War and Peacekeeping

Personal Reflections on Conflict and Lasting Peace

Martin Bell

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786077646
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

There are no winners in war, only losers. We have so far avoided a third world war, but across the globe regional conflicts flare up in a seemingly unstoppable cycle. Who can stand between the armed camps? Over six decades, Martin Bell has stood in eighteen war zones – as a soldier, a reporter and a UNICEF ambassador. Now he looks back on our efforts to keep the peace since the end of the Second World War and the birth of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the new State of Israel. From the failures of Bosnia, Rwanda and South Sudan to nationalism's resurgence and the distribution of alternative facts across a darkening political landscape, Bell calls for us to learn from past mistakes – before it's too late.

1. THE BIRTH OF PEACEKEEPING

The British Army is not a unitary force. It is a collection of regiments and corps, with different traditions and flags and marches and histories and places in the order of battle. Some of them are better at war fighting, which requires aggression, and others are better at peacekeeping, which requires restraint. Some are better at marching than at fighting if they are chiefly trained for ceremonial duties, but still they must make a passable show of doing both. It is in the nature of the military that each regiment and corps thinks itself superior to all the others. They drill that into you when you join them. In the vanguard of an advance are usually to be found the Paras, the Marines (technically part of the Royal Navy) and the Guards, who have distinctive tribal rivalries of their own. In the rearguard of a retreat, which is just as dangerous a place to be, are to be found the county regiments of the line, also known as the PBI, the poor bloody infantry, who manned the ramparts at the end of an empire. Nearly every county had its regiment and mine was no exception. The Suffolk Regiment, which preceded the Royal Anglians and in which I served, was one of those manning the imperial ramparts at the going down of the sun. Unlike our neighbours from Norfolk, we were not royal, but we were as proud of our traditions as they were of theirs, and by no means eager to amalgamate with them. Theirs was the senior regiment, but ours (we thought) was the better one and had the battle honours to prove it. When regiments merge, sometimes two or three times over, each one feels short-changed and believes that it has traded down by amalgamating with the other. I can lay a claim, since the Suffolk Regiment disappeared shortly after my demob, to being its youngest old soldier.

The regiments are not treated or deployed as equals. As the Royal Anglians discovered in the Falklands War of 1982, to be designated the Spearhead Battalion means nothing if you are up against others with more influential connections. The Scots and Welsh Guards, Paras and Marines and Gurkhas were deployed. The Royal Anglians were not.

On 14 May 1948, at the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, the 2nd Battalion of the Warwickshire Regiment, 2nd Brigade Headquarters and 1st Battalion of the Highland Light Infantry left their camps, and it fell to the 1st Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment to be the last troops out of Jerusalem. The Battalion withdrew its cumbersome six-pounder anti-tank guns, with which it had been attempting to keep the peace, from the city’s rooftops. Infantry battalions do not normally deploy their heavy weapons on rooftops, least of all on peacekeeping missions, but those were exceptional times in the most conflicted city in the world. A security force 100,000-strong was failing to keep the peace. Orders were given to bring forward the departure by twenty-four hours before the end of the Mandate, on 15 May, so that it should be conducted without fanfare and not be disrupted by either Jews or Arabs. It was done in good order and without casualties, as the Suffolks withdrew to the Suez Canal Zone and embarked by troopship for Greece without casualties. The State of Israel was proclaimed on the same day by its first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The Company Sergeant Major of A Company, Jack Gingell, lowered the Union Flag, which he did not know what to do with at the time, but was later despatched by way of Athens to the Regimental Depot in Bury St Edmunds, where in due course it was lost. The Company Commander Major R.M. Allen of the Royal Norfolks handed to the Chief Rabbi the key to the Zion Gate, which was a bar of wrought iron a foot long. The Major is reputed to have told the Rabbi, ‘Now at last the Jews hold the key to Jerusalem’, but the last two surviving members of his company did not remember him actually saying that. It was part of the legend and quoted by President George W. Bush in Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset. Henry Longhurst (a reporter before he was a golfing commentator) wrote of the last British garrison, ‘They live in an environment of propaganda, lies, deceit, assault and sudden death . . . and when things go wrong they can generally reckon to get the blame.’

