With increasing armed conflicts rising in different parts of the globe and the United Nations each time being more indecisive about who to help and who to condemn, it is inevitable to ask ourselves how this international organization remains important; but mostly, if it in fact helps towards peacebuilding and strengthening international relations amongst all and not only western countries. Earlier this year an interview with Ronald Hatto was conducted about the role of peacekeeping regarding lasting peace and global security. Ronald Hatto is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Strategic Studies at CERI/Sciences-Po Paris. His research is focused on UN Peacekeeping, French and U.S. Foreign Policy, and Transatlantic Relations. Likewise, he has been involved in the peacekeeping operation with the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP).
As a peacekeeper, do you get to decide where you are going and under which status?
Excellent question. You have, as soldiers, two status. One in which you are moving with your unit as part of a contingent, most of the time, it’s a battalion, 500 soldiers mostly, or as military observers. In this case, you are recruited on a personal basis. In my case, for example, in 1988, I came back from Cyprus with my battalion and I wanted to go back on another mission, but never did. When you are deployed with your unit, you are completely, and fully immune. You cannot be tried in a foreign country, whilst, if you are deployed as a military observer, you are protected, highly protected, but still, you can be tried by the local government, if you commit a crime; that is what we call functional immunity and not absolute immunity.
Contingents are completely immune, absolute immunity. I know that sounds crazy, but I think that member states will probably refuse to let their soldiers be deployed abroad if they were not completely protected from the whole state legal system where they arrive to. Honestly, I am not sure if it is a good thing. I am not sure it is a good thing for a simple reason. Some peacekeepers commit crimes, especially regarding women, rape for example. Then they repatriate the offender and after that, they redeploy them somewhere else. This is something we cannot excuse. If you are a blue helmet, you do not have the right to do these kinds of things. How can you abuse people in need? However, at the same time, I think it would be very difficult to modify it. This clause was established starting in 1956 with UNEF in Egypt. And in 1990, the UN General Assembly adopted a document in which they reiterated and repeated the same thing: military members of the military component of the United Nations peacekeeping operation shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of their respective participating states in respect of any criminal offenses which may be committed by them in host country or territory.
After 1990 with the big operations like Cambodia, for example, or Somalia or elsewhere, the more numerous the personnel, the more risk you have of having bad apples. Okay. And what I would like you to remember is that It’s not only the soldiers who are behaving badly. A lot of offenses are committed by civilian personnel. Why? Because they are much freer to move around. They have their own vehicle. They do not have an officer to check them most of the time. It is also civilians who are creating problems, who are abusing people.
Therefore, according to your experience in peacekeeping operations, why do you think impunity when certain crimes occur continues? Can it be fully stopped?
This question takes us to another important concept for the UN and peacekeeping operations: accountability.
There is a lot of turmoil about creating an international court, maybe a special military court by the United Nations for the peacekeepers, but, once again as I said before, if you do that maybe countries would not send their soldiers. For me, the contributing states should trial their soldiers who committed crimes; they should take the responsibility in their own hands.
The problem is that many countries do not consider sexual offenses to be crimes. That is why I think the UN for the moment at least cannot do anything to punish, especially if they are coming from a military contingent. Correspondingly, it is not only immunity, it is impunity. I can rape a nine year old boy or a girl and I will have no consequences. And this is a big, big, big problem for the UN also because the reputation of the UN is suffering from the bad behavior of its own personnel.
In conclusion, I don’t see any other solution than, especially for the military personnel, to harsh the treatment of the sending state.
Consequently, you can spot some main weaknesses of UN peacekeeping: peacekeepers do not receive proper training and the countries who contribute more soldiers today are different than before. After the 1990s, the West, those traditional contributors, decided to stop participating in operations. Thus, what happens today is that you have mostly Asian and especially African states who are deployed in peacekeeping operations, and sometimes those soldiers are not very well trained, not very well equipped.
An example would be MINUSMA in Mali. They suffered extensively because of all those things. Western states were there, the Dutch were there with attack helicopters. The problem was that they could not provide close air support to the African contingents below because the African soldiers were unable to properly radio procedures to communicate with the helicopters. And the danger with a helicopter like that, is that it is a gunship. It is like a flying tank with rockets and cannon and so if you cannot indicate clearly your position to the pilot they will not open fire because it is too dangerous for friendly fire; you can end up shooting your own troops.
I do not know if you understand the situation. It is quite difficult today because of the origins of the contingents coming sometimes from Burkina Faso. They are good soldiers but not necessarily well trained to operate with soldiers from different countries.
What is the role of peacekeeping in promoting peacebuilding and long term development?
