The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (85 page)

To increase the pressure, the Security Council finally imposed an arms embargo on all the factions in November 2004
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(followed a year later by an embargo on the
trade of diamonds
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), and unveiled the threat of travel sanctions and a freezing of financial assets of individuals obstructing the peace process. Within the Council, France pushed strongly for individual sanctions, while Russia, China, and Algeria were opposed to these measures as well as further actions to tighten the arms embargo.
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Mbeki also successfully urged the Council to hold off individual sanctions to give his mediation efforts time to bear fruit. A tripartite monitoring group of ECOWAS, the AU, and the UN started submitting fortnightly monitoring reports. The main source of problems was that Gbagbo refused to empower his prime minister, Seydou Diarra, with decision-making powers, and dragged his feet on amending laws that would have allowed his rival, Alassane Ouattara, to participate in elections. Rebel leader Guillaume Soro, backed by the Coalition des Marcoussistes opposition parties, refused to disarm until the laws had been passed. Along with other opposition politicians, Soro frequently walked out of his ministerial post in Abidjan to protest what they perceived to be Gbagbo’s recalcitrance in implementing the peace accords.

By 2005, the epicentre of conflict in West Africa appeared to have shifted from Liberia to Côte d’Ivoire. The country has remained divided since 2002. Côte d’Ivoire’s volatile western region saw ethnic and community-based militias continue to clash violently, while the ‘zone of confidence’ continued to be violated, mainly by the rebel
Forces Nouvelles.
In August 2005, the government-backed ‘Young Patriots’ militia attacked the vehicle of the Swedish UN Special Representative, Pierre Schori, who had replaced Tevoedjre in January 2005. The UN mission also reported an eight-fold increase in the limiting of its peacekeepers’ freedom of movement between June and July 2005, and a Moroccan UN peacekeeper was murdered in the northern town of Bouake a month later. The government of Laurent Gbagbo, Konan Bédié’s Democratic Party of Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI), Alassane Ouattara’s Rally of Republicans (RPR), and Guillaume Soro’s
Forces Nouvelles
continued to squabble over implementation of the Pretoria Agreement of June 2005 that had been negotiated by Thabo Mbeki, setting timetables for implementing Marcoussis and Accra III. This resulted in the failure to achieve disarmament targets in August 2005, and the postponement by a year of elections which had been originally scheduled for October 2005.

Consistent with the Pretoria accord, Mbeki had urged Gbagbo to use his exceptional powers to amend discriminatory laws (on nationality, identification, the Human Rights Commission, and the print media) in July 2005, when it became clear that the Ivorian parliament would not amend them. After Gbagbo adopted these laws by decree, Soro and the Group of Seven (G7) opposition parties challenged these measures, as did the parties of Ouattara and Bédié. These politicians
argued that certain groups in Côte d’Ivoire were still deprived of their rights under the nationality law and that the country’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) needed to have clear primacy over the National Institute of Statistics in organizing elections. Gbagbo further amended the laws on the Independent Electoral Commission, the nationality code, and the naturalization law – again by decree – in August 2005, but this still did not break the deadlock.

Apart from recalcitrant politicians and warlords, friction between some of the key mediators further complicated the resolution of the Ivorian crisis. French sensitivities at South Africa’s lead role in the traditional Gallic
chasse gardée
erupted into the open when President Jacques Chirac, during a visit to Senegal in February 2005, complained that the peace process was too slow because the South Africans did not understand ‘the soul and psychology of West Africans’. Regional actors, not least Mbeki, were taken aback by the cultural arrogance and political insensitivity of this statement which underlined the continuing paternalism with which some Gaullists still regarded their former colonies. Some in France also called for French troops to be withdrawn from Côte d’Ivoire, even as the South Africans quipped that they had achieved more in three months than Paris had done in two years.

