The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (35 page)

As a diplomatic forum for the management of relations between the major powers, the Security Council was among the first beneficiaries of the thaw in East–West relations, with its initial focus of activity geared specifically towards assisting in the termination of war. Starting with informal diplomatic consultations in late 1986 to bring an early end to the Iran–Iraq war, a pattern of substantive consultations among the P5 was soon extended to cover ways in which other regional and longstanding disputes – from Southern Africa to Central America and Asia – might be decoupled from the debilitating effects of Cold War rivalry and assisted towards settlement.
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In this, the tried and tested practices of UN peacekeeping and observer activity were found by the Council, as well as by the local and external parties to the conflict at hand, to be a particularly useful tool. From 1987 to 1992, ten UN operations were launched and all but one of them were small scale affairs, often involving the deployment of fewer than 100 observers to the field.
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The UN Iran–Iraq Military Observer Group, (UNIIMOG), created in August 1988 and terminated in early 1991, oversaw and verified the withdrawal of Iranian and Iraqi forces to internationally recognized boundaries, following one of the bloodiest wars of modern times.
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From mid-1988 to early 1990, the UN Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan (UNGOMAP), never exceeding more than 50 military observers, assisted in monitoring the implementation of the Geneva Accords for Afghanistan, providing, in effect, a ‘face-saving’ mechanism that allowed the Soviet Union to withdraw ‘with honour’ from its costly adventure in the country. The UN Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEMI), established in late 1988 and withdrawn in May 1991 following the successful completion of its mission, verified the departure of Cuban troops from Angola. In Central America, the United Nations Observer Group (ONUCA), a more complex mission deployed over the territory of five countries, was established in 1989 to verify compliance with commitments undertaken by Central American leaders in the Esquipulas II Agreement of August 1987, specifically an undertaking to end all support for irregular forces and to ensure that territory would not be used for attacks on neighbouring states.
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The subsequent expansion in April 1990 of ONUCA’s mandate to include tasks relating to the demobilization of
irregular
forces (specifically the ‘Nicaraguan Resistance’) pointed to ways in which the instrumentality of peacekeeping could, under new geopolitical circumstances, be expanded by the Council.
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Even so, all of the activities between 1987 and 1991 remained firmly predicated on the principles of consent, minimum use of force, and impartiality as the determinant of operational activity. As such they differed sharply, in terms of context, scope, and complexity of mandate, both from the UN’s earlier engagement in Congo and from the large-scale operations that were to be launched in the first half of the 1990s. They were also conflicts in which (with the exception of the Iran–Iraq war) superpower rivalry had been a particularly obvious obstacle to settlement. The removal of that obstacle greatly increased the prospect for a settlement and gave the UN a constructive role to play in the process. Finally, though again with some exceptions, the contribution of UN peacekeepers was most unequivocally positive in those cases where the Council was dealing with interstate conflict.

An important exception to the pattern of small-scale operations that characterized the period was the UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) in Namibia from
April 1989 to March 1990. With a total personnel strength of nearly 8,000, the mission was designed to ensure, through UN ‘supervision and control’ of elections, the smooth transfer from South African rule to full independence in Namibia.
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The size and mandate of the operation were both more ambitious and complex than previous UN operations, giving an early indication of the strains under which the Secretariat and its management structure in support of field operations would soon be placed. But more importantly in terms of the focus and interests of this chapter are the challenges which the initial phase of the operation presented for the Security Council with respect to the question of the use of force.

