The World Today
June 1999

UN PEACEKEEPING: Ready for Kosovo?
By John Mackinlay *

 

An international peacekeeping force is going to be needed in Kosovo to take care of security. There are serious doubts about whether the UN is up to the job: its peacekeeping department is in transition, the UN barons still flex their muscles in rivalry and the reform process is far from complete.

It took barely five years for the UN to move from its highest point in the 1991 Gulf crisis to an all time low in 1996 after failures in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda and Angola. Its declining fortunes are reflected in a decrease in UN troops in the field from about eighty thousand to less than fifteen thousand today. This is ascribed to lack of membership support, to bad Security Council decisions and to failures within the UN institution.

In the 1996 elections for a new Secretary General, attention focussed narrowly on the institutional problems of the UN. ‘Reform’ was the pivotal issue in the canvassing rhetoric. It debarred the incumbent Boutros Boutros-Ghali, deemed to be an obstacle to reform, from a second term of office and boosted Kofi Annan as the cooperative insider who could deliver much needed change. With Annan successfully elected, the UN seemed set for reform. However, as insiders knew, the UN is resistant to change and Annan’s initial moves were cautious.

The area of most concern was the ability of the Secretariat to manage future post cold war contingencies. UN forces had been publicly criticised for lack of competence and even the much vaunted successes in Cambodia, Mozambique and Namibia had raised serious doubts about their ability to oversee operations in situations where a more powerful military force might be needed.

A more effective Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) was therefore going to be crucial to success. Significantly, it was Annan himself, director of DPKO before his elevation to Secretary General, who began some important reforms in 1994, doubling the department’s size and vastly improving its military staff capability.

But since 1996 it has been NATO, rightly or wrongly, that has emerged to take the necessary action by land, sea and air that might have been the responsibility of a UN force acting under Chapter VII of the Charter. In the next stage of hostilities in Kosovo this summer, it will be NATO troops that will provide the hardware for the land intervention and exercise initial control of that territory. What happens, or fails to happen, in Kosovo will also be crucially important to the future authority of the UN.

It is as sure as night follows day that after hostilities in Kosovo, NATO states will be under pressure to hand over the administration of the territory to another, internationally more acceptable, interim authority. This body would in turn have to be underwritten by a completely effective international peaceforce.

This task should be carried out by the UN because it has the impartiality, the legal authority and a capability for organising trustee governments, peacekeeping operations and the coordination of humanitarian relief. There is no other global or regional authority  — including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) — with this range of competence and field experience.

However, there are at least two major obstacles. Firstly, handing over to the UN is at present not on the menu card in Washington, especially among the military staff and Congress where there is a climate of resistance and animosity towards a blue helmet solution. Secondly, there is still some doubt that it is institutionally strong enough to manage what is likely to be a hugely important and dangerous affair. Has Kosovo arrived too early for Annan’s reforms to have taken effect?

 

Testing ground

For the UN and the armed forces which might be submitted to its command, the key issue is whether institutionally it is now really competent to organise the security of a recently active war zone. Kosovo, therefore, with the characteristics of a post cold war emergency, will be the testing ground of the UN’s relevance to present day security issues.

An intervention by land forces grows closer after the NATO ministers meeting in Brussels in May. They have several options dictated by Russia’s effectiveness as the East-West interlocutor, Milosevic’s extended unwillingness to submit and the cohesion of NATO states in the face of a long and costly campaign.

Whatever option they take, it is almost certain that unless events  meet with a surprising disaster, at the end of hostilities an area of Kosovo will be under the control of NATO. After that it is also certain some form of interim administration will be needed to organise the occupied territory.

There are several scenarios for the establishment of such a body. From the point of view of an interim administration, the best case is that following an overwhelmingly successful land war, NATO forces succeed in removing all Serbian government and armed forces. A less secure scenario is for a partitioned Kosovo with an area of separation between the two opposed forces policed by a strong international force empowered by a Chapter VII UN resolution. The worst scenario would be a ceasefire that left an element of the Serbian infrastructure intact in Kosovo with a view to returning the displaced population under the security of the international interim authority.

In any of these scenarios there will be a number of worrying problems for an interim administration. During a long NATO build-up prior to a land intervention, Serb forces will have time to prepare elaborate defences. There may be a rash of minefields designed, not only to impede the movements of NATO, but to render the territory dysfunctional, so that it becomes a wasteland where movement can only take place along laboriously cleared paths.

In the worst scenario, where Kosovars once again live among Serbs, there will be continued revenge taking. Each militia and armed gang, including the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and extremist Serbs, will pose a threat to security. Humanitarian convoys and operations will be used as levers in a continuing zero sum game between factions.

Whatever the outcome of the hostilities, there are a number of post war conditions in a future Kosovan territory that immediately become the responsibility of any interim administration:

This is the Kosovan test bed for Annan’s reformed UN departments and these are the trials it will have to face. Unfortunately, this emergency comes at the worst possible moment for Annan. His gradual policies of change have not yet had a chance to take effect or regain the confidence of key members, above all the Americans.

 

On the margin

In the logic of the UN Charter, the military operations branch of the UN should not only be pre-eminent in New York but also globally, surpassing NATO and other regional organisations. The UN’s diminution to peacekeeper from its planned role as global security enforcer has been well rehearsed. What is less well understood is how this process had debarred professional military staff from New York.

Except for one token military advisor, the exclusion of military staff was enforced mainly as a bi-product of the cold war military rivalry in the Security Council. Consequently, the UN Secretariat was woefully ill-prepared for its 1990s initiation in complex military operations. It was not Brigadier McKenzie’s expose of the ‘don’t-ring-us-on-Friday-night’ culture in New York, but the much wider frustration of new contributors from more powerful armies trying to work through the UN’s unprofessional bureaucracy, that finally brought change. In the field there was also a growing, if politically incorrect, realisation that the vagaries of international staff selection meant that effective decision making was done by a tiny nucleus of professional staff officers — usually less than twenty percent of a UN HQ. If the UN was to engage effectively in conventional military operations as envisaged by its Charter, this nucleus would have to be greatly enlarged.