After a South African statement blaming Soro for blocking the peace process, the
Forces Nouvelles
withdrew support from Mbeki’s mediation efforts, accusing him of bias towards Gbagbo. The rebel group then urged the AU Chairman, Olusegun Obasanjo, to find an alternative way of resolving the impasse. These events unfortunately coincided with tensions between South Africa and Nigeria over regional diplomatic issues and the acrimonious battle for an African seat on a reformed UN Security Council. At a meeting of the AU’s fifteen-member Peace and Security Council on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2005, ECOWAS was tasked with overcoming this impasse: a clear attempt to shift the locus of peace-making from South Africa to Nigeria.
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Mbeki and Obasanjo jointly visited Côte d’Ivoire in November and December 2005 to meet all the parties, and were eventually able to convince them to agree on a new prime minister, technocrat Charles Konan Banny, to replace Diarra.

However, the stalemate over implementing disarmament and the amended laws continued. Elections scheduled for October 2005 had again to be postponed by another year. The distrust between the Ivorian parties remained strong, and divisions between the regional mediators did not help. Kofi Annan had asked the Council to deploy an additional 1,226 peacekeepers in December 2005. The Council approved only 850 troops who arrived by January 2006. Annan, pushed by France, asked for a further 3,400 peacekeepers to maintain security in the volatile country. Washington agreed to consider an increase of 1,500–2,000 troops but resisted the increase that Paris was strongly pushing for. With other African members of the Council (Tanzania,
Ghana, and Congo-Brazzaville), the US insisted that the UN mission in Liberia should not be weakened by redeploying UNMIL troops to Côte d’Ivoire – as France had suggested – to bolster UNOCI.
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After UN and AU representatives called for the Ivorian parliament (whose term had expired) to be dissolved, violent demonstrations by the Young Patriots’ in Abidjan and the West of the country targeted UN and French interests in January 2006. South Africa, which had earlier backed this position, reversed itself to support a parliamentary extension, raising questions again among rebel and opposition groups about its bias towards Gbagbo.
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In February 2006, a Security Council committee slapped targeted sanctions on two leaders of the ‘Young Patriots,’ Charles Ble Goudé and Eugene Djué, as well as a
Forces Nouvelles
commander, Fofié Kouakou.
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It seems that the Council will have to continue these and other sanctions against ‘spoilers,’ and a strengthened UN mission will also be critical to achieve UNOCI’s goals in Côte d’Ivoire. Prime Minister Banny was forced to dissolve his cabinet in September 2006, following riots after the dumping of toxic waste in Abidjan killed and hospitalized dozens of Ivorians. With both Obasanjo (privately) and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade (publicly) increasingly critical of Mbeki’s mediation, South Africa stepped down from the role at an AU meeting in October 2006 before it was pushed. UNOCI now had 8,045 peacekeepers in the country, but durable peace in Côte d’Ivoire still remained elusive, despite Soro becoming Prime Minister in March 2007.

We now return to the first three questions we posed at the beginning of this chapter on the role, impact, and perceptions of the UN Security Council in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire, much of which has been covered in the three case studies. It is important to note at the outset that it was ECOWAS (and later the US and Britain) and not the UN that drove the peace processes in Liberia and Sierra Leone for most of the duration of these conflicts. This was less the case in Côte d’Ivoire where France played a significant role from the beginning of the conflict, deploying troops, financing an ECOWAS force, and hosting peace talks. The Council’s involvement in Liberia was slow and tentative: only thirteen months after the
start of the conflict did the Council rouse itself to pass a resolution recognizing ECOMOG’s efforts; it took the Council three years to impose an arms embargo on Liberia’s recalcitrant warlords; and it took nearly four years from the start of the conflict to deploy UN military observers. In the second peacekeeping deployment to Liberia between 2003 and 2006, the Council, pushed by the US, was involved in conflict management efforts from the start, and thus played a more effective role. The second deployment stemmed a certain bloodbath in Monrovia and was more decisive than the lackadaisical and reluctant 1993 deployment during which the UN clearly played second fiddle to ECOMOG.

In Sierra Leone, the Security Council adopted a policy of malign neglect’ to the conflict between 1991 and 1999, leaving ECOMOG again to improvise another effort at ‘peacekeeping on a shoestring’ with predictable results. The British military and political role proved decisive in convincing the Council to replace the ECOMOG force with a UN mission. The Council thus helped to end the conflict in 2002, improvising a rare UN peacekeeping success in Africa. Finally, in the third case of Côte d’Ivoire, the French pushed the Security Council to transform a weak ECOWAS force into a UN force after a year. While the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone had temporarily ended through the leadership of ECOWAS and the support of the UN by 2006, the war in Côte d’Ivoire was still far from over. All three states pushed for UN involvement due to their historical relations – in the case of Britain and the US – and strategic interests – in the case of France – in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire.

