Blessed are the peacekeepers

    • Jump to comments ()

I have spent the last two months in Northern Uganda, scene of one of the world's forgotten wars, which has driven 90% of the population from their homes. It is a startling statistic - matched by the startling feeling of driving through miles and miles of completely deserted countryside where people used to live.

Our hopes are centred on events a few hundred miles north, in southern Sudan, where peace talks are taking place between the government of Uganda and rebels of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). Elsewhere in Sudan, fears remain that a fresh outbreak of fighting in Darfur could claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Meanwhile, in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), tensions are rising as the final result of its first election since independence are announced.

The UN is sponsoring the Ugandan peace talks and organised the elections in the DRC. Talks are taking place between the UN and the Sudanese government about the deployment of a force in Darfur. There are currently over 17,000 UN peace-keeping troops in the DRC, making it the largest such mission anywhere in the world. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is, meanwhile, investigating human rights violations in all three countries.

Despite this impressive level of activity, there really is very little we can do if things go wrong. This part of Africa has been here, poised between peace and war, several times before.

I spent the weekend reading a book written by three former UN peace-keeping staff, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures and got a strong sense of déjà vu comparing some of their experiences to mine, 10 years later.

They joined the UN mission in Cambodia and then served in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Rwanda. Two of them were in Mogadishu during the Black Hawk Down debacle in 1993.

Somalia had been one of the UN's first big humanitarian operations. Its failure turned western public opinion against such interventions and goes a long way to explaining the weakness of the UN's subsequent response in Bosnia and Rwanda.

Unfortunately, we are always one step behind in the debate about international interventions. Nato's actions in Kosovo in 1999 were mainly motivated by its failure to have prevented the Srebrenica massacre previously. Bush and Blair thought that Kosovo showed that invasions can be carried out with very few ground troops and that it is acceptable to sideline the UN security council. This helped them make such a mess of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now that western troops are bogged down in the latter two countries, everyone knows that this constrains the UN's response to other humanitarian crises. Some of the rebels in Darfur may still entertain hopes of western intervention, but, as Alex de Waal has argued, "The idea of foreign troops fighting their way into Darfur and disarming the Janjaweed militia by force is sheer fantasy."

This does not mean that we should give up on the principle of humanitarian intervention. Indeed, it is precisely now, when even the most die-hard apologists for the invasion of Iraq are accepting defeat, that we should avoid retreating into isolationism.

Four million people died during the DRC's civil war, which was itself sparked by a botched response to the aftermath of Rwanda's genocide. Fighting continues in Somalia, parts of which now resemble Afghanistan when it was al-Qaida's training base. Darfur remains on a knife edge of tension, while up to 1,000 people are dying every week in Uganda's displacement camps.

The west cannot isolate itself from the consequences of such catastrophes, but neither should we always see western troops as a panacea.

Experience shows that internationally supported peace-keeping talks, backed up by properly resourced peace-keeping missions have been the most consistently effective means of ending conflict. They are not so glamorous and provide fewer photo opportunities for western politicians, but they work more often.

Unfortunately, they are also rarely covered properly by the media, which seem to lack sufficient attention span to follow them. Instead, we get cheap pieces of inflammatory rhetoric, posing as analysis, which makes it harder to build support for long-term commitments. Then, of course, when things go wrong, there is a standard explanation ready: "It is all the UN's fault."

Latest posts

Today's best video

Today in pictures