'Peace Enforcement': The Real Peace Support Challenge in Africa

---

Mark Malan
Institute for Security Studies

Published in African Security Review Vol 7 No 5, 1998

The subject of peace enforcement, as a topic for informed comment and analysis, is best left alone by those who do not wish to get their fingers burned (or their egos crushed). It is much safer to speak on topics such as ‘peacekeeping’, ‘preventive diplomacy’, ‘peacebuilding’, and their ever-popular derivatives — early warning, rapid deployment, standby arrangements and capacity-building. The dangers inherent in addressing the topic of ‘peace enforcement’ are readily apparent from the oxymoronic nature of the concept. It is akin to being asked to deliberate on the merits of ‘voluntary conscription’, ‘compulsory happiness’, or some other illusion based on a contradiction in terms.

The decision to enter the fray was prompted by a request to speak on The Utility of Force in Peace Support Operations. Obviously, there can be no utility in the use of force during peacekeeping, reducing the challenge to the realm of ‘peace enforcement’ operations. While former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali coined the phrase ‘peace enforcement’, he subsequently had to admit that he did not provide a universally-accepted definition or concept for its implementation. ‘Peace enforcement’ has existed since 1992 solely in the realm of theory, which generally envisages peace enforcement units intervening impartially in a civil war in order to compel the warring parties to peace talks, so that a peacekeeping operation can be established.

In fact, the UN has not been able to react effectively to the imperative to intervene in failed states in the throes of civil war. In various post-Cold War crises, it has not been able to enforce international humanitarian law, to ensure stability, or to provide security for the provision of humanitarian assistance for those in dire need. This is partly because multinational interventions continue to be based on the peacekeeping principles of impartiality, consent, and the non-use of force except in self-defence — principles which are tenuous in the midst of the turmoil of intrastate conflicts.

The purpose of this article is therefore to re-examine the notion of peace enforcement with a view to identify a point of departure that would allow for the evolution of a body of military doctrine for the meaningful support of peace processes where peace does not yet exist.

WHY BOTHER?

The shortcomings in the international community’s response to conflicts in countries such as Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, point towards a crisis in the UN’s capacity to fulfil its responsibility to maintain international peace and security. Particularly, the UN and the rest of the international community face seemingly insurmountable hurdles in trying to bring stability to conflict-ridden African states where "... beleaguered governments ... have lost control over substantial parts of their territories. Their monopoly of power at state level becomes eroded, proliferating downwards into the hands of warlords."¹ Under such circumstances, the "civil population becomes the principal target of violence, its control, division, relocation and extermination the war aims of opposing factions."² This was certainly true of the environment in Somalia and Rwanda, where UN peace operations were very costly and somewhat cosmetic activities.

During the UNOSOM II operation in Somalia, the Chapter VII operational mandate (authorising the use of force) was interpreted differently by each national troop contingent, according to their own particular political and military culture. The Germans, for example, were adamant that force should only be used according to very strict definitions of self-defence, which were based on their interpretations of national constitutional limitations. Other countries only deployed to Somalia after promises that they would be protected — promises apparently made by the US in order to ensure the participation of certain nations.³

The three-year UN intervention in Somalia cost the international community almost US $2 billion, and 150 peace keepers died — 114 as a result of hostile acts. UN officials involved in the mission were left with a conviction that the use of force should be avoided in future peace operations, as the degree of destruction in Somalia was not matched by the achievement of overall (political) mission objectives. The US, on the other hand, ascribed mission failure to the fact that not enough force was used. And the UN Secretary-General was left with the black and white options of either defensive peacekeeping or high-intensity enforcement of the type used by the multinational force in Operation Desert Storm. Somalia was thus the turning point, at which the international community lost all desire to experiment further with peace enforcement operations in Africa.⁴

This fact was soon dramatically demonstrated by the international response to the crisis in nearby Rwanda, where the UN could not even muster 500 soldiers to deal with genocidal killings. By August 1994, as many as 500 000 Rwandans had been killed, three million had been internally displaced, and more than two million had fled to neighbouring countries — out of a total pre-war population of approximately seven million. As the UN Secretary-General observed, the international community’s reaction to the genocide in Rwanda "demonstrated graphically its extreme inadequacy to respond with prompt and decisive action to humanitarian crises entwined with armed conflict."

