LONDON – The crisis in the Congo, and to a lesser extent in Liberia, throws into relief an issue that has long lain at the doorstep of the United Nations – whether or not to authorize the use of an almighty force and a civilian occupying administration.
It is not just the Americans who have shied away from going all the way. At various times countries from all the four corners have given it short shrift. “Peacekeeping” with lightly armed troops was the compromise, which worked well when both sides arrived at the point (often after a lot of fighting) when they wanted a neutral middleman, as in the Middle East or Cyprus (where it averted a Bosnian type Christian/Muslim war), but less well where things were still on the boil, as in the Congo in the early 1960s and Rwanda in 1994.
The question pressed by the widening civil wars in the Congo and Liberia is will the UN membership be prepared to vote for something stronger- an almighty force- perhaps American-led as it was in Korea in 1950, Iraq in 1991 or, on a smaller scale, Australian-led as it was in East Timor in 1998 and British-led as it was in Sierra Leone in 2001? This is not quite how the founding fathers of the UN saw it, but if a big power possesses a fleet-of-foot military machine is not this a proper way to make use of it?
A more robust UN has its dangers- it will inevitably devalue the old time compromise of peacekeeping conceived by former Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, a tool fashioned out of necessity when more ambitious plans were necessarily frozen by the imperatives of the Cold War. Brian Urquhart, who for many years was the head of UN peacekeeping, wrote in his autobiography of many of the tensions in that quite terrifying peace keeping operation that left Urquhart himself beaten unconscious and Hammarskjöld killed in an air crash as they sought to mediate. Many of the soldiers, Urquhart recounts, from Swedes to Indians to Ethiopians wanted to use force. The Swedes at one point even took off to start bombing in retaliation for the murder of an Italian airman, only to be thwarted by bad weather.
Urquhart and his boss, the American Ralph Bunche, gradually persuaded them of the virtue of restraint. “They simply did not want to understand either the principle involved or the bottomless morass into which they would sink if they descended from the high ground of the non-violent international peace keeping force. The moment the UN starts killing people it becomes part of the conflict it is supposed to be controlling and therefore part of the problem. It loses one quality which distinguishes it from and sets it above people it is dealing with.”
Bold words and a sizeable element of truth, as Bunche and Urquhart and their successors demonstrated in a large number of successful and largely forgotten peace keeping interventions- in the Lebanon, in Sinai, in Cyprus and Namibia, in El Salvador and Iran/Iraq, in Cambodia and Macedonia.
Yet even in the Congo the secession of the province of Katanga, a major cause of the civil war, was finally ended when U Thant, Hammarskjold’s successor, in response to a series of attacks on UN soldiers, authorized military action to remove the mercenaries and gendarmes who guarded the secessionist stronghold of Katanga. There was a dose of impatient pragmatism here. Once confronted by the highly profession Indian UN soldiers it took only a couple of days to send them running.
Of course, deploying armed might can be an easy option, a substitute for the long-term grind of preventive action, which many of those who in recent years who argue for “humanitarian intervention” seem to give short shrift to. Nevertheless, there are situations- and the Congo is one and Liberia another- when it is clearly too late for preventive action, and we compelled to conclude that something more heavy handed is immediately needed.
If the UN has on occasion to be a force it also must seriously consider the need to become a colonizer. Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Liberia and the Congo present what one historian called a “caricature” of civilization. The raw truth is that the only time any of these countries, with the exception of Afghanistan, built up any kind of economic and social infrastructure was when they were occupied. There’s not much of the Italian and British legacy to be seen in Somalia these days, but not that long ago Mogadishu was a city of fine buildings with functioning hospitals and schools and a judicial system that worked.
Somalia in 1992, when the Americans led a UN intervention force, quickly in and very quickly out, showed the weakness of trying to sort out a post-colonial mess with just a veneer of military might. The British did not rule India, nor the French Indo-China, nor the Dutch Indonesia, nor the Japanese Taiwan and Korea with an armed veneer. They administered the fiefdoms down to the small town hospital, school and courtroom. One can cavil about the unjustness of one nation ruling another- and indeed it had many unpleasant, arrogant and often racist features, but sometimes it can help propel a society out of its ruts.
The Americans are learning this lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan today. That is America’s peculiar post-invasion responsibility. It created the mess and now it must clear it up. But in the Congo the Europeans share most of the responsibility. It is time overdue for them to ask the UN for authorization to do what has to be done, and can no longer be avoided. What the small French intervention force has begun a much larger European military and civilian operation must continue. And in Liberia it is the Americans too who must carry the burden.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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