The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (32 page)

During the Kosovo crisis in spring 1999, Canada briefly toyed with the idea to push for the use of the Uniting for Peace procedure to gain an explicit authorization for NATO action from the General Assembly, when it became clear that Russia would veto any such resolution in the Security Council. However, it abandoned the plan as it suspected that there was still residual support for Yugoslavia among the Non-Aligned Movement, which might lead to the rejection of such a resolution.
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The British government also considered seeking a Uniting for Peace resolution on Kosovo, but rejected it not only because it feared that such a resolution could not command a convincing majority in the Assembly, but also because it doubted that a Uniting for Peace resolution from the General Assembly, unlike a resolution from the Security Council under
Chapter VII
, could have provided a legal basis for a military intervention without consent from the host state.
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Not only Western states have found the General Assembly highly unpredictable. When the Soviet Union requested an emergency special session over Israel’s failure to heed the Security Council’s calls for a ceasefire in the six-day war in 1967, it hoped to push for a resolution in the General Assembly singling out Israel as the aggressor and calling for an unconditional withdrawal of its troops, which it previously failed to get adopted in the Council. However, in the Assembly such a resolution was also defeated, with a majority of states voting against each individual provision of the Soviet draft. It only passed two much more limited resolutions – dealing specifically with the protection of civilians in the occupied territories, and the status of East Jerusalem.
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All these factors have contributed to an increased emphasis by the Security Council on its primacy in issues of international peace and security since the 1960s, and to marginalizing the General Assembly’s role in that field. However, it seems that because it has been so marginalized by the Security Council, and because it has been increasingly resentful of the Council’s failure to address issues of importance in particular to its G-77 membership, the General Assembly has increasingly come to use the tool of Uniting for Peace resolutions and emergency special sessions to raise such issues, trying to increase the pressure on the Security Council and relevant member states to act. Engaging in ‘symbolic politics’,
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these states use their majority in the General Assembly to have their voice heard in political debates where they otherwise yield little formal influence and which in the view of some powerful states are outside the remit of the General Assembly. In light of the increasingly salient divide between the G-77 and Western states (in particular the US) reflected in the acrimonious arguments over the war in Iraq, UN reform, and the UN budget, it seems highly unlikely that in the near future Council members will consider using the Uniting for Peace procedure and increase General Assembly involvement in issues of international peace and security.

Alongside an evolution in the initiator of the United for Peace procedure, the issues addressed by it have changed with its increased use by the Assembly. The Security Council has used Uniting for Peace resolutions predominantly in the context of major conflicts, both international (Korea, Suez, Hungary, Afghanistan, and the annexation of the Golan Heights), and civil (as in the Congo). The General Assembly, on the other hand, has mostly used the resolution to address issues other than major conflicts (with the exception of the Soviet request for an emergency special session on the six-day war in 1967), raising instead major political concerns of its developing world membership, in particular decolonization and the Palestinian question.

In addition to the issues addressed, the content of the measures taken by the General Assembly has changed significantly since 1951. When addressing the Korea and the Congo conflicts, the Assembly upheld or even strengthened the Security Council mandates of the UN troops,
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and in the Suez crisis the General Assembly requested the establishment of the UN’s first armed peacekeeping force. In its second emergency special session, the General Assembly requested the Secretary-General to send an observation commission to Hungary, ‘to investigate the situation caused by foreign intervention in Hungary’.
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While the Secretary-General named members of the commission, the Soviet Union and the Hungarian government never granted them access to the country, but the commission produced a report on the basis of over 100 interviews mostly with Hungarians who had fled the country.
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The emergency session on the Congo was the last time the General Assembly called for any specific measures. Henceforth it mainly articulated moral condemnation of attacks, and called for ceasefires and the withdrawal of troops.

An exception to this trend was the request by the 10th emergency special session in December 2003 for an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice on the legality of the wall constructed by Israel in the occupied territory.
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While Israel challenged the request and argued that the General Assembly had acted ultra vires, the Court noted that as the US veto had prevented the Council from exercising its
responsibility of maintaining international peace and security, and as the Council had not discussed the issue of the wall in its meetings preceding the Assembly’s request, the Assembly had acted within its authority.
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It is highly ironic that the use of the American veto to protect Israel from international censure only made the court’s involvement, and the finding that Israel is acting illegally, possible. While the advisory opinion focused attention for a time on the legal issues in the conflict, it had little effect on the ground.