The inability of the international community to cope with crises such as those in Somalia and Rwanda, is often explained in terms of a lack of political will. However, even had such a ‘political will’ been mustered, it is doubtful whether the UN would have known what to do with it. The world body is far more comfortable with the ‘Chapter VI’ tools of conflict resolution — most notably the concept of ‘preventive diplomacy’. As Adelman and Suhrke have noted: "There was considerable international investment in preventive diplomacy in Rwanda, but when this failed and genocide ensued, the international community effectively disengaged. Humanitarian relief within Rwanda and to refugees across the border soon resumed, but these efforts were designed to deal with the consequences of conflict, rather than the violence itself."⁵

Dealing with violence is not only considered risky and expensive, it is also potentially ‘messy’, and may sully the reputation of the world body. Thus, the ‘politically correct’ school continues with its fixation with Chapter VI and its reluctance to seriously consider how to make peace enforcement work. For example, Corum contends that, "[p]eace enforcement operations have absorbed an enormous amount of UN troops, money, and energy, with little to show for it ... the cost, the heavy casualties, and the lack of success of peace enforcement operations have damaged the credibility and prestige of the UN, and are placing other operations at risk."⁶

However, there is a minority viewpoint which is less concerned with the risks involved and more concerned with humanity. One such thinker is Sir Brian Urquhart, a man who made a great contribution to ‘classical’ UN peacekeeping. Urquhart has admitted that "... the inability of the Security Council to enforce its decisions in less conventional military situations [than Operation Desert Storm] is the most serious setback for the world organisation since the end of the cold war." He adds that the "capacity to deploy credible and effective peace enforcement units ... could make a decisive difference in the early stages of a crisis."⁷

Such pro-intervention arguments are almost always based on ethics. In an humanitarian emergency, it is morally reprehensible to stand by and do nothing, even if the only way to intervene effectively requires lethal force. On the other hand, the anti-intervention argument is based on pragmatism, focusing as it does on what is possible and effective, rather than what is right. The way to move forward is clearly to unify these positions by focusing on what is both right and effective.⁸

The strongest practical argument for attempting to develop a viable peace enforcement doctrine, however, is the fact that ‘peace enforcement’ operations have been and will continue to be conducted — by the UN (Congo, Somalia, and arguably Bosnia); by regional arrangements (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Bosnia, Economic Community of West African States’ Observer Mission (ECOMOG) in West Africa and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in former Soviet republics); by mercenaries (e.g. Executive Outcomes in Angola and Sierra Leone); and by interested neighbours (e.g. Angola, Rwanda and Uganda in the former Zaire). Unlike UN peacekeeping, though, the lack of doctrinal development means that, in each instance, the interventionists play according to their own principles and rules (or the lack of these). Advancing the cause of doctrinal development for peace enforcement is therefore anything but a bellicose exercise — it is a necessity for those who wish to see the use of force in the name of peace exercised judiciously, and controlled by legitimate authority according to acceptable principles and standards.

As Smith has observed, "... the real issue is not the role of UN forces and how well they do. The real issue is whether, how and with what objective to organise external intervention into complex conflicts. This issue is not going to go away."⁹ In the largely internal conflicts of the future, the states involved in these conflicts and their regional neighbours will be ill-equipped to manage or limit problems through regional security agreements, and the international community’s penchant for long term solutions will be too slow. The lack of alternatives will therefore raise the question of direct intervention by those states with the capacity to do so — and the military arm will be a crucial factor.¹⁰

Current thinking on responses to conflict reflects a trend towards wanting to establish peace and democracy in a war-torn society in one fell swoop. States are reluctant to intervene in third party conflicts unless a ceasefire is in place, and the warring parties have agreed to a comprehensive ‘peace’ plan which begins with the voluntary assembly, disarmament and demobilisation of belligerents, and ends soon thereafter with the staging of free and fair government elections. Such conflict resolution initiatives have come to be known as ‘wider peacekeeping’ or ‘multifunctional peacekeeping’. According to the principles and doctrine which have guided such interventions, there is no place for the use of force by the multinational military forces deployed to support the peace process.

In the absence of binding and comprehensive peace agreements in crisis situations, and of any progress in the direction of peace enforcement at the political level, the military has been left out on a limb — with the unenviable task of developing doctrine for operations which governments still seem to find ‘unthinkable’. As a British officer puts it, "[i]t may well be argued that whilst ... ‘Wider Peacekeeping’ offers the policy makers some chance of success at a relatively low cost (relative to peace enforcement), they are highly unlikely to resource peace enforcement. This may be the case, but it is still incumbent upon the military to have a doctrine that gives the policy maker the option [of choosing to launch a peace enforcement mission]. What the British Army now requires is an Army Field Manual (AFM) for Peace Support Operations which ... enunciates an approach for peace enforcement."¹¹

Such an approach is indeed articulated in the new British Army field manual on peace support operations which, unlike Army Field Manual ‘Wider Peacekeeping’, devotes significant attention to the concept and conduct of peace enforcement operations. However, in true military fashion, the proposed concept of peace enforcement proceeds from a firm base — the established theory of peacekeeping operations. The draft manual states, for example, that peace enforcement and peacekeeping "are both operations designed to achieve the same end-state, that is a long-term peace settlement ... PE [peace enforcement] will generally be the precursor to a PK [peacekeeping] operation."¹² It proceeds to suggest that a peace enforcement operation "will be necessary when the commander’s estimate deduces that PK techniques alone will not achieve the end-state [implicitly, a long-term peace settlement]."¹³

Other sections of the field manual deal respectively with The Transition from PK to PE and Transition PE to PK, indicating that peacekeeping and peace enforcement are somehow conceived as adjacent points on a continuum which allow for easy transition from one to the other.¹⁴

The US Army has also recently undertaken to conceive a viable point of departure for peace enforcement. The issue of executing peace enforcement operations was first addressed in doctrine in the April 1996 draft of US Army Field Manual (FM) 100-20, Stability and Support Operations. According to US Army doctrine, peace enforcement operations are framed by ‘politically sensitive’ rules of engagement and involve the threat or use of armed intervention to compel hostile belligerents to comply with international sanctions or resolutions.¹⁵ This is perhaps slightly closer to the mark than the British Army approach, but it also does not go far enough beyond the bounds of peacekeeping.

Boutros-Ghali’s An Agenda for Peace clearly recommended that the Security Council "consider the utilisation of peace enforcement units in clearly defined circumstances and with their terms of reference specified in advance."¹⁶ These ‘terms of reference’, however, must encompass more than the US Army’s conception of ROE — rules of engagement governing the use of force. They must define the very nature of ‘peace enforcement’ and the essence of the task of the peace enforcer.

While the British and the American militaries have made some attempts to devise an operational doctrine for peace enforcement, most national doctrines on forceful interventions in the cause of peace continue to amount to "a counsel of inaction bordering on paralysis."¹⁷ This explains why, when driven by the ‘CNN factor’, attempts have been made at international ‘peace enforcement’ without a conceptual framework of where, when, and to what end to use force. Situations such as those in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda have been considered on a case-by-case basis, with only very vague criteria for evaluating the utility of force. The danger with such an ad hoc approach is that such individual determinations may form an unintended pattern that later constitutes a set of de facto principles of operation — a pattern that can already be discerned in the British and US Army doctrines on peace enforcement as derivatives of peacekeeping.¹⁸

The successful implementation of peace enforcement therefore requires more than knee-jerk reactions to media-inspired sentiments of international sympathy, and it definitely requires a fundamentally different point of departure to that of a ‘peace agreement’. According to Guest, "[w]e need a rationale for humanitarian intervention not dependent on TV images and the mood of the moment. It has to start with human rights, the prohibition against genocide, and the Geneva Conventions, which lay out clear guidelines for civilians caught in conflict. These universal standards were massively abused before or during every recent crisis. If governments were to enforce these laws, as they are obliged to do, there would be less unpredictability about their humanitarian response."¹⁹

For governments, the violation of human rights is legitimately an international concern, affirmed by the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Helsinki Accords. The principle of humanity, as codified in international law and practice, demands that people are treated humanely in all circumstances, and that everything possible is done to alleviate human suffering and to assure respect for the individual. The dictates of humanity, as stipulated in law, should therefore be the essential starting point for the development of an international capacity for peace enforcement, as "the UN is under moral and legal duty to defend, uphold and apply the principle of humanity wherever and whenever possible."²⁰ If the politicians cannot revisit such basic truths, then it is perhaps necessary for the military to forget about the contrived principles of peacekeeping and to get back to basics when thinking about peace enforcement.

