A STUDY ON THE EFFECTIVENESS AND PROBLEMS OF UN PEACEKEEPING IN AFRICA.
ABSTRACT
The political evolution of Africa is replete with conflicts which have unfortunately gone beyond the capabilities of the continent to resolve without resort to foreign assistance especially in the critical field of military assistance. This study discussed the concept and practice of the United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa, the challenges facing such operations as well as the prospects of resolving them. It conceptualized peacekeeping, adopted the collective security paradigm in discussing the changing operational environment that has transformed UN traditional peacekeeping operations to the contemporary peacekeeping methods and the challenges that have led to half-baked results in such African operations. Qualitatively driven with reliance on secondary sources of data, the paper recommended an improvement in the quality of preparation, planning, monitoring and evaluation of the processes by the Security Council, adoption of clear and actionable mandates by the UN, proper coordination between the Security Council and countries contributing troops, good risk analysis and transparency across the chain of command among others as necessary steps to address the challenges. It concluded that the UN has the capacity to surmount these challenges if adequate support is given to it by member countries
CHAPTER 1-INTRODUCTION
The United Nations Organization (UNO) has undertaken about sixty-three peacekeeping missions between 1948 and 2009 with over a quarter of these operations in Africa. Today, current United Nations peace keeping operations stand at fifteen missions with Africa having seven of these on-going peace keeping operations (www.un.org/peacekeeping). The above shows clearly that Africa is an important case study for the analysis or evaluation of UN peacekeeping operations and also highlights the level of conflict engulfing the continent. The United Nations was established on the 26th of June 1945 with the charter signed in San Francisco, the United States of America. All African States are members of the world body, the formation of which predates the independence of each of them. Within the continent are a plethora of conflicts which heightens the degree of insecurity itself, a clear manifestation of yet another phase in the political evolution of Africa. During the 1950s and 60s, the people of Africa were united by their common struggle against foreign domination with their overriding interest being the total independence of these states from the shackles of colonialism and domination from a common enemy. These were the foreign colonial powers that were seen as not only dominating the people of the continent, but also exploiting the continent to their unfair advantage. While the situation in Namibia and South Africa remains a painful thorn in the flesh of the continent, the completion of the decolonization process in Africa threw up a new challenge of nation building which replaced the struggle for liberation. Perhaps one of the most critical developments in this process has been the extent to which internal differences, tensions and conflicts surfaced once the common bond of the struggle against a common enemy was loosened by the attainment of independence. These conflicts have unfortunately expanded in scope beyond the continent, thus, entailing a new form of dependence on foreign powers especially in the field of military assistance and peacekeeping (Onimode, 2000, p.11) The African Heads of State had frowned seriously against what they viewed as the grave issue of foreign intervention in the Organization of African Unity (OAU) summit at Libreville in 1977, but since then the problem seemed to have intensified as more conflicts tend to rear its ugly head within the continent instead of abating. As members of the United Nations Organization, African States are committed to the provisions of the UN charter, Article (1), which demands members “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to peace” and it is binding on them, therefore, when they suffer severe conflicts they have to resort to the instrumentality of the world body in resolving such conflicts particularly where the state in question lack the capacity to manage the conflict internally. However, such resort to third party intervention is not out of place as it remains one of the core objectives of the UN, to maintain international peace and security. This the UN does through the use of peacekeeping missions in trouble spots all over the world. The peacekeeping instrument projects the UN as an arbiter with the capacity to promote collective security and maintain a world based on international law instead of the authority of weapons (Basu, 2005, p. 22). The UN peacekeeping mission also ensures the enforcement of the collective will of the UN, instead of the partial interest of the most powerful of nations. As observed by Alan James (1990), “the tool of peacekeeping has proved to be the UN’s most direct contribution to the maintenance of peace and security in the world” (p. 11). Statement of Problem The continent of Africa has been plagued by incessant conflicts arising from numerous factors some of which includes the struggle for resources, boundary disputes, despotic and undemocratic leadership, and military intervention in governance as well as sit-tight leadership syndrome of most African leaders. It is therefore stating the obvious that most African states lack the ability and capacity to contain these conflicts, thus, they often resort to the UN for assistance in resolving them. Again, the task of assembling a multinational force such as required for peacekeeping remains a daunting one. Similarly, each conflict situation wears a different character as no two conflict situations can really be the same even when they have the same issue field. Thus, the UN is opened to some great task in the planning and execution of peacekeeping operations. However, the problem arising from this development and which motivated this study is the fact that the UN faces numerous problems and challenges at the course of intervention in these conflicts which demand some investigations. This study remains one of such efforts in bringing to the fore, these challenges and discussing them extensively in the context of the African peacekeeping experience. Theoretical Orientation This study adopted the theory of collective security as a theoretical framework. In doing this, it realized that the entire idea of peacekeeping is founded on the basis of collective security which entails the coming together of troops from different countries of the world with the sole aim of defending and restoring peace to restive nations. Collective security remains a system by which states have attempted to prevent or stop wars. Under a collective security arrangement, an aggressor against any one state is considered an aggressor against all other states, which act together to repel the aggressor. This is primarily the basis for peacekeeping by nations in the international system. Collective security arrangements have always been conceived as being global in scope; this is in fact a defining characteristic, distinguishing them from regional alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In fact, both the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded on the principle of collective security (Wight, 1977, p.149). Collective security can be understood as a security arrangement, political, regional, or global, in which each state in the system accepts that the security of one is the concern of all, and therefore commits to a collective response to threats to, and breaches of, the peace. Collective security is more ambitious than systems of alliance security or collective defense in that it seeks to encompass the totality of states within a region or indeed globally, and to address a wide range of possible threats. While collective security is an idea with a long history, its implementation in practice has proved problematic. Several prerequisites have to be met for it to have a chance of working (Yost, 1977, p.149). This is one theory that explains the use of international forces through the ambit of the United Nations and other International Governmental Organizations (IGOs). It is a security regime created by the great powers that set rules for keeping peace. The theory is guided by the principles that an act of aggression by any state or group of states will be met by a collective response from the other states. It stipulates that effective collective measures would be taken to assist any state under aggression by another member or group of states. Collective security is based on some basic tenets. The first is that all states would avoid the use of force except in self-defence. The second rest on the general agreement that peace is indivisible, while, the third is the pledge by all states (or members of the IGO) to unite against aggression and restore the peace. Indeed, members must keep their alliance and commitments to the group and agree on what constitutes aggression. Lastly, they also must pledge to contribute resources (material and personnel) to form a collective security force to fight the aggressor(s) and restore the peace (Kegely & Wittkopf, 2001, p.559). Collective security appears to exist as a goal in that its application at the international level is limited by problems. Most glaring is the unwillingness of countries to subordinate their sovereign interests. It is not often that when a powerful state commits aggression against a weaker one that other powerful states go to war over the issue as it can be quite costly to suppress a determined aggressor. This is to say that the collective security system does not work against aggression by great powers. In fact, only the UN’s intervention in Korea (1950-1953) and the Persian Gulf (1990-1991) appear close to fulfilling the idea of collective security (Kegely & Wittkopf, 2001, p. 560). In recent years, the concept of collective security has been broadened and by the end of the cold war, the liberal premises of international community and mutual state interests provided the foundation for a new idea called common security or ‘mutual security’. This is the notion that the security of all states is mutually interdependent; therefore, the insecurity of one state makes all other states insecure. This new notion was aimed at solving the security dilemma because if a state threatened another state, its own security interest would be diminished (Palme, 1992, p. 28). Peacekeeping: A Conceptual Analysis Peacekeeping generally is an intervention by a third party to separate and pacify participants in a conflict. The United Nations has performed peacekeeping operations since 1948, when it sent military observers to Kashmir, to oversee the ceasefire between India and Pakistan, and the Middle East, in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Fifty