POLITICS: Pendulum Swings Back Toward UN Peacekeepers

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 22 1999 (IPS) - UN peacekeeping has seen its ups and downs over the years – but the past three months have demonstrated a dizzying shift in international support for the “blue berets”.

At the end of February, the United Nations hit a low point in support for peacekeepers when China vetoed the extension of the Preventive Deployment Force (or UNPREDEP) in Macedonia and Angola decided not to renew the UN Observer Mission in Angola (MONUA).

Those two snubs lowered the number of UN troops deployed worldwide to some 12,000 – down from a peak of nearly 80,000 five years ago. They also contributed to sharp downturns in both countries, as Macedonia has had to grapple with a refugee exodus from Kosovo without UNPREDEP’s help, while full-scale war returned to Angola.

This week, however, the “blue berets” are back in favour with a growing clamour for UN peacekeeping missions in East Timor and Kosovo.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer set the tone in Tokyo Thursday, declaring that, if peace talks between Portugal and Indonesia about East Timor were a success, “clearly we hope that a UN presence could be on the ground in the next few weeks.”

Downer urged Japan to support such a UN mission financially.

Then Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin said that the Yugoslav government was willing to accept an international force in Kosovo, operating under a UN mandate.

That proposal may not prove acceptable to NATO – Belgrade is still resisting the idea that the forces be armed or include NATO members. Still, a UN spokesman said that “the news out of Belgrade is encouraging” and that Secretary-General Kofi Annan expected further details when he visited Moscow next week.

Already, the concept of a UN force for Kosovo has won support from at least one European leader.

Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema pointedly visited Annan on Thursday, a day before attending the fiftieth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Washington, and affirmed his backing for a UN force in Kosovo.

“Since we are talking about a peacekeeping force…clearly this force should be under the UN aegis,” D’Alema said.

Any international force for Kosovo, he argued, must also include members of NATO states and forces from nations like Russia, Ukraine and other nations which share Yugoslavia’s Eastern Orthodox orientation.

In order for the Kosovo crisis to be solved, he added, “it is necessary for the UN to recover the full role which it has” in addressing international crises.

The shifts in the United Nations’ fortunes, however, may be as tentative as they have been swift. Although support is growing for two new high-profile missions, ultimately neither one may be approved by the 15-nation Security Council.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas downplayed any talk of a UN peacekeeping mission in East Timor when he met Annan here Thursday. “I don’t think a peacekeeping role in the form of troops is in the cards,” he said.

Alatas’s Portuguese counterpart, Jaime Gama, argued nevertheless that Indonesia must “abide by a compromise stance and not by a splitting posture” in any discussions on peacekeepers.

The rising tide of violence in East Timor, just months before the United Nations plans to hold a ballot for the Timorese to determine whether they want autonomy under Indonesian rule or independence, has prompted many rights groups and UN officials to consider a peacekeeping role there.

Jamsheed Marker, Annan’s special envoy in East Timor, argued that some UN presence – although not necessarily a peacekeeping force – must be deployed as soon as an accord on transitional autonomy is reached, to ensure that conditions for a fair vote can be established.

Dozens of pro-independence Timorese have been wounded and killed by pro-Indonesian paramilitaries in recent weeks.

Amnesty International this week argued that “any transitional agreement (in East Timor) must include the presence of independent and impartial monitors. The UN is best placed to provide such a presence.”

The dilemma in East Timor, like that in Kosovo, underscores why UN peacekeepers are needed anew: In both places, a deteriorating human rights situation on the ground and political differences over how to respond have prompted leaders to rethink the usefulness of the blue berets in easing tensions.

The Kosovo situation has been a more complex one, with NATO initiating an aerial attack on Yugoslavia on Mar. 24 that has so far failed to slow the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

With the air war now in its fifth week, European leaders like D’Alema – who has expressed his worries over the civilian toll of the bombing – are now looking to the United Nations to provide an alternative to the unlikely option of deploying NATO ground troops.

The possibility of NATO ground troops, D’Alema argued, “is not one of the options that is on the table.” US President Bill Clinton this week reiterated that the ground troops idea would not be on the official agenda at the NATO meetings in Washington.

At the same time, however, most governments want some international troops in Kosovo to ensure that Yugoslav security forces could withdraw and allow the more than 600,000 Kosovar refugees to return.

Yet any UN force would need to be accepted by all permanent members of the Security Council – including Russia, which likely would insist on a heavy component of troops taken from the post- Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States. NATO leaders, including Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have insisted that any force in Kosovo be “NATO-based”.

Finding peacekeeping arrangements that satisfy all sides is likely to be tricky in both East Timor and Kosovo. But at least the United Nations is being considered as a viable alternative to regional forces like NATO, let alone inaction.

That is a change from previous years, when the United States in particular had reduced its support for UN peacekeeping in the wake of high-profile failures in Somalia and Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Until this month’s upsurge, the United Nations encountered a lack of support for several intended missions, in hot spots like Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But for now, the political pendulum which had moved away from the blue berets has swung slightly back.