A seemingly obvious, but extremely profound general principle of conflict resolution was identified by the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda report, i.e. that "respect for international law and norms will tend to diminish conflict, whereas violations will tend to stoke it." The report continues to (under)state the fact that, "[t]he behaviour of state and presumptive state actors was in this respect less than adequate, and mostly counter-productive."²¹ This statement clearly refers not only to the direct parties to the conflict, but also all to those who profited from the conflict, and those who meddled in or abstained from efforts to resolve it. The report contains the following indictments:

International law and associated principles designed to uphold international order were repeatedly violated, including sanctity of national borders and arms embargoes.



International refugee law was not observed.



The legal right and moral obligation to intervene in order to stop the genocide was not acted upon.



Human rights law was repeatedly and severely transgressed with impunity. 



Donors continued to give economic aid and, in one case, also substantial military assistance to a government linked to systematic violations of human rights.²²

It is evident that international law, as an effective restraint on behaviour, requires not merely the existence of legal principles, but also the willingness of governments and non-state actors to comply with them. Non-compliance with international law is a function of several factors, but the most pertinent is the ability of actors to violate the law without serious threat of sanctions.²³ Compliance with authority is reinforced and strengthened by the probability of enforcement of the law against those who may transgress it. Most people, even in failing states, comply with the fundamentals of humanitarian law. They do not murder their neighbours, commit atrocities, or rape and plunder as a matter of course. In order to maintain the compliance habits of the many, it is also not necessary to achieve perfect enforcement against violators. If a reasonable percentage of them are indeed convicted and punished, this is generally sufficient to make crime an unattractive option.²⁴

The issue of punishment for crimes always raises the most basic questions of justice, order and social conflict — and agreement on such issues always seems elusive. While the morality of punishment remains ‘incurably relative’, it is generally accepted that punishing offenders implies the imposition of some form of ‘hard treatment’, and that it involves some form of ‘unpleasant consequence’. The imposition of punishment may be justified on a number of grounds, the most basic being retributive, or simply that the penalty is seen as deserved for the offence concerned. But in the realm of ‘peace enforcement’, there is more utility in the practical or instrumental benefit of punishing offenders. Here the principal aim of imposing a penalty for an offence should be to deter its repetition, or to incapacitate the offenders.²⁵

However, governments remain extremely reluctant to invoke the full force of international law to address issues which are not perceived as directly related to their national interests and related foreign policy guidelines. This is obviously reflected in their attitude towards peace enforcement. Military thinkers, if they wish, need to devise a doctrine that gives the policy-maker the option of choosing to launch a peace enforcement mission. The military is, per definition, an enforcement tool without equal. It is, however, not an appropriate instrument for fighting "the deep battle for consent."²⁶ Preoccupation with the latter is an unfortunate hangover from British wider peacekeeping doctrine, which is retarding new thinking on the conduct of peace enforcement operations. Moreover, Western military organisations are extremely reluctant to engage in anything akin to policing functions, and crime remains "a virtually overlooked environment in Army doctrinal thinking."²⁷

Such attitudes do not reflect the realities of the type of environment in which peace enforcement operations have been contemplated. This is one of ‘failed states’ which, while suffering from varying intensities of internal armed conflict, are definitively characterised by lawlessness. In Hobbesian thought, the first requirement of political and moral institutions is that they should provide citizens with security. In failed states, the government system has broken down and there is no rule of law. In this environment, there is a blurring of crime and war — the type of situation that characterises most contemporary complex emergencies. Intervening forces are not likely to be confronted by legitimate national armies or by the typical criminals that police are accustomed to deal with. Rather, they will face criminal-soldiers representing non-state entities such as clans, local militias, mercenary forces, private armies, guerrilla movements, corporations, and drug cartels.²⁸

There is an increasing trend towards deploying UN civilian police officers alongside peacekeepers, in order to assist in the resuscitation of national law enforcement agencies. As unarmed civilian police are not equipped to address the issue of international law enforcement in a ‘not crime-not war’ environment, the military remains the only viable instrument. However, this reality is obscured by the notion of peace as the antithesis of war, and the related (though absurd) notion that the military (as purveyors of war) are uniquely qualified to create peace through ‘peace enforcement’.

