The African Union's Role in Peacekeeping

Building on Lessons Learned from Security Operations

Isiaka Badmus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137426611
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This study examines the African Union's peacekeeping role in managing African conflicts. Based on a qualitative research methodology, it analyses AU peace operations in Burundi and Somalia, and hybrid peacekeeping in Darfur, in order to identify the lessons learned and suggest how future outcomes may be improved.

1

Conceptual Framework and Some Background Issues

Introduction

There is controversy and a lack of consensus among scholars and practitioners about the theory and practice of peacekeeping. Although the concept of peacekeeping as a tool of managing international conflicts evolved in the early years of the UN, its application in the post-Cold War international arena has undergone many changes. Also, peacekeeping activities have been stretched to include many tasks that were not envisaged by its founders. The end of the Cold War and the new context of conflicts characterised by the shift from interstate wars to predominantly intrastate ones have occasioned the growing rate of deployment of an increasing number of UN peacekeeping missions across the globe. This new development attests to the international community’s commitment to dealing with threats to peace and security. Peacekeeping missions have increased in size, scope, and strategies with complex mandates. Contemporary peace operations have moved beyond the interposition of forces and ceasefire monitoring and observation to include an increasing number of non-military functions in such places as Cambodia and El Salvador. In spite of the metamorphosis in the nature and practice of peacekeeping, the UN peace operations have not been able to resolve some internal armed conflicts, especially in Africa, on an enduring basis, as with the deadly trilogy of Angola, Rwanda and Somalia in the 1990s.¹

In this chapter, I examine the concept and evolution of peacekeeping. I also investigate UN peacekeeping experiences in Africa with a view to examining its successes and failures in resolving the post-Cold War African conflicts that have ravaged the continent over the past few years and the reasons for these performances in different contexts of African conflicts. I interrogate whether the UN peace operations have been successful in securing a path to durable peace in Africa in the post-Cold War period. Regionalisation and regional peace operations within the framework of the African institutions, both the AU and the RECs are also explored in order to question the benefits and the drawbacks of this approach to conflict management based on the pro and con arguments of its advocates and sceptics respectively. Therefore, I start by conceptualising peacekeeping.

Peacekeeping: definition and evolution

The concept of peacekeeping defies easy operational definition, as there are arguments and counterarguments among peacekeeping scholars and practitioners honouring different theoretical perspectives (Diehl 1994; Kondoch 2007). In its traditional form, peacekeeping involves the deployment of military personnel to conflict theatres with the responsibilities for supervising the buffer zones and monitoring ceasefire agreements. According to McLean (1996: 321), peacekeeping is the use of “international military personnel, either in units or as individual observers, as part of an agreed peace settlement or truce, generally to verify and monitor ceasefire lines.” The essence of traditional peacekeeping is to help develop confidence in the peace process, and its success depends on the principles of consent, impartiality, and non-use of force (except in self-defence) (Diehl 2008). In contemporary peace operations, the tasks of peacekeepers have been expanded beyond their role under the traditional model.

A case in point is the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) that has been deployed since 1964 to prevent fighting between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities in Cyprus. The troops were deployed in a neutral area that separates the belligerents. Despite the fact that UNFICYP has performed creditably in observing the maintenance of the ceasefire agreement and maintaining the buffer zone as a confidence building measure, which prevented the conflict from escalating through the involvement of the then superpowers, the peace mission has also been engaging in tasks such as food distribution, provision of essential social services, and human rights promotion (Månsson 2005). The UN for its own part defines peacekeeping as:

An operation involving military personnel, but without enforcement powers, undertaken by the United Nations to help maintain or restore international peace and security in areas of conflict. These operations are voluntary and are based on consent and cooperation. While they involve the use of military personnel, they achieve their objectives not by force of arms, thus contrasting them with the “enforcement action” of the United Nations under Article 42. (United Nations 1990: 4)

Having provided a snapshot of peacekeeping, it is now important to locate its place and evolution in the UN Charter.