In some cases, the resolutions of the General Assembly’s emergency special sessions have asked the Security Council to take actions, highlighting the primacy of the Council regarding issues of international peace and security as the only institution able to take decisions binding for states. At its 8th emergency special session in 1981 on Namibia, for example, the Assembly asked the Council to impose sanctions on South Africa,
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which earlier had been vetoed by France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
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The Council never acted on this request. Most of the time, therefore, the General Assembly’s emergency special sessions have served the purpose of expressing the international community’s moral indignation, rather than strengthening the UN’s capacity for collective security, underlining further the diminished role of the General Assembly.
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As the preceding discussion has shown, the Uniting for Peace procedure did little to strengthen the capacity of the UN to address problems of conflict. However, through its involvement in two of the earliest UN missions, UNEF in the Middle East and ONUC in the Congo, the General Assembly, under the Uniting for Peace procedure, helped to frame the original conception of a key UN practice: peacekeeping. As Marrack Goulding, the former Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, has argued, peacekeeping has traditionally been based on five main principles: peacekeeping operations are United Nations operations, that is they are financed, authorized, and run by the UN; they are established with the consent of the host government; they are impartial, not advancing the interests of one of the conflict parties over that of
another; they use force only in self-defence; and they are comprised of troops provided by member states.
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While the practice of peacekeeping has evolved significantly since 1956, these principles are still relevant today. The development of three of them in particular has been shaped by the debates in the General Assembly about the establishment, control, and financing of UNEF and ONUC: the financing of peacekeeping operations, consent by the host government, and the impartiality of peacekeepers.

Peacekeeping operations have predominantly been United Nations operations – established by the Council or the General Assembly, managed by the Secretariat, and financed collectively by the member states.
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The General Assembly’s involvement through the Uniting for Peace resolutions led in particular to controversies over the financing of UNEF and ONUC, with the Soviet Union rejecting the notion that the expenses should be born by UN members collectively. The dispute was partly rooted in the Soviet rejection of the General Assembly’s authority to authorize UN missions or to extend their mandate to restore or maintain international peace and security, and consequently in its unwillingness to pay for missions it regarded as illegal.
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While the Secretary-General and Western states argued that UNEF was established by an organ of the UN (the General Assembly) and should therefore be financed collectively by all members,
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the USSR and its allies argued that the expenses should be born by the ‘aggressors’ responsible for the need to have the mission in the first place.
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The former view prevailed, and in December 1956 the General Assembly decided that expenses should be apportioned between members.
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The arguments over the financing of peacekeeping operations were rekindled over the operation in the Congo. This time it was not only the Soviet Union, but also France – which wanted to keep security issues in the hands of the Security Council where it enjoyed a veto – who questioned the General Assembly’s authority to authorize peacekeeping missions and impose the cost on member states.
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The refusal of the Soviet Union and its allies to contribute to the costs of ONUC,
despite an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that confirmed that peacekeeping missions should be financed collectively by all members, and who were therefore legally bound to pay,
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caused the first major financial crisis of the UN. It also resulted in a political crisis, as the arrears of the Soviet Union and its allies reached a level that would disqualify them from voting in the General Assembly in 1964.
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When the issue of financing peacekeeping operations was resolved in a compromise in 1965 (after a year without any votes in the General Assembly, and all decisions only taken with consensus), the principle that such missions are financed collectively but in accordance with a different scale to the regular budget, which is still the basis for peacekeeping appropriations today, became firmly established.
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The principle that peacekeeping operations are UN operations has weakened since the end of the Cold War. Rather than running operations itself, the Security Council has authorized regional organizations to implement a range of peacekeeping missions, such IFOR/SFOR in Bosnia,
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KFOR in Kosovo,
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or ISAF in Afghanistan.
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These operations eschew the traditional UN control, as national contingents remain under the ultimate command of their capitals, rather than a UN-appointed force commander. However, even if the importance of missions authorized by the Council, but run by regional organizations, has increased, it has been accompanied by a growing number of peacekeeping operations run by the UN, with record numbers of UN peacekeepers deployed in 2006.
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Peacekeeping missions are generally established with the consent of the host country.
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While there are strong pragmatic reasons for consent, such as reducing the risk of local attacks on peacekeepers, host state consent was one of the central issues in the debate about the constitutional basis of UNEF in the General Assembly, reflecting that it is one of the foundational principles of the UN system. The requirement of consent for such peace operations was widely emphasized by member states in the General Assembly debates. In particular the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites denied that a Uniting for Peace resolution could provide the legal basis for UN military action, as under Article 10 of the Charter
and the terms of the Uniting for Peace resolution the Assembly can only recommend that members take collective measures. It was only because Egypt consented to the deployment of UNEF on its territory that the Soviet Union abstained, rather than voting against its establishment.
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These limits of the General Assembly’s authority with regard to authorizing the use of force are reflected in the Secretary General’s report on the creation of UNEF. Thus, the report stresses that ‘[w]hile the General Assembly is enabled to
establish
the Force with the consent of those parties which contribute units to the Force, it could not request the Force to be
stationed
or
operate
on the territory of a given country without the consent of the Government of that country.’
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While peacekeeping missions have increasingly been established under a
Chapter VII
mandate since the end of the Cold War, making government consent formally unnecessary, consent has continued to be sought in the vast majority of UN operations, for pragmatic and principled reasons.
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However, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s statement in 2005 that Eritrea’s demand to withdraw UN peacekeepers was ‘unacceptable’ indicates that the importance of consent, so central to the deployment of UNEF to Egypt in 1956, is no longer unquestioned.
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As Jennifer Welsh argues elsewhere in this volume, while consent remains critical for the support for UN operations by key member states, it has increasingly been coerced through economic and political pressure in particular in conflicts involving major humanitarian emergencies, such as in Haiti, Kosovo, or East Timor.
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