Author: Wietse Stam
Dossier: 75 jaar Mensenrechten-verklaring en VN-Vredeshandhaving: Een verkenning van de toekomst
Editor: VN Forum/Vereniging voor de Verenigde Naties
The New Agenda for Peace, published by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, calls on UN member states to “undertake a reflection on the limits and future of peacekeeping.” The modest and cautious document implicitly seems to suggest that future UN peace operations will be smaller, more political, and have lighter military footprints. This raises the question about the future of the promotion and especially the protection of human rights through UN peacekeeping. After all, ambitious human rights mandates need to be supported by robust and credible military and police components, which requires serious commitments from UN member states, and a political willingness to accept the risks involved in providing credible protection.
In preparing the Summit of the Future it is useful to reflect on experiences from the early 1990s, when the original Agenda for Peace was published by then Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. It was the product of the optimistic zeitgeist in the post-Cold War period during which great hopes were raised about the potential of a revitalized United Nations to manage conflicts, assist countries on the path to peace, democracy and advance human rights. UN peacekeeping operations mushroomed and mandates became increasingly comprehensive.
One of the first UN operations that included a human rights component was the UN peacekeeping operation in Cambodia UNTAC (1992-1993), which did groundbreaking work in promoting human rights but had a limited effectiveness in protecting human rights. The mission’s leadership decided not to protect the ethnic Vietnamese minority in Cambodia against murderous atrocities by the Khmer Rouge, fearing that this would lead to an escalation of the peacekeeping operation towards peace enforcement. Human rights were also threatened by the incumbent government party which was responsible for the intimidation and murder of political opponents. But UNTAC had become too dependent on the government’s army for the defense of the elections against the Khmer Rouge, who had vowed to violently disrupt them. Because of this dependency -and loss of impartiality- the UN mission was unable to hold the government accountable for human rights violations. The lesson from this revolutionary but also largely forgotten multidimensional operation is that a UN peacekeeping mission needs to be sufficiently robust itself in order to guarantee its impartiality and its ability to protect human rights effectively.
In a more general sense, the highly ambitious missions of the early 1990s lacked credible deterrent capabilities. The authority of peacekeepers was frequently unpersuasive, mostly because of categoric declarations from the outset that they would never use force. The lack of political will to take risks and use force was a central explanatory factor for the failure of peacekeeping in Bosnia (1992-1995) and Rwanda (1994), which did much damage to the reputation of the UN. Marrack Goulding, head of UN peacekeeping between 1986 and 1993, would admit in his remarkably frank memoirs Peacemonger (2003) that, retrospectively, one of the central lessons from his experience in the early 1990s was to never turn a blind eye to the parties that do not respect the peace agreements they signed: “every condoned violation creates a precedent; ground lost at the beginning cannot be recovered; start tough and continue tough.” It is therefore also important that all parties to a conflict agree in advance to a clear mandate for the human rights component in order to avoid that UN missions are halfway accused of exceeding their authority or implementing an intrusive Western agenda into domestic affairs.
Goulding’s lesson echoed in several introspective papers, such as the “Brahimi report” in 2000, the “Capstone report” of 2008, as well as the “New Horizon” document published in 2009, out of which the concept of “robust peacekeeping” was born. This was based on the idea that spoilers could only be deterred from undermining peace processes and committing human rights violations by a firm military and political posture from both the Security Council and troop-contributing countries. The concepts of “responsibility to protect” and the “protection of civilians” became standard elements of UN mandates.
Peace operations with human rights mandates make important contributions to ending the cycles of violence, build trust, stabilize a society and sustain peace. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) therefore considers UN peace operations as “a powerful tool to protect and promote human rights”. The language in mandates on human rights and the protection of civilians has strengthened in the past several years. And even when a UN mission does not explicitly have a human rights mandate, it still has an obligation to respond to violations and abuses of human rights.
However, in the New Agenda for Peace, Antonio Guterres rightly points to a “gap between United Nations peacekeeping mandates and what such missions can actually deliver in practice”. This gap is to a large extent caused by a lack of well-equipped blue helmets, but also by the fact that, in practice, mandates and rules of engagement are often interpreted narrowly by commanders in the field who – like in the 1990s – are under pressure from their capitals to avoid risks. Robust mandates are not enough to deter violations of human rights, it is a credible deterrent posture that is needed. This has been argued in a 2017 UN-sponsored report by the Brazilian lieutenant general Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz, former force commander of UN missions in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which he emphasized that one needs to acknowledge that peacekeeping operations, like any other military mission, involve risks. The Cruz report emphasizes the importance for peacekeepers to show “determination” in fulfilling their mandate and deterring spoilers from continuing their disruptive campaigns. He urges troop-contributing countries to “change their mindsets, take risks and show a willingness.” UN peacekeeping operations are not risk-free interventions, and member states that contribute their troops and other personnel to a mission need to be more aware of this reality.
If we want to keep human rights front and center of peacekeeping, UN missions need to have credible deterrent capabilities and a willingness to deter human rights violations. It is also vitally important that blue helmets behave in an exemplary fashion and are not themselves responsible for human rights violations. All the parties to the conflict, as well as the civilian population, need to be convinced that the UN mission is serious about upholding the values it preaches. Weakness in resolve can provoke spoiler parties to push the boundaries, resulting in a loss of credibility for the UN. Peacekeeping operations need a visible and reassuring presence in the field in order to protect civilians. But this requires a willingness to go on patrol, and patrols require troops.
The suggestion in the New Agenda for Peace to design smaller “more nimble” UN operations, might stem from a realistic reflection on the limits in the current geopolitical landscape. However, it seems at odds with an ambitious human rights agenda for UN peacekeeping. If the UN and its member states are serious about human rights, an enhanced commitment is required on all levels, but especially by troop-contributing countries. They need to commit more resources to UN peacekeeping and accept more risk in the defense of human rights. Guterres is therefore correct to throw the ball back to the member states, which seems to be the purpose of his New Agenda. Western countries in particular should do some serious introspection. Though largely involved in UN operations the 1990s, they turned progressively reluctant to have their soldiers don the blue helmet again. This is problematic, because UN peacekeeping can only be effective when UN member states match their declared ambitions with true commitments. As long as Western countries continue to refrain from contributing infantry battalions, the future of UN peacekeeping, and the protection of human rights therein, is highly uncertain.
Wietse Stam
Dr. Wietse Stam is a historian of international relations and an expert on UN peacekeeping. His doctoral dissertation, entitled “The Imperative of Success”, is about the UN peacekeeping operation in Cambodia (1991-1993).