The term ‘peace enforcement’ is not only a contradiction in terms, it is also an obvious misnomer when contemplated for a failed-state environment, as enforcing peace (were it possible) would also presume that peace exists. According to the International Peace Academy, peace is "[a] condition that exists in the relations between groups, classes or states when there is an absence of violence (direct or indirect) or the threat of violence." Direct violence, in turn, is defined as "a condition that exists when human beings deliberately kill or physically injure other human beings", while indirect violence is "a condition which exists when the physical and psychological conditions of some groups, classes or states is inferior to that of others."²⁹ The latter condition means that there is little peace on this earth, for there is inequality in all states and social systems. However, the Security Council must surely be obliged to declare a threat to the peace (or an offence under international law) when human beings deliberately kill or physically injure other human beings on a massive scale, and to authorise effective intervention in order to terminate such actions. Where national laws do not exist or have no effect in preventing murder and maiming, international law, in the form of an appropriate Security Council resolution, must fill the breach.

According to Doyle, "one cannot define peace as nothing short of economic justice or social harmony without losing an understanding of peace as something different from and, possibly, less demanding than those other worthwhile goals."³¹ He distinguishes between a temporary peace which can be achieved through coercion, and more durable peace which involves aspects of legitimacy, political participation, social integration and economic development. The bottom line, however, is that "it does appear difficult, if not impossible, to secure the higher, more dynamic aspects of peace before the lower aspects of law and order are met."³²

While national policy guidelines for participation in peace support operations continue to stress the need for a comprehensive and lasting solution as a precondition for involvement, there are strong arguments for a far more modest assessment of the attainable goals of intervention. As Clapham has noted, "[t]he essential requirement for any would-be interventionist is to take a hard-headed approach to the situation, and disregard outcomes that result from mere wishful thinking."³³ The objective of peace enforcement as a military undertaking, therefore, should simply be to enforce international law as precursor or as an adjunct to broader, non-military peace processes.

Where a national legal order has lost its efficacy, to the extent that it no longer protects the citizenry from the grossest of human rights abuses, a higher body of law must be invoked — at least until a new legitimacy has been established at the national level. The problem, however, is that the efficacy of international law itself is widely doubted, and the will to act is often sadly lacking. The current body of international law is predominantly "a system of agreements between independent and sovereign collectivities, usually states, that defines how relations between and among them will be conducted."³⁴ It has therefore proved more effective in restraining the behaviour of states towards other states than it has in restraining the behaviour of states towards their own citizens. This is why the Security Council needs to adopt the role of emergency legislature when intrastate anarchy prevails.

If peace enforcement can be viewed as akin to international law enforcement, then the principles and practices for the conduct of such operations become much clearer and logically more consistent. While it has been extremely difficult to bend the principles of war to fit in with the conduct of peace support operations, this is not so with the principles of law enforcement. Indeed, it is common practice in many countries to refer to police officers as ‘peace officers’ (and even for a military officer to be granted the ex officio powers of ‘Justice of the Peace’).

Reduced to its simplest terms, the law to be enforced during a peace enforcement operation is the one that circumscribes the particular type of peace which is to be enforced. This law should typically be framed in a resolution of the UN Security Council, which authorises the use of force to ensure compliance with a set of terms which the world body feels are essential to the pursuit of a higher-order condition of peace. This would include general tenets of international law pertinent to the conflict situation, as well as specific treatises designed to deal with the particular problem of lawlessness in the area of operations.

The mandate of the peace enforcer, or the ground law which s/he is tasked to uphold, should be clearly derived from this resolution and codified in terms which are as clear and unambiguous as possible. Instead of the vague and often altruistic terms hitherto embraced in the mandate of wider peacekeepers, peace enforcers need a much clearer notion of exactly what laws they are supposed to uphold or enforce.

Until now, peacekeepers have typically been mandated to monitor and assist in the compliance of the parties to the terms of the general peace agreement, which usually includes separation, assembly and disarmament of categories of belligerents. The peace enforcer may pursue a similar mandate, but the terms must be reduced to articles of law. For example, the peace enforcer must know that it is an offence for any person/group of persons other than those serving in the international force to be in possession of an automatic firearm. Once various categories of offences are identified and documented, the peace enforcer must have the power to arrest the perpetrators of such offences — whether they are individuals, informal groups, or highly-organised entities such as military units. The Chapter VII Security Council resolution acknowledges that forceful arrests will most likely be necessary, and must therefore provide for elements of force application that are superior to those most likely to be encountered during the conduct of operations.