The UN was established in 1945 to promote international peace and security. The establishment of the UN was important because of the failures of its predecessor, the League of Nations (the League), to avert the Second World War and the human catastrophes that followed. Consequently, the UN was to correct some of the weaknesses of the League, especially in the area of pacific settlement of dispute and the maintenance of international peace and security. The UN was originally designed and planned to achieve international peace and security through a framework of collective security as stated in Chapters VI and VII of its Charter. The two chapters form the body of norms and principles around which the collective security acts. Chapters VI and VII² of the UN Charter are paramount because the provisions of these two chapters deal with situations that are regarded as threats to international peace and security. First, in Chapter VI, prospective member states of the organisation must respect and subscribe to Article 33 of the UN Charter. The UN Charter enjoins member states to maintain the high standards of international behaviour and settle their dispute by peaceful means (Article 33 (1)). Thus, Chapter VI centres on the modalities for pacific settlement of disputes by means of enquiry, negotiation, conciliation, arbitration and judicial settlement, and also by resort to “regional agencies or arrangements or other peaceful means” (Article 33). Chapter VII calls for peace enforcement against states that use force in international relations if actions taken in pursuit of Chapter VI fail. Peace enforcement measures might include the application of economic sanctions, arms embargoes and the use of force as a last resort. The Charter contends that the combined strength of all member states should be used to punish belligerents. Collective security systems require that member states should give up a proportion of their freedom to act independently. The degree of action permitted would be limited to the right of self-defence until the UN Security Council assumed responsibility. Collective security is a system, either regional or global, where member states agreed, in principle, that the security of one is the concern of all, and in this regards, to join resources and forces together in responding to an act of aggression. The whole idea of collective security is based on states renouncing the use of force in international relations and agreeing instead to settle their disputes peacefully and with a willingness to respond collectively to any act of aggression (Baylis 2001: 264).

Under the UN Charter, the UN Security Councill remains central in making decisions on security matters, especially the determination of the existence of threats to peace. Therefore, the use of military force could only be authorised by the UN Security Council with the help of the UN Military Staff Committee. The P-5 played a very important role in the establishment of the UN and as a result, the Charter empowers them with the right of veto on such matters. This means that collective use of force by the UN could be applied only if, where and when there was a consensus among the P-5. Despite the important place and role of the UN Security Council in international peace and security matters, other organs of the UN do have inputs into this endeavour; the United Nations General Assembly especially also has the secondary function of settling disputes (Article 39, see also Boulden 2013). The General Assembly has in the past made effort to induce the UN Security Council to apply sanctions against recalcitrant states. The General Assembly has also exercised its power by recommending collective measures in situations of eventual breach of the peace or act of aggression, especially when the Security Council failed to exercise its primary responsibility. This was exemplified by the adoption of the Uniting for Peace Resolution (UPR) by the UN General Assembly in 1950, authorising the deployment of peace enforcement operation to Korea when the council was incapacitated in making a decision due to the East-West rivalry (Forrester 1993). The purpose of the UPR was to provide the UN Secretary General with responsibility for collective security measures and simultaneously to decentralise the UN system itself.

The envisioned unanimity among the UN member states, especially the P-5, and the renunciation of the use of force in international relations, proved to be ill-advised and erroneous . Two fundamental false assumptions of the UN founders crippled the effectiveness of the UN Charter and proper functioning of the organisation. First, it was thought that aggression would be in the form of interstate conflicts, and second, there was the assumption that states are bound to obey and follow norms of the international system in their international relations since they operated through their governments (Fetherston 1994: 3). This vision when related to the evolution of peacekeeping is inaccurate because in the contemporary international system, most conflicts are internal armed conflicts and championed by non-state actors. Also, for most of the UN’s existence, especially during the Cold War, the envisaged cooperation among the P-5 did not materialise. This is because the UN Security Council was envisioned to be an organ by means through which the Great Powers could exercise a joint directorate over international political affairs, as long as they could agree upon joint policy and action, but unfortunately, the council failed to operate in the clear absence of such agreement. Therefore, the Charter failed to correctly anticipate the shape and balance of the post-Second World War environment. Despite the existence of these two routes to maintaining international peace and security, lack of cooperation in the UN Security Council renders the council ineffective, and this greatly damages the mechanisms available for conflict management and also has negative effects on the entire UN system. As Adisa and Aminu (1996: 85) rightly observed: “that consensus (among the P-5) proved difficult to achieve in the era of the Cold War which was marked by mistrust and disagreements among the superpowers. The descensus threatened to immobilise the UN and constrained the organisation’s ability to respond to and seek to mitigate problems arising from conflict situations.” Consequently, the UN Security Council was unable to resolve many international disputes contrary to the aims of the Charter’s mechanism.