The enhancement of DPKO began in 1993 with the transfer of NATO staff departments, lock, stock and barrel, across to UN HQs, in the field. In New York, the peacekeeping staff was also being transformed by new appointments of Gratis Military Officers (GMOs). GMOs were from the new generation of more powerful UN contingent providers from NATO, former Warsaw Pact and non-aligned nations. A hundred and fifteen arrived by 1995 and had a considerable impact in the newly constituted department. They brought with them the much more aggressive modus operandi of a military culture.

For the first time, the UN had the professional staff to anticipate, plan and conceptualise peace force operations as well as to regulate itself by creating operational manuals of an international standard.

The supreme irony is that just as the staff enhancement began to bear fruit, the international community turned its back on the UN as the primary peace force organiser. While the DPKO was growing stronger and more competent than ever, the activity for which it was preparing was passing to the regional level.

Unfortunately, DPKO’s enhancement attracted a powerful backlash. Nations which could not afford to send high quality GMOs to New York saw it as a diminution of their influence. There was also the gravy-train dimension: if the new posts were essential, then surely the UN system must pay for them out of a regular budget and offer them to all members? It was inevitable that whatever the good or bad motives of GMO providing nations, it would be seen as a cabal of the rich and powerful.

Within the institution there were also enemies of the newly empowered DPKO. The arrival of large numbers of uniformed, professional military staff was viewed as a threat by the UN’s international civil servants. The new military intake was energetic and professional but extremely discomforting for a work culture that had largely eschewed the deadline as a management device.

In 1997, the 51st General Assembly passed resolution 51/243 to suspend the provision of GMOs. There was barely suppressed glee in the Secretariat and beyond, but not from those who genuinely desired a greater role for the UN as organiser of the militarily powerful mainstream international peace forces.

In March, the last GMOs left the Secretariat buildings. Within the DPKO some felt the sudden removal of one hundred and fifteen staff officers would amputate the source of its success and growing professionalism. A smaller, newly recruited staff began to arrive, but with limited arrangements for continuity between outgoing and incoming regimes, it is unlikely that DPKO will revive its professional capability or esprit de corps for some time.

 

Dire straits

Unfortunately, this visible loss of competence urged the UN’s enemies, especially in the US, to continue its exclusion from conflict stabilising. In Washington they exercised a more immediate influence on Security Council aspirations. Despite Kofi Annan’s optimistic post inaugural visit to Capitol Hill to unlock some of the long-standing US debt, the UN’s peacekeeping finances are still in dire straits. Several issues continue to retard US payments.

Firstly, Congress has imposed a twenty-five percent ceiling on US assessed contributions to the peacekeeping budget. This restriction means a further six percent loss to the UN peacekeeping account. Secondly, the annualised peacekeeping cost system, introduced by the General Assembly in Boutros-Ghali’s time, is now being used to restrict unforeseen contingencies that Washington finds awkward for its national agenda.

UN requests for additional funds for unforeseen crises and new deployments have been refused. This has serious consequences for peacekeeping contributors, as well as for the UN’s crisis response capability. By holding back on the peacekeeping budget, the US spreads the burden of its debt to other peacekeeping contributors who forgo troop and equipment repayments to allow the UN to stay in business. If the US does pay its arrears, the first priority will be to reimburse these contributors and the benefits will only be felt in the UN later.

With the DPKO in recession, the smart money in New York is on humanitarian affairs as the dynamic element in the UN system. A new department, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), has superseded the less successful Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA) which failed in the early 1990s to make much impact as a global coordinator of emergency relief and development.

With a new UN Secretary General, the climate for change seemed to favour OCHA as the rising department. Annan’s moderate and realistic reforms emphasised more effective cooperation, even coordination, of humanitarian efforts. As well as a new image, new mandate, new office title, and new offices, OCHA also has a new director, Sergio Vieira De Mello, a popular UN figure with a successful field record.

His department is split between New York and Geneva. In New York it deals with policy, national relief and development ministries as well as the other departments in the UN Secretariat. In Geneva, it is oriented to the field, organising consolidated appeals, technical support, relief assets, logistics and capacity building. Despite the new look, in real terms the locus of power in the UN system has not shifted. De Mello’s problem is that the UN barons controlling the big five agencies in Geneva, Rome and New York have no reason to submit themselves to his centralised coordination.

At the highest level, the weekly meetings of the Senior Management Group often witness Annan in listening mode and the UN barons flexing their muscles. The incapacitating tension between the need to centralise and the barons’ autonomy is real and its effects have already been felt in the unpreparedness of the humanitarian community on the borders of Macedonia and Albania. Kosovo is therefore a stark prospect for the UN. Annan’s slowly reforming and yet vulnerable organisation is barely ready for the multiple trials that will face an interim authority. NATO nations have already demonstrated that, however much they support the concept, they may not subordinate their troops to a UN organisation in such a potentially dangerous environment.

In Washington, officials oppose the idea of the UN as an interim authority in post war Kosovo. But failure to participate would allow an alternative coalition of regional interests to fill the vacuum. Other organisations would begin to shape the perameters to suit themselves. Although Annan’s key departments in New York are probably not strong enough to play a crucial role in post war Kosovo, can they afford to be marginalised in such a massive crisis?

 

Endnotes

*: The author wishes to thank Anthony McDermott and senior officials in the UN Secretariat for their invaluable assistance in his research.  Back.