While the Namibia operation is generally and justifiably viewed as a success, it came close to collapse at the very outset following the intrusion into northern Namibia from Angola of forces from the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO). This clear-cut violation of the original ceasefire agreement occurred at a time when UN forces had not been fully deployed. The ensuing violence and the prospect of a further deterioration on the ground created an immediate crisis for the nascent UNTAG mission. That crisis was only resolved after the politically controversial proposal by the UN Special Representative, Martti Ahtisaari, approved ‘albeit with misgivings’
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by the Secretary-General, to release South African Defence Forces from restrictions imposed under ceasefire agreement, and to allow them to redeploy to the border area. The use of force in this instance, not by UNTAG which was ill-configured for it, helped to avoid the collapse of the mission. Marrack Goulding, in charge of UN peacekeeping in the Secretariat at the time, noted later that ‘if the process was to be saved, he [the Secretary-General] had no choice but to authorise suspension of the SADF’s confinement. To his credit he took that choice.’
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These events, still controversial, did not in the end place a damper on the independence celebrations that accompanied the end of the mission the following year, removing from the Security Council agenda one of its longest-standing items. More problematic was the tendency to assume, evident in writings at the time, that the operation merely confirmed the
possibilities
for expanding the UN’s traditional peacekeeping role, when, plainly, it also pointed to its limitations in circumstances when consent breaks down.
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The overall experience of UN peacekeeping in numerous armed conflicts between 1987 and 1991 was to encourage the view – easily gleaned from Council discussions
and actions over this period – that operations under UN auspices would become a more prominent feature of the international landscape.
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The innovative aspects of UN missions in Central America and Namibia – including human rights monitoring, electoral support, and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) activities – added to this view a belief in the possibilities of developing existing practices. Not recognized in Council deliberations until later was the fact the armed conflicts, though fuelled by the Cold War, also reflected local causes and regional dimensions and could not simply be reduced to violent arenas of Cold War; the most intense and murderous phase of Angola’s drawn-out civil war was still ahead. When at all extant, such considerations tended to be overshadowed by what was perceived as the overwhelmingly positive fallout of the end of the Cold War for the UN.
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That perception was powerfully aided, not by a successful peacekeeping operation, but by a large-scale enforcement operation under
Chapter VII
, Operation Desert Storm, launched to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The unity of purpose demonstrated in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 – in Charter terms, a clear-cut and unambiguous threat to international peace and security – led the Council, according to David Malone, to conclude that ‘because enforcement of its decisions against Iraq had been successfully carried out, the constraints on and limitations of peacekeeping had fallen away.’
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Given the history of the Council’s role in UN peacekeeping activity since, this may seem as an extraordinary conclusion to have arrived at. Still, it is not an inaccurate reading of
An Agenda for Peace
, the influential, though flawed and overly sanguine attempt by the then Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, to explore the implications of the passing of the Cold War for the UN. Commissioned by the Council at its first ever meeting at the level of heads of state and government in January 1992 and endorsed by it in June 1992, the report argued that ‘an opportunity [had] been regained to achieve the great objectives of the Charter’ and that the organization ‘must never again be crippled as it was in the era that has now passed’.
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To fulfil that vision, as the rest of
An Agenda for Peace
went on to suggest, peacekeeping might have to expand and develop in qualitatively new ways and, in a telling phrase seized on at the time, the document spoke of UN peacekeeping as an activity undertaken ‘hitherto with the consent of all the parties concerned’.
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As a piece of analysis, the major weakness of the document stemmed from its profoundly apolitical and a historical treatment of the UN as an institution, and its
implicit failure to recognize the admixture of motives that drive member states involvement with the organization. Most striking, as Adam Roberts perceptively noted in a contemporary assessment of the document, was that it said ‘virtually nothing about state interest as an explanation of state behaviour’.
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Even as it was published, that omission was glaring, though it would become still more obvious over the next three years.

The period following the January 1992 summit saw a dramatic expansion of UN peacekeeping activities, not merely in terms of numbers but also, more crucially, in terms of the scope and complexity of individual missions. By early 1994, the number of troops, civilian staff, and military observers deployed on UN peacekeeping duties around the world reached nearly 80,000, spread over 17 missions and with a budget of close to US $4 billion.
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Between February 1992 and July 2000, 31 new missions were authorized by the Security Council. These impressive statistics provide only part of the story, however. Behind them lie two further developments that marked a clear shift, historically speaking, in the Council’s use of UN peacekeeping as an instrument at its disposal.