Most justice systems do not regard ignorance of the law as an excuse for transgressions. If this tenet is to be applied in the realm of international law enforcement (peace enforcement), as it should be, a massive effort would have to be put into communicating the essentials of this law to the population in the area of operations — especially the belligerents, who are most likely to transgress this law. This means that the law must be reduced to terms clearly understandable to the population at large, as well as to the law (peace) enforcers. Moreover, in line with the deterrence theory of punishment, successful ‘arrests’ must be well-publicised, as well as the punishment meted out to perpetrators. It is through such practical examples of ‘crime and punishment’ that people quickly become educated about legal boundaries and the implications of transgression, and learn that compliance behaviour is in their own best interests.

The analogy between law enforcement and peace enforcement obviously does not end here. Peace enforcers must also be bound by due process of law, which includes provisions for the detention, trial, and possibly incarceration of offenders. Such processes either do not exist, or are not effective at present. This, however, is a political rather than a military challenge — unless some type of international martial law is contemplated. The latter may indeed be a tactical and operational necessity, and an option which would supplement higher-order legal development.

While it may be futile to attempt to persuade governments that such a concept of international law enforcement is a necessary and viable instrument for conflict resolution in the failed state environment, it may just be possible to steer military thinking in this direction. Without developing more elevated ‘principles’ of peace enforcement, the operational applicability may well be illustrated through an historical and hypothetical example of operations in a ‘not crime-not war’ environment.

The failure of the UN peace process in Angola has been graphically described by former World Food Programme representative in Southern Africa, Mercedes Sayagues, in an article with the appropriate title of No War, No Peace, No Angola Peace, No Angola Solution.³⁵ Sayagues describes the ‘peacekeeping’ environment in Angola since 1991 as "an amorphous condition of neither war nor peace ... an exhausting series of war, peace agreement, demobilisation, lack of war, threats of war, lack of peace ... a permanent bleeding and rape of people and resources." She criticises the deceased UN Special Representative Alioune Blondin Beye for never publicly assigning blame for the many violations of the peace accords and UN resolutions. This appeared to have been the official policy since the first incomplete demobilisation of 1991/92, with the UN accepting excuses for not handing over territory, not presenting fighters, not relinquishing weapons, and repeatedly missing deadlines. This strategy of accepting delays and saving face prolonged rather than resolved the conflict.³⁶

While presently teetering on the brink of another full-scale civil war, Angola has endured seven years of a ‘not crime-not war’ environment since the deployment of UNAVEM II in June 1991. In fact, there has been very little ‘peace’ to keep in an environment where UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi has not complied with the pertinent resolutions. He kept fighting when he lost the (fair) 1992 elections. And after signing the Lusaka peace accords that led to UNAVEM III, he did not demobilise his armed forces, nor did he let go of the diamond fields, allow the government to administer the country, and convert his armed movement into a peaceful opposition party.

The latter is not surprising, for there was no real will for peace. In the ‘not crime-not war’ economy there are plenty of opportunities for both ruthless criminals and corrupt high-ranking officials to flourish. If there had been real peace (or a semblance thereof), the people of Angola would no doubt have begun demanding to know why the oil and diamond revenue is never spent on alleviating their wretched poverty. To cope in this environment, the UN initially sent in UNAVEM II, a weak little force with a utopian mandate. When this mission failed after an over-hasty electoral debacle, the much stronger UNAVEM III was sent in, also with a peacekeeping mandate and posture.

UNAVEM III never had the ‘teeth’ or resolve to enforce international law. In fact, the mission never really carried the weight of anything resembling a legal statute. For example, the type of verbs used in Security Council Resolution 976 (1995, establishing UNAVEM III) indicate that compliance by the parties has been optional, rather than compulsory: ‘welcoming’, ‘reiterating’, ‘noting’, ‘calling upon’, and ‘urging’ are hardly the type of words that inspire compliance. The only demand made under the eighteen points of Resolution 976 was that "all concerned in Angola take the necessary measures to ensure the safety and freedom of movement of United Nations and other personnel deployed under UNAVEM III."³⁷ From the start, this demand was patently ignored by UNITA.

Weak resolutions obviously provide for weak mandates. In broad outline, the military component of UNAVEM III had a mandate only to verify, monitor, supervise and assist with relevant aspects of the peace process. These included:

the withdrawal, quartering and demobilisation of UNITA forces;

the collection and storage of UNITA armaments; and

the movement of government forces (FAA) to barracks.