The Suffolks’ departure was the signal for the start of the War of Independence, the first of several between Israel and its Arab neighbours in a conflict that remains unresolved to this day. Not until the Six-Day War of 1967 did Israel, by force of arms, seize back control of the Zion Gate. It still bears the marks of a fierce battle between Israelis and Jordanians just after the British left. The Israelis withdrew under the fire of the Arab Legion, having rescued the remnants of the Jewish community within the walls. Thirty-nine of the Jewish fighters were killed and 134 wounded. Ben-Gurion lamented, ‘We have lost the city of David.’ Twenty-two of the twenty-seven synagogues in Jerusalem were destroyed.

At one point in my short career as a soldier, I held the key to the battalion safe. The secrets that it contained were not operational but regimental, like whether a certain corporal was entitled to one of the campaign ribbons that he wore. When one of the Royal Marine Commandos was deployed to Cyprus, it left its national service officers behind, so that the harvest of medals that it confidently expected would be won only by the regulars. Some medals are harder earned than others. They are awarded and worn for a reason, but cause more disputes in the Army than anything else; and regimental pride, now as then, is paramount.

That is why regimental histories tend to be self-serving, omitting episodes of defeat, indiscipline or desertion. Ours had a record of forlorn escapades dating back to the Boer War and a failed attempt to take an enemy position in Colesberg in the Northern Cape in January 1900. The Boers called it ‘Suffolk Hill’. They were ready for the night-time attack and outnumbered the Suffolks by fifteen to one. The military intelligence was flawed, as it so often is. A survivor wrote home to his mother, ‘I do not think we shall get into a worse fire if we stay here for a year.’ The operation was an unfortunate start to the 1st Battalion’s campaign. The Commanding Officer was among the ninety killed and a court of inquiry was held into the headlong retreat of three hundred of his men. General John French, the General Officer Commanding, who of course was not present, alleged that they had been ‘seized with panic and retired’. This was the same General French who in 1914 was involved in the Curragh Mutiny and then commanded the British Expeditionary Force in the retreat from Mons, in which our 2nd Battalion was all but wiped out. The Suffolks’ Captain Brett, taken prisoner by the Boers at Colesberg, was the Lieutenant Colonel Brett killed by the Germans at Le Cateau. Luck plays a greater part in soldiering, where it is a matter of life and death, than in anything else: it lies in the roll of the dice and the fall of the mortar.

A recruiting poster of the time proclaimed ‘SEE THE EMPIRE, SERVE YOUR COUNTRY, JOIN THE SUFFOLK REGIMENT, GOD SAVE THE KING!’ This was changed later to ‘JOIN THE SUFFOLK REGIMENT: GOOD PAY, GOOD FOOD, GOOD CLOTHING, GOOD SPORTS, GOOD HOLIDAYS, GOOD COMRADES.’ Good chances too of getting killed in action in various outposts of an extensive but already crumbling Empire. Echoes abounded of the recruiting posters of 1914: ‘JOIN UP AND SKIP OVER . . . WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE GREAT WAR, DADDY?’

No mention was made either of a soldier of the 1st Battalion who went over the wall with rifle in hand during the Palestine campaign and defected to the Haganah, the Jewish fighters, before the end of the Mandate. He believed in their cause and was wounded in Jerusalem while fighting for them. He worked on a kibbutz for four years and married an Israeli. Then he returned home, gave himself up to the Military Police and was court-martialled, as he knew he would be. He was sentenced to twelve months and served eight of them in the Military Corrective Training Centre, also known as the glasshouse, the Army’s prison with a harder regime than its civilian counterparts.

He then returned to regimental service at the Depot and administered the same stiff discipline from which he had suffered. On one occasion he ordered an errant recruit in Bury St Edmunds to scrub a cookhouse table.

