Failing Our Peacekeepers

How does it feel to be set up to fail? You might want to ask a peacekeeper. Commitment to peacekeeping seems to run rather shallow, as world leaders refuse to match their bold in-front-of-the-camera promises with adequate support and mandates for the missions they deploy.

A harrowing account from a journalist from Sarajevo, which glides back and forth between memories of the war and a mass burial of Srebrenica victims, speaks with disdain, or maybe more remiss, of the UN peacekeepers who left thousands of civilians to the devices armed belligerents with genocidal plans. The 160 Dutch peacekeepers, who faced harsh criticism after the incident, were fighting a losing battle, overwhelmed by thousands of Serb militia and without any reinforcements.

Commander Romeo Dallaire faced a similar challenge just a year before, as Operation Broken Silence reminds us in a recent post on the Responsibility to Protect. Dallaire sent a series of communiqués with UN headquarters in New York in 1994, which have now become symbolic of international complicity in the face of genocide, describing with fierce urgency the plans he'd uncovered, and his suggestions for how to stop them before they were put into motion. He was told this was outside of his mandate. Over 800,000 Rwandans lost their lives in a mere 100 days.

In Darfur and the DRC, peacekeeping missions are chronically under-resourced for their missions. The peacekeepers themselves are not at fault for this --- rather, politicians, diplomats, and envoys commit to peace and protection in grand speeches, authorize missions in much-lauded votes at the UN, and then fail to provide the support necessary for the troops to fulfill cripplingly weak mandates. Just getting helicopters for UNAMID has been like pulling teeth.

With all of their troubles, these missions do have a positive impact for civilians caught in war zones, and those nations that do contribute troops and equipment are under-appreciated. But securing adequate deployment of peacekeeping missions requires so much of our bandwidth that it seems to distract attention away from the larger issues at hand, to the gain of belligerents and the detriment of civilians.

[Photo from The Guardian: Haitian rioters block a street in downtown Port au Prince while Brazilian UN peacekeepers look on. Photograph: Kena Betancur/EPA.]