Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights, North America

POLITICS-US: Legislators Renew Call for UN Intervention Force

Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 13 2007 (IPS) - The U.N.’s failure to take swift action in Darfur and other hotspots around the world is propelling new calls for the creation of a permanent peacekeeping force that would stand ready to help stop armed conflicts before they turn into humanitarian catastrophes.

Formal U.S. support for the proposal to establish a permanent peacekeeping force is currently being discussed by a U.S. House of Representatives committee that deals with foreign affairs.

Supporters say a U.N. Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS), capable of intervening in the early stages of a humanitarian crisis, could save millions of lives and billions of dollars.

“It is (also) in the interests of the United States,” according to Democratic Congressman Albert Wynn, who introduced the legislation backing such a force last March, along with his Republican colleague, James Walsh.

As envisioned by the two Congressmen, UNEPS would recruit, train and employ 10,000 to 18,000 professionals with a wide range of skills, including police, military, judiciary, and relief workers.

Wynn and Walsh say the new force could easily move to quell an emergency within 48 hours of U.N. Security Council authorisation, because it would be a permanent one.

Eriade Hunter, a spokesperson for Rep. Wynn, told IPS that the congressman “believes that this is an important initiative which must be diligently pursued. As a result, we are actively trying to build the level of awareness by gaining co-sponsors of the bill in order to take the necessary next steps.”

Currently, in order to prevent genocide and other forms of war crimes, the U.N. has no reliable capacity to speed up its efforts to save civilian lives.

Proponents of the idea of creating a permanent force cite massive killings in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sudan as clear examples of U.N. failures.

In Darfur, Sudan, a three-year-old scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign conducted by the Sudanese government and Arab militias has displaced some two million people and resulted in the deaths of between 200,000 and 400,000 members of African tribes.

The U.N. is trying to put together a 17,000 to 20,000-strong joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur, but the process has been slow as only a handful of African countries have offered troops. Neither the United States nor the European Union members have offered any.

Regardless of the outcome of the Congressional bill, the proposal has been fully backed by a number of influential humanitarian and rights advocacy groups.

“This is important legislation and Representatives Wynn and Walsh should be commended for their bipartisan leadership on this global effort,” said Don Kraus, executive vice president for government relations at the Washington-based Citizens for Global Solutions.

Recently, Kraus and 36 other representatives of groups involved in international humanitarian activities sent a petition to the U.S. Congress calling for its support for the proposed legislation backing the new peacekeeping force.

“The time has come to [create] a permanent emergency response service,” the letter said, noting with concern the U.N. failure to tackle emerging crises due to lack of appropriate tools.

Signers of the letter said the permanent force would not only be useful for the world community to fulfill its “responsibility to protect” civilians, but would also help create a climate of stability in volatile regions.

Noting that it has taken months for the U.N. to deploy its peacekeepers in Darfur, they said if a standby force were currently in existence, the peacekeepers could be on their way in days rather than months.

The job of building support and raising funds for each new U.N. mission, in their view, is like “a volunteer fire chief who is forced to raise funds, find volunteers, and secure a fire truck for each new fire.”

Under the given U.N. system, it takes 30 days for a rapid deployment and 90 days for a complex mission to be sent for peacekeeping tasks.

Noting that the United States has voted for each of the 18 U.N. peacekeeping missions currently deployed around the world, Kraus reasoned that the proposal put before Congress would be beneficial to the United States.

“The American people recognise that the whole world is our backyard,” he told IPS. “That’s why this resolution has the support of so many diverse organisations. Helping people keep peace makes us safer and is the right thing to do.”

Those who signed the letter also included the Genocide Intervention Network, the International Crisis Group, National Peace Corps Association, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Refugees International, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the United Methodist Church.

Kraus and other supporters of the bill say they are quite hopeful about the outcome of their lobbying efforts on the Capitol Hill, but U.N. officials suggest that the move to create a new permanent peacekeeping force was unlikely to materialise.

“It’s a non-starter,” a U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) official told IPS. “(This proposal) has been there for 15 years. The membership has no appetite for this.”

In 1993, then U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had proposed a similar idea, but the United States delegation shot it down.

The DPKO official acknowledged the need for change, but said there is “reluctance on part of the powerful member countries.”

“We are looking at how to cut the time lag between authorisation and deployment,” he added.