years later the UN peacekeepers still had presence in these regions. The number of UN peacekeeping operations has increased rapidly since the end of the Cold War, with involvement in Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans and Kuwait, amongst others. Peacekeeping has tended to involve the introduction of military which has the job of observing the implementation of ceasefire agreements and providing a buffer between combatants. There has been debate as to the extent to which peacekeeping forces could or should be involved in the active enforcement of ceasefires, the possibility and practicality of neutral intervention, and the balance between upholding the status quo and acting to change the strategic situation in order to enhance the prospects of conflict resolution (McLean & McMillan, 2003, p.400). Of the issues the United Nations confronts, none is as vexing as peace and security. During the Cold War, the structure of the Security Council (requiring unanimity among the five permanent members) prevented the United Nations from playing a major role in issues directly affecting those members. A new approach labelled peacekeeping evolved as a way to limit the scope ofconflict and prevent it from escalating into a Cold War confrontation. Peacekeeping operations fall into two types, or generations. In first-generation peacekeeping, multilateral institutions such as the UN seek to contain conflicts between two states through third-party military forces. Ad hoc military units, drawn from the armed forces of non-permanent members of the UN Security Council (often small, neutral members), have been used to prevent the escalation of conflicts and to keep the warring parties apart until the dispute can be settled. These troops operate under UN auspices, supervising armistices, trying to maintain ceasefires, and physically interposing themselves in a buffer zone between warring parties (Mingst, 2004, p.172). In the post-Cold War era, UN peacekeeping has expanded to address different types of conflicts and take on new responsibilities. Whereas first-generation activities primarily address interstate conflict, second-generation peacekeeping activities respond to civil war and domestic unrest, much of it stemming from the rise of ethno-nationalism. To deal with these new conflicts, second-generation peacekeepers have taken on a range of both military and non-military functions. Militarily, they have aided in the verification of troop withdrawal such as the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, and have separated warring factions until underlying issues could be settled as was the case with Bosnia. Sometimes, resolving underlying issues has meant organizing and running national elections, as were the cases in Cambodia and Namibia; sometimes it has involved implementing human rights agreements, such as in Central America. At other times UN peacekeepers have tried to maintain law and order in falling or disintegrating societies by aiding in civil administration, policing, and rehabilitating infrastructure, as in Somalia. Peacekeepers have equally provided humanitarian aid, supplying food, medicine, and a secure environment in part of an expanded version of human rights, as followed in several missions in Africa (Mingst, 2004, p.173). Peacekeeping was originally an operation that involves military personnel but that over the years, modern peacekeeping has now evolved to a point where economic, political and social issues are involved. Accordingly, this new trend is popularly described as peace support operations (PSOs), an expression used to describe the total gamut of plans, policies and actions geared towards preventing, managing operations and resolving conflict as well as restoring and maintaining peace in a conflict environment. PSOs began with military observation (or observer mission) and were later expanded to cover every facet of peacekeeping (Gbor, 2003, p.12). UN peacekeeping has had successes and failures, as illustrated by the two African cases of Namibia and Rwanda. Namibia (formerly South-West Africa), a former German colony, was administered by South Africa following the end of World War 1. Over the years, pressure was exerted on South Africa to relinquish control of the territory and grant Namibia independence. Though the process of disengagement was tough because South Africa refused to consider change, citing security concerns, as long as Soviet-backed Cuban troops occupied neighbouring Angola, the UN Transition Assistance Group in Namibia (UNTAG) played a vital role in managing the move from war to ceasefire and then to independence. The operation in Namibia became the model for UN peacekeeping in Cambodia in the early 1990s and in East Timor in the late 1990s ((Mingst & Karns, 2000, p.24). But not all UN peacekeeping operations have been successful. Rwanda is an example of where a limited UN peacekeeping force proved to be insufficient and where genocide subsequentlyescalated as the international community watched and did nothing. Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi have seen periodic outbreaks of devastating ethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis since 1960s. The trend of conflict continued despite the 1993 peace agreement called for a UN force (the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda, UNAMIR) to monitor the ceasefire (Mingst & Karns, 2000, p. 24)
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