‘With what should I scrub it?’ asked the young soldier.

‘With this toothbrush’, he replied. That was how the Army was in the 1950s, and it did not ease its regime until the end of conscription, when it had to become more attractive to the volunteers who were the only soldiers who remained in its ranks. For us it was an obligation that we could not escape. For them it was a career that they had chosen.

The former deserter was Private John ‘Ringo’ Watson. By the time I joined the Battalion in 1957, he had been promoted and was a popular and effective platoon sergeant in D Company on active service in Cyprus. He had seen more soldiering than anyone around him except the Regimental Sergeant Major and the Post Corporal. Everyone who knew him admired him. His subaltern depended on him, as was customary, much more than he did on the subaltern. The subaltern commanded the platoon but the sergeant actually ran it. John Watson was injured for a second time while serving with the Royal Anglians in County Londonderry and was renowned in the Sergeants’ Mess for picking the shrapnel out of his wounds with a bayonet. But for his record as a deserter, and a slight academic deficit (for he was impatient with paperwork), he would have achieved his ambition of rising to the rank of regimental sergeant major, just as his Commanding Officer had wished. He was a natural regimental sergeant major through and through. Instead he became a company sergeant major and ended up instructing cadets and deterring trespassers at Framlingham College in Suffolk, where he lived in the Porter’s Lodge. For his services for the army reserves in East Anglia he was awarded the British Empire Medal. He died in 2011 aged eighty-two. He had served in the Army for twenty-nine years (four of them AWOL in Israel). One of his former platoon commanders, Professor John Sutherland, described him as ‘the best, hardest, and in terms of military morality the most admirable soldier I ever knew’.1 Amen to that.

The Suffolks have a place in history denied to other and supposedly grander regiments, because their departure from Jerusalem marked the beginning not only of a war but of the long years of United Nations peace operations, which have continued ever since in countries as far apart as Cambodia and El Salvador, Bosnia and Namibia. Amid the turbulence of the twenty-first century there are fourteen such UN missions operating across four continents, with 110,000 blue helmets serving in them at an annual cost of more than six and a half billion US dollars. Their successes and failures are, at the best, evenly balanced, with the failures most conspicuous in Africa. In 2018 Israel shared its seventieth birthday with that of United Nations peacekeeping. The first of the international forces created under the blue flag was UNTSO, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, established on 29 May 1948, and consisting of a UN representative in Jerusalem supported by unarmed military observers. It supervised a series of ceasefires, attempted to monitor a UN arms embargo and became an immediate target of armed gangs. The first of the UN Representatives, Count Bernadotte of Sweden, was ambushed and murdered by Jewish extremists two months after his arrival. But UNTSO was only part of the UN’s enduring presence in the Middle East. Each of the Arab-Israeli wars threw up its own ‘alphabet soup’ of United Nations interventions.

After the Suez debacle of 1956 the Security Council established UNEF, the United Nations Emergency Force, which was the first real peacekeeping force, armed and mandated to supervise the withdrawal of British, French and Israeli troops from Egyptian territory. The initiative for the force, as well as one of its contingents, came from Yugoslavia, at that time in its Titoist and non-aligned heyday, but later to need a peacekeeping force of its own. Yugoslavia even honoured its peacekeepers in the Sinai with a postage stamp. These included the crew of a minesweeper sunk by an old German mine in the Mediterranean. UNEF was ordered out of the way by the Egyptians, and swept aside by the Israelis, in 1967. After Israel’s lightning victory it returned on 16 July 1967 to the accompaniment of an artillery duel across the Canal and a dogfight above it between Israeli Mirages and Egyptian MiGs. From that point on the soldiers of the token UN force became spectators, and sometimes casualties, in a seven-year war of attrition, which intensified in March 1969 and led inevitably to the Yom Kippur War of October 1973.