Therefore, lack of cooperation among the P-5 resulted in the adoption of peacekeeping as a conflict resolution mechanism, since it is not foreseen by the founders of the UN and also does not appear in the UN Charter (Kondoch 2007; O’Neill and Rees 2005; Thakur and Schnabel (eds) 2001; Weiss 2007). The recurring impasse resulting from the veto-wielding powers of the members of the UN Security Council actually led to the fashioning of the traditional peacekeeping model as a conflict containment strategy. Bassey (1993) argued that despite its extensive application, peacekeeping is not reflected in the theoretical substructure of the UN Charter. Instead, it has evolved as an experimental compromise between collective security and permanent paralysis, both of which have confronted the UN as a result of Cold War politics. The peacekeeping approach (or “preventive diplomacy” to use Dag Hammarskjöld’s category), Bassey (ibid.: 23) concludes, “represents a different formulation of the UN role in the field of peace and security from those envisaged in Chapters VI and VII of the UN Charter. It has, nevertheless, added a new dimension to the traditional diplomatic instruments of negotiation, conciliation, and mediation.” Since the envisaged consensus among the P-5 proved difficult to achieve during the Cold War, the lack of agreement threatened to ground the organisation’s ability to respond to conflict situations. It was within this context that traditional peacekeeping (a halfway house between Chapter VI and VII) evolved.

Traditional peacekeeping is a conflict containment instrument that involves disinterested³ external assistance to intervene and encourage the belligerents to extricate themselves from military action. Classical peacekeeping operations involved two kinds of missions: unarmed observer missions and the peacekeeping force. The latter involves the use of soldiers but in a non-combat way. Peacekeepers’ orientation, attitudes, and actions are preferably non-forceful. Instead, peacekeeping impulse is based on consent. The non-violence ethic in conflict resolution distinguishes it from peace enforcement (Adisa and Aminu 1996: 86). In this regard, peacekeeping that deviates from the traditional intentions is seen to be nothing more than organised violence via armed intervention delicately shrouded in the peaceful guise of a UN mandate, when in fact it actually describes war rather than peace.

The UN peacekeeping operations during the early period were traditional in nature, which is closely associated with the interpositioning of troops between the antagonistic parties after the ceasefire had been agreed upon. Traditional peacekeeping is designed to avoid the direct confrontation between the superpowers in regions of conflict during the Cold War period. The UN first ventured into this operation in 1948 when it dispatched unarmed military observers, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO), to Palestine to monitor and ensure compliance with a truce negotiated by Count Folke Bernadotte during the first Arab-Israeli war (Goulding 1993). In 1949, the mandate of UNTSO changed to helping the warring parties supervise the application and observance of the four General Armistice Agreements between Israel and the four neighbouring Arab countries (Bello-Fadile 1992: 9). Also in 1949, when India and Pakistan were at loggerheads over the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the UN Security Council established the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to supervise the ceasefire between the two countries. Traditional peacekeeping attempts to contain violence rather than find durable solutions to end conflicts; that is, it is too preoccupied with treating the symptoms rather than dealing with the causes of conflicts. The danger of the traditional peacekeeping approach is that it has proved to prolong the duration of peacekeeping operations, as they lack any built-in exit strategy and associated peacemaking was usually slow to progress. Most of the missions mounted by the UN between 1945 and 1988 involved military force with security-driven mandates; that is, peacekeeping forces were interposed between combatants, and they monitored ceasefires. During this period, the missions were conducted with the consent of the concerned parties.