With regard to the issue of the reaction of regional actors to the Security Council, in Liberia and Sierra Leone some of the warlords often called for an increased UN role in order to counter the dominance of a Nigerian-led ECOMOG. Some of the parties in Côte d’Ivoire – particularly the government of Laurent Gbagbo – have, however, looked upon the UN with suspicion due to French influence within the Council. They have thus sought to balance the French role by calling for a stronger AU and ECOWAS role. Significantly, no peace conference was held in France after 2003, and the centre of peace-making moved from Paris to Pretoria as Thabo Mbeki took up the reins of AU mediator. ECOMOG maintained a somewhat ambiguous attitude towards the Security Council in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. On the one hand, many of its leaders wanted a larger Security Council role to make up for their financial and logistical deficiencies; on the other hand, West African leaders were reluctant to hand over the credit for any peacekeeping success to the UN after nearly a decade of often thankless and frustrating peacekeeping in both countries.

Some ECOWAS countries such as Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso opposed the Nigeria-led ECOMOG, backed rebels in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and contributed little to sub-regional peacekeeping efforts in either case. Both therefore seemed to prefer a UN force and a stronger Security Council role. Similar splits were evident in Côte d’Ivoire, with Nigeria – the traditional rival of France in West Africa – seeking to wield its influence through peace-making within the AU (which it chaired in 2004 and
2005) and ECOWAS frameworks. Francophone countries such as Niger, Togo, and Benin which had deployed troops under a French-financed ECOWAS that was later subsumed under a UN mission had a stake in supporting the UN Security Council as well as French diplomatic and military efforts in Côte d’Ivoire.

On the basis of the three cases, there are four lessons for the Security Council’s future efforts at managing conflicts in West Africa and elsewhere: establishing an effective division of labour between the UN and regional organizations like ECOWAS; acknowledging the role of external actors – particularly the powerful members of the Security Council – in ensuring an effective UN role in regional conflicts; developing effective strategies to deal with spoilers; and cooperating with local hegemons like Nigeria, which possess relative political and military clout in their regions, in undertaking multilateral UN missions.

In discussing the lessons of UN-ECOWAS cooperation in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire, it is important to emphasize that the UN Security Council has primary responsibility for international peace and security and simply shifted its responsibilities to ECOWAS due to the reluctance of the Council, after debacles in Somalia and Rwanda, to sanction UN missions in Africa. The ECOWAS interventions underlined the importance of an active Security Council role in sub-regional peacekeeping efforts. In Liberia, the UN played a limited but useful monitoring role to ECOMOG, and oversaw the country’s 1997 election. The UN also deployed a peacekeeping mission into Liberia between 2003 and 2006. In Sierra Leone, the UN played a similar military monitoring role as in the first intervention in Liberia until it took over peacekeeping efforts from ECOMOG in l999. In Côte d’Ivoire, the UN took over ECOWAS’s peacekeeping responsibilities after a year in 2004.

The creation of UN peace-building offices in Liberia and Sierra Leone represents a potentially significant innovation in the organization’s conflict management strategy. However, these offices will have to be substantially bolstered with stronger mandates and greater staff and resources. Their cooperation with ECOWAS and
civil society groups will also have to be strengthened and more clearly defined. The peace-building office in Liberia, established in 1997, was the first ever such office established by the UN. However, as an internal UN report of July 2001 admitted, the peace-building office in Liberia was poorly resourced and its mandate was weak and not politically intrusive due to the initial reluctance of the UN to establish the office.
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The Liberian government had accepted the office as the lesser evil to a continued ECOMOG presence in the full knowledge that the UN would not interfere with its running of the country. The UN also established a peace-building office in Sierra Leone in January 2006.
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These offices have been mandated to perform such tasks as providing electoral assistance; promoting human rights and the rule of law by working through both governments and civil society actors; mobilizing donor support for disarmament, demobilization, and the reintegration of ex-combatants into local communities; supporting the rebuilding of administrative capacity; and rehabilitating local infrastructure.