WEEKLY SELECTION-KOSOVO: UN Knows Limits of Ground Forces

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 3 1999 (IPS) - The scene was the United Nations, and Kofi Annan was furious, imploring a coalition of willing nations to send troops to Africa and asserting, “It is not acceptable for cruel leaders to hide behind sovereignty.”

That was in 1996 when Annan was head of UN peacekeeping and favoured sending troops to Burundi to stave off an ethnic war after a coup.

Now Secretary-General of the United Nations, Annan did not make the same arguments this week about Kosovo – where the United Nations has largely deferred to European governments.

In 1996 Annan argued that “We have to move quickly before everything blows up in our faces…history will already judge us very severely for (the 1994 genocide in) Rwanda.”

Despite that plea, Western support for ground troops never materialised, and the world body sat on the sidelines as central African governments enforced an embargo on Burundi.

In Burundi and other conflict zones, the United Nations learned a harsh lesson: the desire to act against atrocities often outstrips the will of nations – including Western governments – to commit ground troops.

The week-long North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) offensive against Yugoslavia has failed to prevent the expulsion of Kosovar Albanians – but the use of ground troops against the Serbian forces engaged in the “ethnic cleansing” may even be more precarious.

The NATO air strikes that began on Mar 24 – directed mostly at Yugoslav air defenses – have had little effect in deterring Belgrade’s attacks on ethnic Albanian villages in Kosovo. UN officials estimated that more than 150,000 Kosovar Albanians had been forced to flee to other countries.

The violence has prompted some US politicians to push for ground troops to be sent to Yugoslavia. “We must absolutely not rule out any option, including ground troops,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Yet several recent experiences involving the United Nations show how complicated that task could be.

In the UN’s heyday of the early 1990’s, US support for the multilateral use of ground troops pushed UN peacekeeping to its highest level, with some 80,000 troops stationed around the world.

Washington’s support for UN peacekeeping was especially pronounced in Bosnia-Hercegovina (although no US troops participated in the UN Protection Force), Haiti and in Somalia.

But after the deaths of 18 US troops during a failed UN mission to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed, in October 1993, President Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25), which sharply restricted US support for UN peacekeeping.

In the ensuing years, the number of UN troops abroad dwindled, to less than 14,000.

Ironically, PDD-25 asserted that Washington would not support any UN peacekeeping mission without an agreement on the ground, clear objectives or a clear date for terminating troop presence – all of which are lacking in the current NATO mission.

Military analysts have varied widely in the estimates of the number of troops needed in Yugoslavia – from 100,000 to 200,000. That talk, in turn, has prompted UN officials – who have largely been on the sidelines for the Kosovo conflict – to spot double standards in the treatment of conflicts.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who maintained a discreet distance from the Kosovo conflict after the NATO attacks began, pointedly noted this week the difference in the West’s reaction to Belgrade’s atrocities and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

“Obviously, this is another tragedy, just as we saw in Rwanda,” Annan said Thursday. “There has been a different response here than in Rwanda, and I think the question has been raised as to whether we react more strongly to certain crises than to others.”

However, the secretary-general added, “I think it depends also on the region, and the concern of the countries in the region.”

Annan’s words have been privately echoed by many diplomats from developing nations over the past week, who have noticed a double standard.

They said that, the killing of some 250 Kosovar Albanians before the Paris peace talks ended last month earned a tough NATO response while other, bloodier conflicts – such as the growing war in the Congo-Kinshasa met little international response.

One senior UN official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, argued recently that, to deal with the crisis in central Africa effectively, the United Nations would need a peacekeeping force with a “bare minimum” of 15,000 soldiers.

But he added that the chances were slim that Western countries, whose support was necessary for complex logistical and communications services, would contribute to such a force.

Western antipathy to UN peacekeeping also has restricted, or delayed, the world body’s involvement in Sierra Leone, Burundi and Congo-Brazzaville. The prospect of UN peacekeepers in East Timor – which has been raised by senior officials, remained unclear.

Ultimately, the problem with ground troops is a simple one: When the fighting starts, few governments can stand the political pressure of having to justify placing their soldiers into complex conflict zones.

Clinton faced sharp criticism from his Republican opponents after the Somalia debacle, while the Belgian government has spent five years investigating why 10 Belgian UN peacekeepers were killed at the start of the the 1994 genocide.

Nor are ground troops any guarantee against further violence, as the UN experience in Bosnia-Hercegovina showed in 1995.

Then, as now, Western leaders urged the creation of “safe havens” to protect Muslims from attacks by Bosnian Serbs. But the UN troops were ill-equipped to defend the six Bosnian safe zones from attack, so that a Bosnian Serb assault on the zones of Srebrenica and Zepa pushed out UN forces and led to massacres in both cities.

Despite such problems, Annan and other UN officials reportedly were working on plans for greater UN humanitarian involvement in Kosovo, which could be reported to the UN Security Council next Monday.

Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy said there is a broad sense in the Council of a “need for genuine engagement by the United Nations” in Kosovo, but added that any effort would need widespread support in the Council – a proviso that could include Belgrade’s ally, Russia.