UN NEEDS MOBILE PEACE FORCE
COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 25 Jan 2009
We can send people into space and genetically engineer most life, but it appears we’re incapable of stopping organized mass murder and gross violations of human rights. Empowering the United Nations — providing it with the capacity to fulfill its assigned tasks — still tends to be viewed as mission impossible.
It may be comforting to ignore serious challenges, but we should know better. With 18 peacekeeping operations worldwide, the UN and member states are overstretched. The UN has accepted the concept of the responsibility to protect civilians from their own state, but Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is asking for help to determine how and with what such laudable ideas might be translated into action.
People remain at risk largely because governments tend to debate and delay any national deployment for four to six months, if not longer. With slow responses, there is little to stop conflicts from escalating and spreading, necessitating later, larger, more expensive efforts. As a result, prevention of armed conflict remains elusive. The late and lame, hybrid response to Darfur confirms how far we’ve actually come since the Rwandan genocide.
Yet these are far from mutually exclusive challenges. To prevent genocide, protect civilians and stop deadly conflict, the UN needs a permanent capacity to promptly deploy a legitimate (that is, universal), credible (that is, robust), integrated (that, multidimensional and multifunctional) and widely acceptable (that is, authorized) presence.
A United Nations Emergency Peace Service would help with each challenge, saving millions of lives and billions of dollars. It would complement existing arrangements by providing a critical first responder or lead service, ready to deploy immediately upon authorization of the Security Council.
National and UN officials have stressed the urgent need for a rapid deployment capability, a strategic reserve, a force multiplier, a deterrent capacity that might protect civilians and address human needs in areas of high risk. UNEPS is designed to fulfill these needs.
The proposed service would be composed of approximately 15,000 personnel. They would be assigned to a UN base under two mobile mission headquarters. By drawing on the very best of dedicated professionals worldwide, the UN could screen, select and train participants to high common standards, ensuring higher sophistication and readiness for various assignments.
Aside from providing a robust military presence to maintain security, there would be sufficient police to restore law and order as well as an array of civilian teams specializing in areas such as humanitarian and disaster assistance, human rights monitoring and education, peace-building, conflict resolution, even medical and environmental units.
With a startup cost of proximately $2 billion and annual recurring costs of nearly $ 1 billion, this might be viewed as major investment, although it would likely be shared among the 190 member states of the United Nations.
The benefits are increasingly evident. The recent report of economists’ Copenhagen Consensus suggested a similar option would be a cost-effective investment in stopping conflict-prone areas from reverting to violence and in providing an over-the-horizon security guarantee.
The magazine American Prospect ranked UNEPS fourth in its list of "the doable dozen" — 12 ideas "that don’t cost the moon and deserve to see the light of day."
The cost of such a service would easily be offset by reducing the size, duration, delays and higher costs of subsequent UN peacekeeping operations, which frequently deploy too slowly to stem the escalation and spread of deadly violence.
As an integrated service, UNEPS would also extend to initiating quick-impact and long-term projects to counter the structural violence of exploitation and repression, as well as stemming cultural violence, the rationalizer so evident in divisive politics, religion, media and academe. Conflict-prone areas would have services that helped to avoid a relapse into more violence.
Historically, similar proposals have captured substantive public and political attention only in the aftermath of bad wars or genocides. With Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur, attitudes and priorities are changing. A poll of 14 diverse countries suggested 64 per cent favoured a permanent UN peacekeeping force. We could be in the midst of a serious shift.
Planning and preparation may soon prove helpful. Diverse sectors in the global north and south have confirmed an emergency peace service is an appealing concept. The case is now more compelling and the model more appropriate. Most, if not all, are encouraged that UNEPS might provide a more rapid, reliable and cost-effective response to diverse crises.
Endorsements are coming from around the world. The upper house of the Japanese parliament recently passed explicitly supportive legislation, the United States Congress has given bipartisan support to the United Nations Emergency Peace Service Act of 2007 and the British cabinet has called for a "world emergency service." Even in a normally reserved sector of the UN, one senior official noted that, UNEPS "is like music to our ears."
Like it or not, increased interdependence will entail mutual vulnerability and either common security or shared insecurity. While the current cynicism and lack of co-operation are easy to understand, global challenges will soon push people and governments into deeper collaboration. It may not be inevitable, just essential, for survival.
It is now important to develop a broad-based constituency of support among civil society, here and abroad. Of course, there is still no assurance diverse governments will be sufficiently courageous to step up and support the idea.
Strangely, Canada presents a particularly tough challenge at this time. The idea, even the initiative, may stem from here, but there has been little, if any, tangible assistance from any Canadian university, institute or foundation. As Canada’s contributions to UN peacekeeping now rank 54th overall, most know this government’s institutional preferences are in the Pentagon and NATO, not the UN.
Further progress on the initiative for UNEPS will depend upon educational outreach, active partnerships, political pressure and enlightened leadership.
Yet with support and wider co-operation, something incredible might happen: together we might give peace a better chance. Together, there is the prospect of taking a big step toward saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war.
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Peter Langille directs Global Common Security i3 in London, where he specializes in UN peace operations and peace and conflict studies.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 25 Jan 2009.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: UN NEEDS MOBILE PEACE FORCE, is included. Thank you.
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