The first is an overwhelming concentration of UN operations deployed in intrastate or internal conflicts. The only clear-cut exception to this pattern has been the UN mission to monitor the ceasefire between Ethiopia and Eritrea, established in July 2000 following a brief but murderous war.
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In all other cases, the Council has engaged UN forces in conditions of latent or actual civil war, that is, in disputes involving contests over the proper location and identity of governmental authority within a given territory – or, as Richard Betts put it more plainly in late 1994, disputes in which ‘the root issue is… who rules when the fighting stops?’
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These
contests, moreover, have often been marked by the violent clash of communal, ethnic, and religious ‘identities – identities which themselves have crystallized against the backdrop of economic decline, authoritarian rule and, frequently, an earlier history of violence and counter-violence. From the point of view of UN peacekeepers, the
Supplement to An Agenda for Peace
– issued by the Secretary-General in 1995 and, in effect, a corrective to the optimism that had badly distorted analysis in
An Agenda for Peace
– spelt out some of the implications. ‘The new breed of intra-state conflicts’, it noted, possess

The second trend, and also, a key driver of Council action, is of a normative kind. While nearly all of the operations launched between 1987 and 1992 dealt with conflicts that had arisen in, and been affected by, the dynamics of the Cold War, an increasingly important source of UN involvement since has been a growing readiness on the part of the Council to address matters previously deemed to fall within the domestic jurisdiction of member states. The growing emphasis in international fora on good governance, the promotion and protection of human rights, and democratization all reflect this trend; as does the way in which the use of military force has increasingly come to be justified on humanitarian grounds.
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As such, the trend may be seen as a historically significant shift in the balance of attention and priorities given by the Council to the
justice-related
provisions and spirit of the Charter, as distinct from those concerned with maintenance of order within the international system. This is not to suggest that the ‘humanitarian impulse’ has in any way overridden calculations of national interest by Council members when contemplating whether to authorize UN involvement, and the form of such involvement, in individual conflicts.
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Indeed, a charge regularly
levelled at the Council since the early 1990s has been its selectivity in responding to humanitarian emergencies, with the case of Rwanda offering the weightiest counter-claim to the argument that a ‘solidarist consensus’ has emerged in international relations.
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For all this, the explosion of peacekeeping and the nature of the tasks authorized by the Council to UN missions after the Cold War cannot be explained without reference to this shift in normative boundaries. Since the UN Observer Mission to El Salvador (ONUSAL) was established with its own Human Rights Division in 1991 – the first time in the history of the organization that a ‘human rights operation was deployed throughout the territory of a country for a lengthy period [with] such intrusive powers
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– every new UN peacekeeping mission has been given some responsibility in relation to the monitoring and promotion of human rights in the mission area and/or an explicit humanitarian function by the Security Council. The mandate of UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), for example, included an entire section dealing with human rights, and authorized the mission to develop and implement a programme of human-rights education, provide general human-rights oversight during the transitional period, and investigate human-rights complaints.
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The mandate of the UN Operation in Mozambique (ONUMOZ) in 1992–4 included the coordination and monitoring of ‘humanitarian assistance operations, in particular those relating to refugees, internally displaced persons, demobilized military personnel and the affected local population’.
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In Liberia, the UN Observer Mission (UNOMIL) was tasked in 1995 with investigating and reporting to ‘the Secretary-General on violations of human rights and to assist local human rights groups’.
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Of the missions in the 1994–2000 period, human-rights or humanitarian-related provisions were also explicit in the mandates of UNAVEM III (Angola), UNPREDEP (former Yugoslavia), UNAMIR (Rwanda), UNMIBH (Bosnia), UNTAES (Eastern Slavonia), MONUA (Angola), and UNOMSIL (Sierra Leone).