Peacekeeping in its proper sense began in 1956 with the involvement of the UN in the Suez crisis, which erupted as a result of the Anglo-Israeli-French attack on Egypt. The UN established the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF I) to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Egypt (Adebajo 2011). The UNEF experience was a success story because it ended the destructive war, and for more than ten years, it effectively kept peace in that part of the world. UNEF established a basic set of principles and standards, which have served as the basis for the creation of all other missions. UNEF I and II⁴ represented a progression in the evolution of peacekeeping, for they were created to secure a ceasefire (a more complex task), which contrasted these operations with previously mentioned ones. In the case of UNEF II, the mission was able to douse tension, diffuse hostility, reestablish a buffer zone between the belligerents, and eventually insulated the crisis from the influence of a confrontation between the superpowers. Despite the considerable optimism created by the UNEF experiences for the prospects of peacekeeping, traditional peacekeeping operations are all characteristically the same, and they are not meant to offer permanent solutions to conflicts. Finally, the proliferation of internal armed conflicts following the end of the Cold War puts new demands on peace missions, and eventually traditional peacekeeping gave way to the more complex and multitasked peace operations with expanded mandates.

The end of the Cold War established new parameters, which removed obstacles that had hitherto restrained peacekeeping operations. This is because the USSR, which had previously been suspicious of UN peacekeeping, abruptly changed its position and lent its support (Weiss 2007). The situation opened up opportunities for direct superpower involvement in peacekeeping through an atmosphere of collegiality in the UN Security Council, which obviously had the effect of improving the capability of the UN to deal more directly and effectively with international security problems. The progressive developments in the UN Security Council in general and peacekeeping in particular made Boutros-Ghali (1992: 89–90) declare that the new era had brought new credibility to the organisation as the end of the ideological war had led to an impressive expansion in the demand for peacekeeping support. As a result, in less than five years, between 1985 and 1989, five new peace operations were established and by 1994, 24 new operations were established in different parts of the world (Adisa and Aminu 1996: 90). This was far more than the number of operations initiated by the UN in the previous 40 years.⁵ As well, there is the growing complexity and magnitude of the mandates and tasks of the new missions. Post-Cold War peace operations involved multi-component missions in which civilian and post- conflict rebuilding activities occupy an important place. That is, peacekeeping has moved from limited functions to full-fledged state-building operations. For example, most of the UN-authorised peace operations after the Cold War are mandated to undertake security sector and justice sector reforms (Piiparinen 2012; see also Dobbins et al. 2005). Therefore, the UN-mandated peace operation, the United Nations Transitional Assistance Group (UNTAG) (1989–1990) that worked for Namibia’s independence became the institution’s first major multidimensional peace operation that was mounted in the post-Cold War era. UNTAG represents a new direction in peacekeeping since it gave it a new complexity, for peacekeeping had now transcended the Westphalian conception that relied on limited engagement to end interstate conflicts and moved towards the post-Westphalian order in which it had to wade into the terrain of engaging within states to manage intrastate conflicts. Thus, the UN had progressed from a status quo orientation to become the architect of political transition as demonstrated in the cases of Timor Leste (East Timor) (Howard 2008; Smith with Dee 2003), Cambodia (Coulon and Liégeois 2010; Dobbins et al. 2005; Richmond and Franks 2011) and Namibia (Adebajo, 2011; Howard 2008; Malone and Wermester 2000). In Cambodia, the UN peace mission (the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia – UNTAC) was authorised (under UN Security Council Resolution 745), between 1992 and 1993, to implement the Paris Peace Accords of October 1991 (Howard 2008). The tasks of UNTAC were to implement the 1991 accords, which was in agreement with the de facto government in Cambodia at the time and other warring factions (Coulon and Liégeois 2010: 10). In line with its mandate, UNTAC administered Cambodia (a sovereign state that was in turmoil after many years of armed conflict), organised general elections and restored a democratically elected civilian administration in the troubled Asian country (Doyle 1995; Doyle, Johnstone and Orr 1997). Among its achievements, UNTAC was able to promote and safeguard human rights across the country (Doyle 1995).

The UN deployed a peace mission in East Timor (the United Nations Mission in East Timor – UNAMET) in June 1999 after many years of subjugation of the territory (East Timor) under the Portuguese and later Indonesian colonial rule. UNAMET was mandated to conduct a referendum to determine the future of East Timor (Chopra 2002). The inability of UNAMET to accomplish its tasks successfully, due to a number of challenges that confronted the mission, paved the way for the deployment of an UN-authorised multinational peace enforcement mission (the International Force in East Timor – INTERFET) in September 1999 to provide peace and security in East Timor and suppor...