Picking Up U.N. Peacekeeping's Pieces: Knowing When to Say When

When ethnic tensions in Kosovo flared into violence between Serbian police and Albanian separatists in March, the United States and the international community were quick to condemn the crackdown. But little besides rhetoric was forthcoming. Despite the lingering presence of a well-rehearsed U.N. sanctions regime in the Balkans, a large NATO-managed international peacekeeping force in Bosnia, and a well-established U.N. peacekeeping mission to Macedonia, no international intervention of any sort was seriously considered. It was as if the global community's bag of intervention tricks was actually smaller in the tragic aftermath of the Rwandas, Bosnias, and Somalias of recent times. NATO had its hands full, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe exists only on paper, and the United Nations was many times bitten and twice shy.

When the United States stood alone against the other 14 members of the U.N. Security Council in opposing a second term for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1996, it effectively killed a range of ambitious peacekeeping functions with which the United Nations has been experimenting since 1992. Granted, many of the experiments were manifest disasters, and the blue helmets' failure to halt political violence in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia was reinforced by images of peacekeepers held hostage in Bosnia, gunned down in Mogadishu, or butchered in Kigali.

These controversial operations not only failed in gaining the peace but overwhelmed the organization and pushed it deeper into debt. Between 1988 and 1993, U.N. peacekeeping grew from less than 10,000 troops in 5 classic peacekeeping missions to almost 80,000 blue helmets in 18 different operations, including large and heavily armed missions to Cambodia, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia. The annual peacekeeping budget ballooned from $230 million to $3.6 billion, exceeding the general budget and accelerating the United Nations' chronic insolvency. A U.N. senior official said in 1995 that the organization was seeking a "bear market" for future peacekeeping because of these problems. By 1997 the United Nations had tapered off its military operations to some 15,000 peacekeepers operating in more mundane environments on a budget of around $1.2 billion.

While a broad range of observers drew the same basic conclusion from this episode -- that the United Nations should not manage complex, dangerous, and ambitious military operations -- most are split on how it happened and whom to blame. Conservatives in the United States charge the United Nations itself and especially a fiendishly ambitious Boutros-Ghali, who they say openly tried to accrue more and more military legitimacy and power. One conservative wrote recently of "Boutros-Ghali's kaleidoscopic ambition" and his "expansive agenda in the peace-making arena."

Conversely, liberal internationalists blame a parochial U.S. Congress, which pulled the United States out of Somalia at the first sign of trouble and now holds America's U.N. dues hostage to its provincialism. In April Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright implicitly lumped American critics of the organization with conspiracy theorists who see black helicopters behind every U.N. biosphere program.

Both views are off-base. Those who put U.N. peacekeeping through the wringer and hung the organization and its last secretary-general out to dry were, ironically, those American internationalists most likely to promote a larger U.N. collective security role. Many in both the Bush and Clinton administrations sought a much greater role for the United Nations in international security affairs. Even Ronald Reagan climbed aboard the bandwagon in 1992, giving a speech at Oxford University in which he called for "a standing U.N. force -- an army of conscience -- that is fully equipped and prepared to carve out humanitarian sanctuaries through force if necessary."

But even though many American officials were philosophically amenable to that goal, they chose to propel the United Nations into uncharted waters more out of political expediency than as a carefully crafted approach to collective security. As the executive secretary to the secretary-general, Shashi Tharoor, has noted in the Winter 1995-96 Survival, the decisions to send the United Nations in strength to places like Bosnia sometimes "reflected not so much a policy as the absence of policy . . . respond[ing] to the need to 'do something.' "

BUILDING ON SAND

Both of these books offering ways forward for the United Nations implicitly recognize that American officials, especially in the first Clinton administration, pushed a reluctant United Nations into much greater military roles than it could hope to handle. In the former Yugoslavia, it soon became painfully obvious that despite the deployment of almost 40,000 combat troops, the United Nations was in over its head. Among American leaders, it was fashionable in both parties to bemoan the ineffectiveness of the U.N. peacekeepers -- despite the fact that the Bush and Clinton administrations were far more responsible than any other government for the U.N. effort in the former Yugoslavia. Between September 1991 and January 1996, the Security Council passed 89 resolutions relating to the Yugoslav situation, of which the United States sponsored one-third. While Russia vetoed one resolution and joined China in abstaining from many others, the United States voted for all 89, including those 20 that expanded the mandate or size of the U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR).