The United Nations and Peacekeeping in Africa

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Christopher Clapham

Published in Monograph No 36: Whither Peacekeeping in Africa? April 1999

Africa has been by far the most importent regional setting for the peacekeeping operations of the United Nations.1 During the Cold War period, the sole substantial UN engagement in peacekeeping on the continent (if the operation in Sinai is excluded), the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC, 1960-64), dwarfed all other activities in this field in which the UN was involved.2 Of the thirty peacekeeping operations established by the UN since 1988, fourteen, or nearly half, have been in Africa.3 Several of these operations, such as the UN’s role in monitoring the 1994 elections in South Africa, have been minor in scope, and would scarcely qualify as ‘peacekeeping’ in the normal sense of the word. But others, such as those in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, and most of all in Somalia, have been among the organisation’s most important initiatives in peacekeeping and conflict resolution since the end of the Cold War.

For better or worse, Africa has had a critical impact in defining the limits and possibilities of the post-Cold War global order, and the place of the UN within it. An assessment of this record should therefore help to provide some understanding of the role of the UN, of peacekeeping, and even of Africa in the emerging global order — or disorder.

The obvious place to start is with the UN itself, even though it must immediately be pointed out that much of its record cannot fairly be ascribed to the organisation, but has reflected the dilemmas that any attempt to resolve often intense and intractable problems would have confronted. Even in cases where the UN may be regarded as having failed (and it has also had some important successes), there is generally little to suggest that another organisation, such as the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), would have done any better. Nonetheless, the UN does bring to the task not only some distinctive capabilities, but also a number of weaknesses.

On the positive side, it has the enormous advantage of constituting the world’s sole global political organisation, with the authority to act (to the extent that it is able to obtain agreement among its leading members) on behalf of the international community as a whole. In so far as there is anything that can be described as ‘the international community’, the UN is its voice. Against that, its weaknesses, to a large extent, are the mirror image of its strengths. The end of the Cold War, while liberating the UN to play something approaching the task envisaged by its founders in 1945, has also revealed the constraints under which the task would inevitably have to be carried out — in the process disappointing many of the exaggerated expectations that arose in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The UN must obtain broad agreement to its actions in the first place, if not among all its members, then at least among the most important of them, and especially the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council. Deployment of any force requires the support of two-thirds of the members of the Security Council (currently nine out of fifteen), and the absence of a veto from any of the P5. The UN is thus not an autonomous actor, but the expression of an international consensus, to the extent that it is possible to obtain. This issue on the whole, has been less problematic in Africa than in much of the rest of the world. The continent did not form one of the major focuses for superpower hegemony or competition (unlike, say, Central America and Central Europe on the one hand, or the Middle East and South-east Asia on the other), so that compromise between the superpowers was more readily obtained here than elsewhere. This helps to account for the relative success of both ONUC (despite some major differences between the United States and the Soviet Union), and of the Angola-Namibia accords of 1988.

It is also worth noting that, although Africa’s two major former colonial powers, the United Kingdom and France, are among the P5, no major UN operation (among which would be included those in Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Somalia and Western Sahara) has taken place in former French or British colonies, except for Somalia which includes the former British Somaliland.4 While the British or (especially) French presence on the Security Council has sometimes been significant, for example, in obtaining UN authority for the controversial Opération Turquoise in Rwanda in 1994, it has affected the role of the UN in Africa far less than might have been expected. The role of the US, on the other hand, has been critical on occasion, most obviously in Somalia, but also in the tragically misguided decision to withdraw the bulk of forces deployed in the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) from the country at the outbreak of the genocide in April 1994.

The internal politics of such a large and peculiarly constructed organisation as the UN have also affected the management of peacekeeping operations in Africa. These have not only included the relationship between the secretariat (and especially the Secretary-General) and the P5 states, but also that between headquarters in New York and operations on the ground. Secretaries-General, invariably drawn from fairly small states (and in the case of the last two incumbents from Africa itself), tend to favour a more activist role than the major powers, and one which the US in particular has been reluctant to pay for. Nor has the standing of the Secretary-General himself been entirely beyond question: regional perceptions of Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s actions in the Horn of Africa were deeply affected by policies with which he had been associated in his previous position in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. In the case of both Somalia and Rwanda — to revert to two of the most traumatic experiences of attempted peacekeeping in Africa — the UN found itself both at odds with the leader of its operations on the ground (Mahomed Sahnoun in Somalia, Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda), and on other occasions unable to exercise operational control over forces (US Rangers in Somalia, the French in Rwanda) which were at least technically deployed under its authority.

The UN, moreover, has had to act in collaboration with both major member states and with regional organisations and powers. This was indeed envisaged in the UN Charter, but in practice has meant that, rather than laying down the framework of a global order that would be implemented through other organisations at the regional level, it has had to put together coalitions of states and organisations in order to operate at all, in the process becoming the prisoner of its allies to some extent. At least in Africa, this has been most the evident in Liberia, where the UN only entered the scene as an adjunct to the regional initiative put together by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which, in itself, was heavily under the influence of the hegemonic ambitions of its major state, Nigeria, and indeed the personal contacts and economic interests of Nigeria’s rulers. That Nigeria had a government that was both military and notoriously corrupt added to the embarrassment, but did nothing to alter the fact that no settlement was possible without Nigerian engagement.

In the abortive Arusha agreement on Rwanda, the UN was brought in to assist in guaranteeing a settlement negotiated in association with the OAU, whose Secretary General, former Tanzanian Foreign Minister, Salim Ahmed Salim was anxious to use it to enhance the organisation’s standing in the resolution of conflicts within African member states. On some occasions, as for example in Mozambique, the UN’s ability to work with a broadly united set of regional states has greatly enhanced its capacity. On others, as in Somalia, the endemic conflicts of the Horn meant that there was no effective regional security structure to back up the UN intervention, a deficiency scarcely rectified by attempts to bring, in addition to the OAU, the Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in on the act. In short, regional partnerships are often unavoidable, and are usually essential to success, but also place constraints on the kind of settlement that the UN is able to seek.

The United Nations is thus a cumbersome participant in the attempted settlement of Africa’s fluid and complex conflicts. Hampered by its peculiar decision-making mechanisms, chronically short of cash, constantly having to look over its shoulder to the demands of major powers, it is characteristically under pressure to find cheap and quick-fix solutions to conflicts — the ruthless factionalism of Liberian or Somali warlords, for instance, or the appalling ethnic divisions of Burundi and Rwanda — which are almost impossible to understand from distant New York. But it is likewise inconceivable, on the other hand, that such conflicts could be resolved without any involvement on the part of the global organisation.

Whatever the appeal of ‘African solutions to African problems’, neither the OAU nor individual African states or subregional organisations have the resources required to reach and implement such solutions. Nor have attempts by individual external states to create frameworks for regional security in Africa led to anything more than a slanging match between the two most prominent of these states, the US and France. Some African conflicts have generated an extraordinary proliferation of ‘special envoys’ from all manner of regional organisations (including entirely non-African ones such as the European Union), attempting to negotiate settlements, at best only in partial collaboration with one another. The UN, for all its problems, is the only body capable of superimposing any global coherence on the search for regional order.

The problems that the UN has had to face in Africa also reflect the peculiar difficulties of peacekeeping itself, and the wide divergence between what may be regarded as the ‘classic’ role of peacekeeping and, especially in Africa, the kinds of conflict which the UN and other would-be peacekeepers have been called on to resolve. Classic peacekeeping, as James has defined it, "... refers to the international help which is sometimes sent to an immediate problem area when disputing states wish, at least for the time being, to live in peace."6 Critical to this conception of peacekeeping are that the peace to be kept is one between disputing states, and that these states — at least provisionally and temporarily — have agreed on some basis for living in peace, which external forces are then called on to help police. This agreement, in turn, creates the conditions for what Margaret Carey has identified as the basic principles of peacekeeping:7

No major African peacekeeping operation, whether undertaken by the UN or by anyone else, has met these conditions. Most importantly, no such operation has involved any conflict between states at all. Direct conflicts between states in Africa have been relatively rare, and none of those that have taken place have involved any substantial commitment of resources to peacekeeping operations.8 At most, they have involved only relatively low-level attempts at mediation or demarcation, by the UN in the case of the Nigeria-Cameroon and Chad-Libya border disputes,9 and by other states and organisations in the dispute between Eritrea and Yemen. Virtually all African conflicts which have involved external peacekeepers or peacemakers have been conflicts within states, even though such conflicts have often involved — as a result of the permeability of Africa’s state frontiers, and tacit or overt support for conflicting parties by external states — an international dimension.

Such conflicts not only create major operational difficulties, which will be touched upon in later in this article, but they also raise critical issues of standing. The UN, like other international organisations, is an organisation of states: it is indeed the global ‘trade union’ of states. The UN Charter rests on the distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ spheres at critical points, and the organisation has only very limited powers to intervene in matters which concern the domestic jurisdiction of states. Chapter VIIof the UN Charter does permit the UN to concern itself with any issue that presents a threat to international peace and security, a formula that has been used to enable it to involve itself in a number of essentially internal conflicts, including the issue of apartheid in South Africa, for example, but that it should become involved at all in the issues that have captured its attention in Africa is at least paradoxical.

The state-centredness of the UN instantly renders the premise of impartiality extremely problematic. While it is possible for an institution formed in this way to remain impartial in issues concerning two or more of its own member states, it is scarcely possible for it to remain so with regard to conflicting parties which are states and ones which are not. For a start, it normally requires the consent of the state concerned to become involved in the conflict in the first place (if it can identify such a state — and in Somalia it could not); and such consent is only likely to be given if the government concerned believes that such involvement will benefit itself. Furthermore, the operating principles and assumptions of institutions formed by states will almost inevitably incline them towards solutions conceived in statist terms, notably the maintenance of the territorial integrity of an existing state, and the extension of effective state control over the whole of its territory. This obviously does not vitiate the possibility of the UN becoming involved in conflict-resolution in Africa, or at least sometimes, of such involvement being successful. It does mean, however, that it is only likely to be successful if the parameters of the eventual resolution are implicitly accepted from the outset.

It was implicit, for example, in the resolution of the conflicts both in Mozambique (where it was generally successful) and in Angola (where it tragically failed) that the respective incumbent governments of the Frente de Libertaçao de Moçambique (Frelimo) and the Movimento Popular de Libertaçao de Angola (MPLA) would stay in power, and that the conflict resolution processes would essentially involve the negotiation of appropriate ‘side payments’ (such as specified positions in central government, or a limited degree of autonomy in running the governments of particular regions) to the main opposition group. It is barely possible to conceive what would have happened had Frelimo or the MPLA lost their respective elections to the National Resistance Movement in Mozambique (Renamo) or the União Nacional para a Independência de Angola (UNITA), and the insurgents had consequently demanded the right to form new governments in Maputo or Luanda. One can safely assume, however, that no smooth handover would have occurred.

Indeed, it was the recognition by key elements in the incumbent National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRNDD) power structure that the full acceptance of the Arusha Peace Agreement would have involved their exclusion from power that triggered the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It is almost equally inconceivable that the UN (much less the OAU) could carry the responsibility for a peace settlement that involved the dismemberment of the territory of an existing state. Once the separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia had been agreed to by the two governments concerned, for example, it was possible for the UN to become involved (in a very limited capacity) to validate the results of the subsequent referendum through which the division was formally legitimated. For the UN to propose such a separation in the first place, against the opposition of the Ethiopian government, would scarcely have been possible.

The fact that peacekeepers (or the states that send them) inevitably arrive with implicit agendas of their own creates difficulties in the relationship between the peacekeepers and the ‘peacekept’.10 In particular, those whose prospects for success are diminished by the presence of peacekeepers will treat them with suspicion or hostility, even if they have been induced by external pressure to agree to their arrival in principle. In turn, this is likely to lead to incidents, often of an apparently quite trivial kind, which serve to deepen suspicions on either side, and may eventually lead — as most obviously in the breakdown of relations first between the Unified Task Force (UNITAF) and subsequently the UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) and Mahomed Farah Aidid — to the outbreak of open conflict between the peacekeepers and one of the domestic parties. It was likewise evident that the UN Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM) was implicitly hostile to Savimbi and UNITA (and for very good reason, many would add), and that relations between the two were always liable to break down, whereas relations between UNAVEM and the government in Luanda, however strained they sometimes may have been, rested on the solid understanding that both were ultimately trying to achieve the same objective of a settlement to the war that would leave the MPLA in power.

Engagement in peacekeeping operations in civil conflicts, inherently more invidious and usually also more hazardous than the simple interposition of a peacekeeping force between states that have already agreed to the conditions for its deployment, also raises tricky questions about the composition of the force itself. Operations of this kind, of which the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia provide non-African examples, are less likely to be restricted to forces provided by the generally small, distant and neutral states which have formed the backbone of ‘classical’ peacekeeping operations. They are more likely to draw on major states which have hegemonic ambitions (which also, of course, involve hegemonic responsibilities) that, in turn, affect perceptions of their neutrality. The extreme case of such hegemonic involvement is that of French forces in Opération Turquoise, but the leading roles of the US in UNITAF, and of Nigeria in the the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) force in Liberia, are equally clear.

It should be emphasised that there is nothing inherently wrong with hegemony, which may indeed be necessary to ensure the stability of potentially highly unstable regional systems, and which characteristically requires any would-be hegemon to assume the often considerable costs involved in maintaining order.11 However, it does move peacekeeping firmly out of the sphere of pure benevolence and global good citizenship in which it is often placed, and into that of power politics. Hegemonic peacekeeping, which involves participation by an alliance of states under the leadership of a dominant power, also raises issues within the alliance itself, since other players may be pursuing agendas at least partially at variance with those of the leader.

The Italian forces engaged in Operation Restore Hope, for example, evidently had as their primary objective the restoration of Italian influence in a former colony, which in turn led to an extreme reluctance to become involved in any activity which might create political difficulties, and to a preference for handling potentially tricky problems by bribery rather than force. Forces from Guinea and Sierra Leone in ECOMOG, obviously concerned about the impact of the Liberian war on their own neighbouring territories, likewise had agendas which did not always coincide with those of the Nigerian leadership of the operation.

In summary, peacekeepers in Africa have been plunged into the most intractable problems in attempting to maintain some kind of order on one of the world’s most violent and unstable continents. For them the relatively straightforward tasks of merely policing agreements between states are not an option. They have been called on, rather, to prop up (or re-create) collapsing states; to intervene in vicious civil wars; and to negotiate and, if need be, enforce peace settlements among conflicting parties whose commitment to any peaceful resolution of conflicts was often at best extremely uncertain, and at worst no more than a façade behind which to prepare a resumption of hostilities. The situations which they encountered on the ground, have often been quite different from what they had expected, and the twists and turns of the conflicting parties have required the managers of operations on the ground to redefine their missions, in frantic communication with a political leadership outside the conflict zone which saw things in a very different light. Their own motives (plausibly enough, sometimes) have been called into question, and the motives of different states engaged in the same operation have not always been consistent. The support of a united international community could not be taken for granted. In short, it has been a veritable can of worms.

To show how these general considerations have been realised in practice, and to draw some conclusions about the factors essential to success or failure, it is necessary to look, however briefly, at some of the actual experiences of the UN in African peacekeeping. What seem to be the five most important operations, those in Namibia, Mozambique, Angola, Rwanda and Somalia, have therefore been selected, and ranked in descending order of ‘success’, from the most successful at the start to the least successful at the end.

The Namibian settlement, and the role of peacekeepers within it, fell well outside the general run of peacekeeping operations discussed in this article, and its inclusion helps to point to the very different circumstances generally found elsewhere. The robustness of the settlement, which enabled it to survive major weaknesses in the peacekeeping operation itself, rested on its unambiguous location in the politics of decolonisation. The idea that colonial territories were entitled to become independent, following an election in which rivals for the control of its post-independence government competed for support from indigenous voters, has formed the bedrock for the creation of the African state system and, in most cases, its implementation has been completely unproblematic.

However, problems arose in three cases — Eritrea, Namibia and Western Sahara — where the territory of a former colony was controlled by a neighbouring state, which sought (tacitly in Namibia after the 1960s, explicitly in the other two cases) to incorporate it into its own territory, and where this incorporation was resisted by a movement which claimed to represent the people of the colony itself. All that was needed for a normal decolonisation process to be implemented was for the occupying state to agree to it, a breakthrough achieved in the Namibian case with the Angola-Namibia accords of December 1988.13

The UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) subsequently had the task of supervising an apparently uncontentious transition. Its smaller than envisaged size and slow deployment, both the result of weaknesses within the UN structure already identified (notably cumbersome decision-making, and the reluctance especially of the P5 states to provide the necessary funds), would probably have resulted in the derailment of a less robust settlement. Forces of the South-West African Peoples’ Organisation (SWAPO) crossed the border from Angola on the day the cease-fire leading to the transition was due to come into effect, and were bloodily suppressed by South African forces with the consent of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General (UNSGSR) who was in charge of UNTAG.14 The UNSGSR himself, astonishingly, had only arrived in Namibia the day before, and the deployment of the UN force to northern Namibia, where the most difficult problems were obviously likely to arise, had not yet taken place.

That the whole peace process did not collapse, was due to the continuing commitment of all the major parties, including South Africa, SWAPO, Angola and a united international community. Though UNTAG subsequently got its act together, and some elements of the operation worked extremely well, the achievement of Namibian independence was not a triumph of UN peacekeeping, but a success by default.

Mozambique, by contrast, is the clearest example of the success of the peacekeeping process itself, accompanied as this was (and indeed had to be) by a massive range of co-ordinated diplomatic and humanitarian activities. The war in Mozambique, unlike that in Namibia, was a classic example of the extremely messy kind of conflict — part domestic, part international, part ethnic, part ideological, and militarily unresolvable — with which modern Africa has been plagued. That it should have given way to a peace settlement which, no matter how fragile it may be, has so far brought one of the most war-shattered countries in Africa some five years of peace, is a remarkable achievement. In that achievement, equally, the UN, and especially the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Mozambique (ONUMOZ), has had a central place.

Oddly, that place did not include any major role in the negotiation of the General Peace Agreement (GPA) signed between the Frelimo government of Mozambique and its Renamo rival in October 1992. Though the involvement of international organisations in implementing settlements which they have had no part in reaching, has understandably been identified as a significant source of subsequent problems, this happens to have been precisely the case in the UN’s most successful experience of peacekeeping in Africa. Still more remarkably, a critical role at this stage was played by an unofficial mediator, the Roman Catholic Sant’Egidio community, while the Italian government provided most of the necessary diplomatic resources. The UN was brought in at a relatively late stage, in order to assure the verification of an agreement which had already been reached in its essentials by the conflicting parties.

Once established, however, ONUMOZ was able to assume a core co-ordinating position. One element in this was that the UNSGSR in charge of the operation, Italian Aldo Ajello, was ideally placed to link the informal processes through which the GPA had been negotiated to the subsequent, much larger scale and more complex operation of assuring its implementation. Another was that the UNSGSR was able to exercise control not only over the peacekeeping aspects of the settlement in the more limited sense of the term, but also over the related and extremely important humanitarian programme, including the co-ordination of assistance for the internally displaced and returning refugees, and the integration of demobilised soldiers. The provision of humanitarian assistance, especially to areas of the country controlled by Renamo, was a critical element in the ‘side-payments’ needed to keep Renamo on board.

More important than all of these, however, was the ability of the UNSGSR to call on the support of a remarkably united international community. Given the end of the Cold War (in which Mozambique, unlike Angola, had been only marginally involved), the absence (again unlike Angola) of substantial resources within the country, and especially the settlement in South Africa, no major external actor, whether global or regional, had any interest in helping to maintain the conflict. This meant that the UNSGSR could call on the leverage provided by each combatant’s major external supporters to help bring them in line when necessary. This process was symbolised by the foray into Renamo-held territory of the British aid minister, Lynda Chalker, to persuade Renamo leader, Dhlakama, to participate in the elections, after he had threatened to pull out of the process only shortly before they were due to be held in October 1994. It also enabled him to call on donors to help provide the funds for a Netherlands proposal for subsidies to former soldiers, while the US helped to fund Dhlakama’s election campaign.

The success or failure of peacekeeping operations always looks inevitable in hindsight. The success of the Mozambique operation by no means looked inevitable at the time. The war in Mozambique had been among the most vicious in Africa, not least in the horrors inflicted on innocent people, and Dhlakama was by no means ‘obviously’ more sincere in his approach to the peace process than, say, Savimbi. Even though Renamo’s electoral success in central Mozambique came as a surprise to many observers, and a considerable shock to the Frelimo government, this success did serve to give the movement a continuing stake in the peace process. There were nonetheless elements in the conflict, notably the relative weakness of Renamo and the absence of external support for continued fighting, which enabled skilled mediation and the effective implementation of the GPA to lead to a peaceful outcome. The same outcome could scarcely be expected, regardless of the quality of the UN operation, in situations in which equivalent underlying conditions were not present.

Of all the peacekeeping operations discussed with ruthless brevity in this article, the one in Angola suffers the most from the constraints of the occasion. It has now lasted for nearly ten years, during which UN involvement has been expressed through four distinct missions: the first United Nations Angola Verification Mission (UNAVEM I) was established following the Angola-Namibia accords of December 1988, with the limited goal of verifying the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, a task successfully achieved by June 1991. Its successor, UNAVEM II, was formed to verify the implementation of the Bicesse Agreement, which had been signed between the MPLA government of Angola and the UNITA opposition in May 1991, and collapsed following UNITA’s rejection of the election results in October 1992, leading to massive devastation and loss of life in the resumed civil war. UNAVEM III sought to pick up the pieces, following the revival of the peace process with the Lusaka Protocol of November 1994, and was superseded in June 1997 by the more modestly resourced UN Observer Mission in Angola (MONUA). Over this long period, UN peacekeepers in Angola have attempted to do completely different things under very different circumstances.

From a ‘structuralist’ viewpoint, on the other hand, the failure of UNAVEM II could be regarded as the inevitable result of the untimely insertion of a peacekeeping operation into a situation in which there was no peace to keep. All the way down the line, the comparison with Mozambique points to the foolhardiness of expecting a similar outcome in Angola. The major movement, UNITA, possessed a range of resources (notably through its control over much of Angola’s diamond trade) far greater than its Mozambican counterpart, Renamo. Its leader, Savimbi, had ambitions or pretensions far greater than those of Dhlakama. Angola’s wealth, by no means entirely to be found in oil and diamonds, made it a far more inviting target than dirt-poor Mozambique (by World Bank measures the poorest country in the world), and correspondingly encouraged fishing in troubled waters, not only by states but also by a range of corporations and dodgy entrepreneurs.

Most important of all, perhaps, the international chemistry was different. The Angolan war was far too readily seen merely as the result of Cold War rivalries on the one hand, and of apartheid destabilisation on the other, a scenario that encouraged the delusion that the Angola-Namibia accords and the South African transition would cut off the oxygen which had kept the fires burning. Whereas the Mozambican blaze could be relatively easily isolated, however, that in Angola was also fuelled by wider conflicts, and especially developments in Congo-Kinshasa, with which Angola has a long and completely unmanageable border. Given that ‘peacekeeping’ in this context essentially meant trying to persuade Savimbi to stop fighting, the plentiful resources with which to keep going, meant that he could not be made to do so. A larger UNAVEM II operation, from this perspective, would not have made much difference.

UNAVEM III, with its tortuous attempts to implement the Lusaka Protocol, provides only a partial test of the competing interpretations of the failure of UNAVEM II. Certainly, every care was taken to ensure that previous mistakes were not repeated. The scale of the operation, with a peacekeeping force of some 7 000 troops, was vastly greater. Much more care was taken with the sequencing of the different phases of the peace process, with the incorporation of UNITA nominees into the government in Luanda, the implementation of the cease-fire, and the integration of UNITA troops into a unified national army. The Security Council was ready to bring additional pressure to bear on Savimbi when needed, including UN sanctions — a rare but not unique example of these being imposed on a non-state entity. At the same time, the international setting for the implementation of the peace process improved with the overthrow of Savimbi’s major remaining ally, Mobutu in Congo-Kinshasa, and the displacement of Lissouba by Sassou-Nguesso through the direct military involvement of the Angolan government, in Congo-Brazzaville. That peace should remain so uncertain, even with the improvements to the peacekeeping operation itself and in the international context, points to the extraordinary difficulties of the Angolan situation.

The experience of peacekeeping in Rwanda has clear parallels with Angola. Again, the UN was brought in at a fairly late stage of the proceedings, in order to help guarantee a peace settlement reached under international mediation between the incumbent government and an insurgent movement. Even more so than in Angola, the settlement rested on an extraordinarily naive assumption that parties engaged in an intense conflict, who had agreed to participate in peace talks for essentially tactical reasons, could be expected to abide by the provisions of a complex agreement that required them to work closely and harmoniously together.

The Arusha Peace Agreement was negotiated in the period July 1992 to August 1993 between the Rwandan government (itself at the time consisting of a precarious coalition of parties) and the insurgent Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and called for a UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) to help assure security while the transitional arrangements were being put in place. In the event, external pressure on Rwanda’s President Habyarimana to implement the accords, which would seriously have imperilled the position of his MRNDD party, led in April 1994 to his assassination by MRNDD militants, and the immediate unleashing of an organised programme of genocide which probably caused close to a million deaths. The failure of the Rwandan peace process resulted, not from the shortcomings of UNAMIR which had been deployed in a futile attempt to guarantee the unworkable, but from the assumptions that underlay the attempt to apply a ‘liberal’ ideology of peacemaking — power-sharing, human rights guarantees, free and fair elections, and so forth — to a situation in which none of them applied.

The tragedy of UNAMIR, and the heavy shadow that it cast on the credibility of UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, arose not from its failure to carry out its original mandate, but from the refusal of UN headquarters in New York to permit it to attempt a completely different one. At the start of the genocide, UNAMIR commander General Dallaire desperately sought UN backing for a strengthened operation designed simply to protect human life. Instead, the Security Council ordered UNAMIR’s withdrawal, except for a token 270 troops, abandoning hundreds of thousands of Rwandans to a grisly death at the hands of murder squads orchestrated by high officials in the MRNDD. For this decision, which was strongly influenced by a determination to avert the problems encountered over the previous year and a half by UN peacekeepers in Somalia, both the US and then Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali appear to have borne a heavy share of the responsibility.

There is, of course, no saying how much a strengthened UNAMIR might have been able to achieve, and at what cost to its own forces; it is equally the case that its success or failure could not have been described as ‘peacekeeping’. Its desertion of Rwanda at its time of greatest need nonetheless left a lasting impression, and soured relations especially with the RPF government which took over after its victory in the resumed civil war. The subsequent UN operation, UNAMIR II, performed some useful functions, notably in helping to mediate relations between the new Rwandan government and the international community, but it was never a peacekeeping operation in any meaningful sense of the term, and was withdrawn in 1996.

The UN operations in Somalia, finally, and notably the US-led UNITAF intervention (1992/93) and its UNOSOM II successor (1993/95), represent the extreme cases among UN-orchestrated attempts to create peace where there was none to keep. As in Angola, there is room for dispute over the extent to which the failures of the intervention were due to what Lewis and Mayall (two thoroughly moderate and unexcitable commentators) describe as "... this inordinately expensive, poorly led and coordinated, and incredibly cumbersome UN operation,"20 as against the extent to which they were the result of the structural conditions within which any attempt to bring peace and a measure of humanitarian relief to Somalia and its suffering population would have had to work.

On the one hand, the conditions were as unpropitious as could be imagined. Unlike any of the other four cases discussed above, there was not even the pretence of a peace settlement between the conflicting parties which the UN could have helped to implement. Such agreements as were reached in meetings of rival warlords convened by would-be mediators outside the country (usually in Addis Ababa) were no more than tactical gestures designed to be jettisoned as soon as the participants returned home. Nor did these warlords and their factions represent a real source of leverage that could have been used by mediators in order to construct a viable political order, if they had even been induced to accept one. Little more than coalitions put together for purposes of self-enrichment, with a fairly feeble binding of clan solidarity, they were always liable to fragment if any of their leaders sought to induce his followers to accept any course of action that was not to their immediate advantage. The combination of high levels of militarisation and social fragmentation made it a nightmare environment for any peacekeeper to operate in.

On the other hand, the catalogue of ineptitudes displayed in Somalia lead firmly back to the UN itself. The organisation’s first attempt to grapple with the issue through the modestly resourced UNOSOM I mission led by Mahomed Sahnoun (the only one of the numerous figures involved in the operation to emerge from it with enhanced credibility), failed as a result of a well-publicised disagreement over tactics between Sahnoun and UN headquarters, which essentially turned on headquarters’ determination to seek a quick-fix solution, in place of Sahnoun’s desire to work over the long term through insidious diplomacy. It was a mistake that was to cost the UN very dear. Once the US became deeply involved, during the ‘lame duck’ period which followed Bush’s defeat in the November 1992 US presidential election, the operation certainly could not be faulted for two of the failings which have often been criticised in other peacekeeping missions, a shortage of funds and slow decision-making. It did raise, however, in the most intense form, the problem of the relations between the UN and its single most important member state.

Many of the subsequent failures, though readily classed as tactical and rectifiable mistakes, followed from problems inherent in the operation itself to a large extent. In particular, the US government was unable or unwilling to carry the political costs which could have resulted from any attempt to use its apparently overwhelming military force in order to impose a settlement, while lacking both the skills and the long-term commitment that would have been needed to negotiate one. The most important of these costs was the need to avert casualties. The failure to disarm the major combatants at an early stage of the operation can be ascribed to this need; and the deaths of a small number of American servicemen following a failed attempt to arrest the most important faction leader, Mahomed Farah Aidid, led to the US’ precipitate withdrawal. In the event, the whole operation not only enhanced the standing of the very faction leaders who had created the conflict in the first place, but greatly enriched them into the bargain.

Margaret Carey suggests four eminently sensible conditions which must be in place, for UN peacekeeping operations to succeed:21

Sensible though these conditions are, it is doubtful whether they can be met, and it is not even clear whether they should be. The situations into which peacekeepers are liable to be thrust, are necessarily messy and insecure. The motives of warring parties are almost invariably suspect, and their willingness to pursue a settlement through peaceful means is likely to be slight, unless their arms can be sharply twisted in the process. The underlying causes of conflict will usually lie deep — centuries deep in some cases — and the ideal of national reconciliation will be one that only the most naive can have any hope of achieving. Indeed, the very phrase ‘national reconciliation’ itself begs the question whether anything plausibly describable as a ‘nation’ exists, and incorporates the characteristic assumption of international institutions that problems can be settled within the structure of the existing state system.

However carefully one may try to set out the tasks of the peacekeeping operation, the peacekeepers will find themselves, once they arrive, enmeshed in fluid situations, in which their own actions cannot be circumscribed by resolutions, no matter how carefully these may be drafted in New York. The ‘international community’, finally, exists only when all of the states significant to an operation are of broadly the same mind; and even though securing consensus is a very important task that has to be pursued with diplomatic skill and dedication, to insist on its achievement as a precondition for undertaking a peacekeeping operation would be to give any potentially awkward state a veto over UN participation. Sometimes it may be necessary to jump in and — without self-delusion — hope for the best.

Individual states and international institutions take part in peacekeeping operations for a mixture of motives. These certainly include the hope of building a better kind of international system, rudely shaken though many of these hopes have been during the post-Cold War period with which the preceding discussion is concerned. Such motives often encompass the feeling that, even if the prospects for success seem to be slight, the UN or regional organisations cannot simply stand by and do nothing: it may be better to try and fail, than not to try at all. In some cases — and here the US engagement in Somalia comes to mind — media pressure may be such that ‘something must be done’. States and international institutions equally take part in such operations because of interests, by no means necessarily bad ones, of their own.

It is therefore a futile exercise to prescribe to the UN, or to anyone else, how they should react to pressures to participate in peacekeeping operations in Africa. It is they who have to take decisions, and not the academics. However, two final conclusions may be drawn which are both short and obvious. First of all, the extent of what the UN can achieve to mitigate the consequences of conflict in Africa, though not entirely negligible, is nonetheless extremely limited, and no great hopes and expectations should be placed on it. Secondly, in cases where peacekeeping operations do take place, there is a substantial body of experience, much of it bitter, which can and should be used in order to enhance the prospects for relative success, and to limit the dangers of causing actual damage, in approaching the always hazardous and often dispiriting task of trying to promote international peace and security in Africa.

Endnotes

Definitions of ‘peacekeeping’ vary, and some usages explicitly distinguish peacekeeping from other operations such as peacemaking or peace enforcement, the critical difference being that peacekeepers can use force only in self-defence. In this chapter, the term is used in its broadest sense, to include any deployment of military forces for security purposes under UN authority.



In R Higgins, United Nations peacekeeping 1946-1967: Documents and commentary, Oxford University Press, Oxford, four-volumes, various dates, ONUC accounts for a whole volume (3, 1980), far more than any other operation.



Sir M Goulding The United Nations and conflict in post-Cold War Africa, talk to the Royal African Society, London, 18 June 1998. I am most grateful to Sir Marrack, Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and former UN Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, for making his notes available to me for this contribution. I am also grateful to my colleague David Travers for comments on the first draft.



Relatively minor peacekeeping missions have been sent to some former UK and French colonies, including Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic.



We are fortunate in the recent appearance of a volume, which in addition to discussions of a number of general issues (of which I must admit to have written one), includes case studies of Zimbabwe, Chad, Somalia, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Liberia, Rwanda and Burundi. See O Furley & R May (eds.), Peacekeeping in Africa, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1998.



A James, Peacekeeping in international politics, Macmillan, London, 1990, p. 1.



M Carey Peacekeeping in Africa: Recent evolution and prospects, in Furley & May, op. cit., p. 13.



As it happens, what would be the first such an operation is under discussion at the time of writing: the possible deployment of neutral forces under the auspices of the OAU in the area in dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea in mid-1998.



Noted in Goulding, op. cit.



For an elaboration of these dynamics, see C Clapham, Being peacekept, in Furley & May, op. cit.



The ‘theory of hegemonic stability’ is familiar to all students of the global economy.



See D Pankhurst, Namibia, in Furley & May, op. cit. For more detailed accounts, see L Cliffe et al., The transition to independence in Namibia, Lynne Rienner, London, 1994; C Leys & J Saul (eds.), Namibia’s liberation struggle: The two-edged sword, James Currey, London, 1995.



‘All’ is putting it mildly; in all three cases, considerable violence took place, and in Eritrea especially, the breakthrough occurred only after a traumatic thirty-year war.



Whether the SWAPO/PLAN forces were seeking to establish effective military control in advance of the elections, or whether they were (as claimed) merely looking for UNTAG stations at which to register and demobilise, is contested but immaterial.



S Barnes, Peacekeeping in Mozambique, in Furley & May, op. cit. See also H Abrahamsson & A Nilsson, Mozambique: The troubled transition, Zed, London, 1995; UN, The United Nations and Mozambique, United Nations, New York, 1995; C Alden, The UN and the resolution of conflict in Mozambique, Journal of Modern African Studies, 33(1), 1995; A Vines, Renamo: From terrorism to democracy in Mozambique?, James Currey, London, 1996.



See B Munslow, Angola: The search for peace and reconstruction, in Furley & May, op. cit. I have also been able to consult a pre-publication text of N MacQueen, Peacekeeping by attrition: The United Nations in Angola, Journal of Modern African Studies, 36(3), September 1998. Former UNSGSR Margaret Anstee has written a personal account, Orphan of the Cold War: The inside story of the collapse of the Angolan Peace Process, 1992-3, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1996.



Anstee, ibid., p. 527.



See O Furley, Rwanda and Burundi: Peacekeeping amidst massacres, in Furley & May, op. cit. For analyses of the international aspects of the Rwandan tragedy, see especially Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience, 5 volumes, Copenhagen, 1996; B D Jones, Intervention without borders: Humanitarian intervention in Rwanda, 1990-94, Millennium, 24(2), 1995; C Clapham, Rwanda: The perils of peacemaking, Journal of Peace Research, 35(2), 1998.



P Woodward, Somalia, in Furley & May, op. cit. There is, of course, a massive literature on the Somali intervention. For a quasi-official American view, see J L Hirsch & R B Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on peacemaking and peacekeeping, US Institute of Peace, Washington, 1995; for the UN account, see The United Nations and Somalia 1992-1996, United Nations, New York, 1996. For other and more critical assessments, see J Drysdale, Whatever happened to Somalia?, Haan, London, 1994; I Lewis & J Mayall, Somalia, in J Mayall (ed.), The new interventionism: United Nations experience in Cambodia, former Yugoslavia and Somalia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996; R Omaar & A de Waal, Somalia: Crimes and blunders, James Currey, London, 1994.



Lewis & Mayall, ibid., p. 123.



Carey, op. cit., p. 26.