It’s been a bad year for peacekeeping-and for the United Nations, which in the aftermath of the cold war was expected to be the agency of a new world order. The bloodshed in what used to be Yugoslavia exposed the impotence of U.N. troops. U.N. military and relief deployments in Somalia were so inadequate that the United States had to intervene at the head of a coalition army. U.N.-monitored peace agreements fell apart in Angola and Cambodia and stalled in El Salvador.
The secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, got into arguments with his organization’s most powerful member. A U.S. diplomat accused the United Nations of “dragging its feet” on taking back responsibility for Somalia. Boutros-Ghali promoted a Bosnian peace plan that does not sit well with the Clinton administration (following story). And when the secretary-general toured Bosnia and Somalia six weeks ago, angry crowds jeered him in Sarajevo and threw stones at him in Mogadishu.
Boutros-Ghali, a veteran Egyptian diplomat, is proving to be the most independent and outspoken U.N. secretary-general since Dag Hammarskjold more than 30 years ago. His manner is aloof. His management style is highhanded and sometimes indecisive. He does not always handle criticism gracefully. When the British press attacked him last July, he suggested it was “maybe because I’m a wog,” a racist British term for dark-skinned people.
In a Washington Post op-ed article last week, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a U.N. ambassador in the Reagan administration, charged that Boutros-Ghali “has sought to assume unprecedented powers and functions that the United Nations Charter vests in the Security Council.” She said he has “repeatedly told the Security Council what it should and should not do” about Bosnia, Somalia and Israel. His defenders argue that Boutros-Ghali has merely failed to be the obedient henchman that some Western powers expected him to be. “If the secretary-general were doing what he wasn’t authorized to do, the Security Council would stop him in his tracks,” says Kofi Annan of Ghana, the under secretary-general for peacekeeping. “It seems to me they’re moving in tandem.”
But Boutros-Ghali and his top aides appear to be overwhelmed as countries keep dumping new problems into their laps. There are 13 peacekeeping operations underway, a record number. The longest-running began with the Arab-Israeli cease-fire in 1948; the newest started in Mozambique last December. More than 50,000 soldiers and police officers wear the blue headgear of U.N. peacekeepers. The number will grow when the Security Council votes, perhaps this week, to replace most of the U.S. force in Somalia with up to 20,000 U.N. troops. Worldwide, keeping the peace costs roughly $3 billion a year, and some members aren’t paid up; Washington owes $114 million for peacekeeping (and $296 million in back dues). “The United Nations is suffering from overload,” says John Bolton, assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Bush administration. He thinks there should be “a moratorium on all new peacekeeping operations” until the United Nations regroups.
United Nations peacekeepers are criticized all over the world. Their rules of engagement, and their lack of heavy weapons and air support, prevent them from doing any real fighting. The U.N. philosophy, says Robert Oakley, the U.S. special envoy to Somalia, is “to show that you’re a friend. Sometimes this works.” Other times, he says, troublemakers “see this as weakness.” In some hardship posts, U.N. officials live embarrassingly well. They are paid $140 a day for expenses in Cambodia-where the average annual wage is $110. Salvadorans refer to the United Nations as the “Vacaciones Unidas” (United Vacations). Yet back in New York, peacekeeping and humanitarian staffers are crushed by overwork. “I worked on Christmas Day, and so did about 50 other people,” says one official.
Recent experience suggests that peacemaking is more to the point in some situations than peacekeeping. Last summer Boutros-Ghali suggested that the United Nations should have a standby army, consisting of military units put at the Security Council’s disposal by member nations. Big questions remain unanswered. Is the current Security Council, with five veto-wielding permanent members, capable of running a war effectively? Would the United States, among others, allow its troops to take orders from foreign generals? Is any country prepared to shed large amounts of its own blood in places where its national interests are not directly engaged?
Even under a new world order, it’s hard to believe that countries would surrender so much sovereignty to an international body. The United Nations can do a more effective job of peacekeeping, if anyone wants to give it more money and authority. But perhaps the making of peace is better left to ad hoc coalitions, like the ones in Somalia and the Persian Gulf. With the cold war over, the United Nations probably needs to be reinvented, or at least overhauled-a task that is already being contemplated by the Clinton administration. The first requirement is a clear idea of what the United Nations can do-and what it should not even attempt to do.