It is because of the failure by the parties involved to comply with these critical elements of the UNAVEM mandate that the FAA and UNITA still remain ready to transform the ‘not crime-not war’ environment into one of open armed conflict, and to make a mockery of the international community’s seven-year investment in a utopian vision of Angolan peace.

Retrospective speculation about what might have been done at an early stage in Angola may have little value for the victims of the ongoing conflict in that country. It is possible, however, that a much tougher early reaction to non-compliance with the Peace Accords for Angola, (31 May 1991), the Lusaka Protocol (20 November 1994), and, especially, the string of relevant Security Council resolutions could have led to a vast improvement over the current situation.

If compliance had been enforced from the outset, the capacity to wage internal war in Angola would no longer exist — even if the will to do so was still there. While addressing the latter issue constitutes a political challenge, compliance with disarmament and demobilisation provisions clearly constituted a military challenge which could not be met without substantive powers of inducement. As Stedman has argued, "some conflicts must be intensified before they get resolved."³⁸ Similarly, Miller makes a strong argument for ‘relative justice’, a concept which recognises that there is no monopoly on good or evil.³⁹

Relative justice, in the Angolan scenario, would have involved a multinational force that had a Security Council mandate which, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, authorised it to use force where necessary to uphold the tenets of international law (clearly specified in the resolution which established the mission, or in subsequent Security Council resolutions if there was indeed a transition from peacekeeping to peace enforcement). In particular, the multinational force would have been charged with enforcing the Security Council decision for UNITA forces to hand over their weapons and to report to quartering areas for demobilisation. Within this hypothetical scenario, it is possible to illustrate the techniques of peace enforcement as international law enforcement.⁴⁰

Intelligence reports indicate that a sub-unit of UNITA’s army has not reported to the designated assembly area, nor has it surrendered its weapons. Upon confirmation of this information, the sector commander of the international force issues a decree outlining the exact terms of the law as derived from the Security Council mandate, and demanding the compliance of the sub-unit commander with this law within a specified period of time. Unlike a similar peacekeeping scenario, this decree is not negotiable. It should also be clear that non-compliance will lead to forceful arrest and punishment. At the same time, the sector commander issues a warning order for an attack to one of the units under his command — with H-hour the time of expiry of the period allowed for compliance. The designated unit commences with deployment drills in preparation for the attack.

If the sub-unit commander ignores the decree, despite clear indications that the international force will indeed attack, then so be it, for at the heart of peace enforcement lies the concept of credibility.⁴¹ In this hypothetical situation, the weight of the international unit’s attack is such that the sub-unit quickly surrenders — unfortunately with the loss of some fifteen UNITA soldiers’ lives. Two soldiers of the international battalion have also been killed, and there are a number of wounded on both sides.

While the scenario involves combat and thus resembles one of war, there are significant differences. The international battalion does not celebrate a victory over a hated enemy. It mourns the injury and loss of life on both sides. However, the unit is rightly proud of its success, for the intention was never to destroy the recalcitrant sub-unit — the objective had been to get them to surrender their arms and to assemble for military demobilisation. The latter is accomplished by transporting the survivors of the attack, not to the originally designated assembly area, but to a high-security ‘Resistors of Peace’ (ROP) camp.

At the ROP camp, the members of the recalcitrant sub-unit are ‘processed’ by a specially trained international staff. After initial documentation, those in a position of authority will be charged with the offence of possessing illegal weapons and armed resistance to legal arrest. Most of the rank and file will later be transported to one of the designated assembly areas for demobilised soldiers. Of course, the conditions in the ROP camp are humane but harsh — but no harsher than those experienced in the refugee camps housing the thousands of displaced civilian victims of the conflict.

While UNITA has been cited as a ‘guilty party’ in the above scenario, the object to which force is applied is any person, group or organisation that does not comply with the tenets of international law as specified in the mission mandate. Obviously, peaceful arrests are preferred, and are likely to become more common after consistent and impartial enforcement of the law acts as a deterrent for non-compliance and resisting the authority of the force. Of course, as with any peace support operation, the peace enforcement operation would also fit in with a much broader peace process that would involve many of the existing array of less aversive conflict resolution ‘tools’.

