Cold War, Canada's deep involvement with nuclear weapons and the finer points of NATO strategy to stave off Communist totalitarianism.
UN peacekeeping was used during the Cold War to freeze a conflict between two countries in place. This was so the conflict in question would not escalate and produce superpower involvement. Superpower involvement could have nasty ramifications, like nuclear war. Indeed, and it is clear from declassified Canadian policy documents of the day, UN peacekeeping during the Cold War was used to fill power vacuums in the decolonizing Third World to stave off Soviet and Chinese influence. UN peacekeeping was an adjunct to Canada's NATO geopolitical strategy.
The withdrawal of the Communist empire, however, left local power brokers to their own devices. These individuals capitalized on the potential for violence between ethnic groups and actively stimulated ethnic warfare in bids for power. The first to go was the Balkans, followed by the Horn of Africa, and Cambodia. UN forces brought in to monitor separation agreements found themselves caught between heavily armed warring factions that reported to no internationally recognized authority.
At the same time, changes in information and media technology brought these situations into Western living rooms with minute-by-minute coverage. The ability of interest groups to manipulate and mobilize public opinion had a dramatic effect on demands for international intervention, particularly the humanitarian variety.
In many cases, the UN forces were outgunned and hampered by restrictive rules of engagement. The Cold War peacekeeping mentality -- that is, freeze the situation in place -- didn't work, nor did the use of military force as a blunt instrument against what amounted to dispersed, heavily armed local microgovernments. Diplomacy could not work: there was no state to deal with.
In addition, strategic objectives and alternatives were not thought through, particularly in Somalia. Once the forces were deployed and were in the process of coercing the factions, what next? Was the UN supposed to make the country a protectorate? Was it supposed to hold elections and turn the country over to the winners? Or was the UN supposed to withdraw its forces once public opinion was distracted with some other tragedy?
In many cases, the UN forces came under fire and either stood in place and took casualties, or departed, taking casualties on the way out.
The problems in Bosnia and Somalia were bad enough, but then there was Rwanda. A UN disengagement monitoring force, established between a government and a rebel group, was swept up into an ethnic war that in days escalated to genocide. The UN mission was not equipped or mandated to stop genocide. The unwillingness by the international community to reinforce it or send in an intervention force, particularly after the debacle in Somalia, meant that the follow-on mission was merely there to clean up the bodies.
Unlike Bosnia and Somalia, Rwanda had no Cold War context: There was no power vacuum. This was a straight-out ethnic fight, in a non-strategic area, with UN forces caught in the middle.
By 1995, therefore, UN peacekeeping was as dead as the victims in Rwanda or Srebrenica. These new missions, mistakenly labelled "peacekeeping," were lumped into the mass grave of history.
The replacement for UN peacekeeping was, however, born out of the ashes of Bosnia. A NATO-led force called the Implementation Force (IFOR) moved in to take over from the exhausted and overrun UNPROFOR. IFOR was, using the terminology of the day, "robust." It had firepower and was willing to use it. It had mass. It was equipped to coerce armed factions. It was logistically supportable.
IFOR brought reconstruction co-ordination with it as well, and its successor organization, Stabilization Force (SFOR) developed a long-term strategy to disarm, rebuild and reintegrate Bosnia. IFOR and SFOR imposed peace and brought about stability.
So far, the most successful stabilization mission is SFOR in Bosnia. It took 14 years to get to the point where SFOR could be withdrawn in the fall of 2004. The lesson to take from the SFOR experience is that there are no short-term solutions.
But contrast this to peacekeeping in Cyprus. Established in 1964, the mission still exists, but there has been no movement, no solution. The situation is still frozen in place. Why is it a more complex, more violent situation like Bosnia can be brought to some form of positive resolution and a comparatively minor situation like Cyprus cannot?
Are stabilization operations more dangerous than Cold War-era interpositionary peacekeeping? The record would suggest that Cold War-era peacekeeping was a hazardous undertaking: Canadian soldiers were killed by mine strikes, vehicle accidents, beatings, outright assassination or casual shooting by belligerent forces.
On the whole, Canadian forces engaging in stabilization operations face a far more lethal environment in terms of belligerent armament, but they are in a position to take pre-emptive action and respond to threats with lethal force, unlike those serving in UN operations in the 1950s and 1960s.
On the other hand stabilization operations are less passive than peacekeeping, which increases exposure to risk by enemy action as well as transportation accidents.
Canadians, I hope, understand that today's operations require the use of lethal force and are no longer beguiled by the passive nature of "peacekeeping." Indeed, the new policy documents recognize this shift in attitude. Though there are some aficionados who are nostalgic for the salad days of UN peacekeeping and wish to bask in past glories, the rest of us have moved on and do not wish to be handicapped by mythology.
The acceptance of stabilization operations as accepted Canadian policy is indicative of a more mature Canadian approach to the lethal word that we live in, and not some utopian UN fantasyland. It is gratifying to see that the Canadian government finally thinks so, too.
Sean M. Maloney teaches in the war studies program at the Royal Military College of Canada.
The full text of this article appears in the September issue of Policy Options (www.irpp.org).
PUBLICATION: The Ottawa Citizen
DATE: 2005.09.06
EDITION: Final
SECTION: News
PNAME: Arguments
PAGE: A17
BYLINE: Sean M. Maloney
SOURCE: Citizen Special
DATELINE: KINGSTON
Does anyone need anymore explanation why traditional peacekeeping is extinct?