That is a good question. I mean, initially it was not supposed to be that. It was supposed to be peacekeeping and peacekeeping is not a charter. It is nowhere in the UN charter. So it was a pure improvisation between 1948, the first observer mission in Israel, Palestine, and 1956 with the creation of the famous First United Nations Emergency Force, with the first deployment of blue elements. The UN was not supposed to be involved directly in conflict resolution. The goal was to be there just to manage the conflict. Conflict management, not conflict resolution. Hence, I think that slowly but surely the UN decided that peacekeepers can probably do more. Therefore, if you analyze different cases I do not know if we can call it peace building or almost nation building, at least trying to quelch the tensions creating instability in the country.
Peacebuilding was introduced slowly into the toolbox of the peacekeepers. Nonetheless, if your question is, how do I see the role of soldiers with blue helmets on their head in, in peace building? I think that they are not equipped to do that. It is mostly that they are there maybe to protect civilians. Peacemaking was the job of the UN civilian diplomats. And I think that we are demanding too much of the blue helmets, the soldiers specifically. They are not police officers. They are not judges. They are not civil servants, functionaries. So peacekeepers or soldiers are supposed to maintain peace, not create it from scratch.
Coming back to your question, one of the reasons I think why we are on a declining path regarding peace operations today is probably because we ask too much from the peacekeepers for a few years.
China and Russia are not big fans of the actual role of peacekeepers nowadays. And given that they are more and more vocal in their behavior on the world scene, I think that in the coming years, we will see who will dominate. If China and Russia are more powerful in terms of the respect of world order, we will probably go back to more basic missions. Maybe we will return to very expensive and very, big and complex, multidimensional missions based on peace building. I doubt it because a lot of countries in the South are not big fans. Just like Russia and China. India, for example, is not a big fan of very intrusive peacebuilding missions in states.
UN peacekeeping is always reflecting the balance of power on the world scene. So, um, what would I do? I think I would change the structure. The UN is very complex, but let’s imagine I am all powerful. First of all, I think I would completely reorganize the structure of the Security Council with more permanent members, like Brazil and India; Nigeria I don’t know, and then, for the Arab states, probably Egypt. They would all have the right of veto. Also, I don’t know, probably, the problem is that if you extend the right of veto to too many states, look at the situation sometimes. I mean, this is just brainstorming, you have opened the door to analysis.
The reasoning behind the UN charter, I think, was to try to reconcile idealism and realism. But the problem is for high ranking civilian personnel of the UN, they are fully protected. This is unfair. And I think those people know, they know too well that they are protected. They make decisions and the soldiers are sometimes the ones that have to execute, because they are the ones in the battlefield and are not as simple as they planned it out to be; a million different variables can influence the scene.
Despite the criticisms, do you believe peacekeeping remains a crucial tool for the international community to promote global security? Why or why not?
Absolutely, otherwise, I would not spend this time with you talking about this. Soldiers are not supposed to die, they are going away to help foreigners. When you are a soldier, you are supposed to die for your country, but when you are a peacekeeper, you are helping other people. But yes, I think it’s still quite useful. Plus if it was not perceived as useful by the member states, they would have dropped it years ago. If they continue to pay for it, it must be because it helps at some level.
Even though we are on a declining path, we are at approximately at the level of the highest deployments since the famous fiascos of the 1990s. So it is a huge number, much smaller than 10 years ago, but still quite respectable. I believe in peacekeeping, even though I am perfectly aware that it is full of weaknesses. As pre scholars were saying in 1974, rather than accusing peacekeeping of peace operations as being a complete failure, maybe the right way of evaluating peacekeeping is in degrees of success; not in complete failure.
As I said before, you have the decisions being made on these huge buildings in New York and then you have the people who are actually on the ground and there is a huge gap between them. The most shocking part is that the five permanent members almost do not contribute, except for China and France. The Russians, the Brits and the Americans that contribute in terms of peace. They are those deciding if they create or not a peacekeeping operation and after that they delegate the responsibility to the secretariat and it is very unfair. That is something else I would change if I could, but I mean, I cannot.
Conclusion
As read in the interview, the concept of peacebuilding is considerably new. Nonetheless peacebuilding nowadays is crucial to be taken into consideration for international organizations such as the United Nations to be effective. If immunity and impunity are still allowed due to the fear of having states leaving the organization, accountability and credibility will be less feasible; less impact will UN operations have. However, not all is lost, changes to the structure and ways of communication by the Charter can be made to turn peacekeeping and peacebuilding into concepts that are true. Thus, the main problem remains that those who have the power to make these adjustments and changes are mostly worried with other aspects such as income and power, instead of creating peace, education and respect attainable for all.