The presently accepted conceptual model for peace support operations emphasises consent as the critical divide between peacekeeping and peace enforcement.⁴² However, consent is not the critical issue in the type of operations outlined above. What separates the latter from peacekeeping is rather the necessity to use force in order to ensure compliance. Impartiality, both as a principle and as a definitive boundary between peace support and war, remains intact. The importance of consent, in so far as it may promote peaceful compliance, is recognised — not as a principle, but as something which, though desirable, declines with increasing use of coercion. This awareness contributes to the judicious use of force. The relationship between peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and war is illustrated in the simple diagram below:

According to this conception, the ‘grey area’ between peacekeeping and war-fighting becomes more focused — not on the issue of consent and ‘consent promoting techniques’, but on the whole issue of compliance. Indeed, compliance is at the heart of both the evolving US and British doctrine on peace enforcement, but it is either understated or implicit to current thinking. The probability of compliance is obviously enhanced by credibility. According to British doctrine, credibility depends on a peace enforcement force being perceived as willing and capable of ‘over-matching’ whatever opposition it might be offered.⁴³ This raises the issue of commitment. The more coercion that is needed during peace enforcement operations, the more will or commitment will be needed by the forces involved and their political masters. As Brown has noted, "... the costs of action are higher and the probabilities of success are lower ... Coercive actions should therefore be undertaken selectively, with great care, and with great determination."⁴⁴

Credibility and the probability of compliance will also be enhanced by impartiality, or the treatment of all as equal in the eyes of the law. If one party consistently refuses to comply, then peace enforcement requires firm (and perhaps forceful) action against that party. This is clearly not (or need not be) the same as taking sides with a party/parties that indeed comply with international authority.

This concept of peace enforcement can work well, as long as there is a reasonable chance of outperforming the ‘competition’. In the failing states of Africa, the competition faced by the would-be peace enforcer may not be too stiff. Originally armed and trained by the major powers, rebel movements now typically rely on lightly-armed foot soldiers, and their ability to mobilise local populations to join their cause through persuasion or coercion. They often only have access to less sophisticated weaponry such as assault rifles, light machine guns and mortars. Moreover, while the risks of wounding and fatalities are obviously less, it would be wrong to blindly assert that peacekeeping is financially a much cheaper option than peace enforcement. At the height of the Angolan operation, for example, the UN was spending one million US dollars a day on peacekeeping, in addition to hundreds of millions in humanitarian aid.

The ‘crisis in the external response’ to African conflicts has not been precipitated by any single event. It is, rather, the result of a confluence of a number of clear changes in the post-Cold War security environment, which has been superimposed on the dynamics of the ongoing struggle for power in Africa in such a way that the international community is ill-equipped to cope with the new realities. For example, the de-legitimisation of unilateral national interventions in the affairs of weak or failing states was accompanied by a concomitant belief in the legitimacy and efficacy of multinational responses to threats to peace and security, even when these emanate from intrastate conflicts. The realities of the international response to conflicts in Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, etc. obviously do not support this belief.

Aside from the limitations imposed by financial constraints, domestic politics, and the whole issue of national interest, there is also conceptual confusion around workable modalities for effective responses. Such confusion is an inevitable outcome of the above contradictions and the tensions between ‘morality’ and effectiveness. A perceived solution to this dilemma has been found in the idea that the whole issue of dealing with African crises can be resolved by referring it back to its source (in Africa), thus allowing the developed world to concentrate on resolving conflicts that it better understands and that have a greater impact on its direct interests.

Thus far, however, all efforts to assist African countries in building the capacity to participate in peace support operations have focused on peacekeeping. European and US training initiatives have all claimed adherence to ‘standard UN doctrine’, which is clearly outmoded for anything but consensual interventions where firm peace agreements exist. Events in countries such as Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have exposed the folly of such an approach, and have indicated that there is a gaping hole in the existing repertoire of international responses to conflict in Africa. In particular, there is a dearth of multinational actors that are willing to employ force judiciously in order to establish minimum standards of law and order, and to take the necessary physical and financial risks implied by such a course of action.

The conceptual model of peace enforcement advocated in this article does not address the issue of political will, for this was not the intention. However, it does provide the military with a doctrine that gives the policy-maker the option of choosing to launch a peace enforcement mission that can work. And this places the ball where it belongs — on centre court, with the politicians.