This in turn spawned two peacekeeping forces: the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) to keep the peace between Israel and Syria, and UNEF II, to do the same between Israel and Egypt. Its civilian administrator was a then little-known Ghanaian diplomat named Kofi Annan, on his first peacekeeping mission. I was on the Suez Canal at the time, reporting an exchange of prisoners across the waterway – two Israelis for four hundred Egyptians, with two generals and their batmen (servants) crossing first in a private launch. One of the UN soldiers described their mission to me as Operation Sitting Duck – just as it was to be so many years later in Yugoslavia. It was always in the nature of UN peacekeeping to have the blue helmet in someone else’s sights and caught in the middle of someone else’s war. Nine Canadian peacekeepers with UNEF II were killed in August 1974 when their aircraft was shot down by a missile over Syria. The Canadians celebrate 9 August every year as their National Peacekeepers’ Day.

The force list was completed in 1978 with the arrival of UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon), to oversee the withdrawal of the Israelis from one of their many incursions into Lebanon. It says much about the United Nations and the volatility of Israel’s northern border that the peacekeeping force is still described as interim. It has served there for more than forty years. One of its contingents has always been Irish and most Irish soldiers have served there, some of them several times over. The world has changed and peacekeeping has changed with it. UNIFIL is now supported by a Nepalese battalion 880-strong in which the women are as combat-ready as the men. (The back cover of this book shows them in action.) Despite many setbacks UNIFIL has stood its ground, provided stability, lifted landmines and saved lives at some cost to itself. More than three hundred of its soldiers and police have been killed in a conflict between two countries which have nothing to do with each other except from time to time when one will invade and the other will retaliate. The Lebanese tend not to recognise the Jewish state to the south even by naming it. In Beirut they call it Disneyland.

The first rule of war fighting is: never march on Moscow. The first rule of peacekeeping is: what goes around comes around. It needs persistence, patience and resilience. It offers no battle honours or victories but only outcomes, some of which will be more positive than others. Bash on regardless by all means (the old motto of the Army Commandos); but in due course you will be back where you began. If you do it right, you will save more lives than you can count. If you do not do it right, you are risking your own life for no purpose.

Why the blue helmets? They were chosen not just for protection against the bullets fired by combatants on either side of the intermediary force. The original idea for appropriate peacekeeping headgear was blue berets, but the first UN soldiers were deployed at short notice, and the berets would have taken fourteen weeks to procure. It was quicker for all of the national contingents in a multinational force to take one of the familiar war fighting helmets and splash it with blue paint. The blue-helmeted pioneers were more than front-line soldiers: they were no man’s land soldiers.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, was the originator of the blue helmets and the father of UN peacekeeping. He personally wrote the rules for it at the time of the Suez deployment. He said, ‘Peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but it is a job that only soldiers can do.’ He also said, ‘It is when we play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.’ The purpose of the United Nations, he added, was not to bring humanity to heaven but to save it from hell.

Which brings us to the Congo between 1960 and 1964, which marked a new departure in United Nations planning and operations. It was the first time in its history that the UN had, with its own command structure, fielded a substantial military force and attempted to move from peacekeeping to peace enforcement – what is now called ‘mission creep’. Again, what goes around comes around: it foreshadowed the later debate on Yugoslavia. Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash in 1961 en route to a Congo-related meeting in Rhodes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: ‘MAY IT BURN THEIR LOUSY SOULS’
• 1. THE BIRTH OF PEACEKEEPING
• 2. STAGGING ON
• 3. CYPRUS – THE INTERVENTION THAT WASN’T
• 4. MAXIMUM FORCE
• 5. UNDER THE BLUE HELMET
• 6. ‘NEVER AGAIN . . .’
• 7. KOFI ANNAN
• 8. LANDMINES
• 9. PEACEKEEPERS’ ACCOMPLICES
• 10. SOFT POWER
• 11. SOMALIA
• 12. SOUTH SUDAN
• 13. FLASHBACK TO SINGAPORE
• 14. REMAINER’S LAMENT
• 15. WILD MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE
• 16. TWELVE LESSONS OF SOLDIERING
• 17. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
• 18. BACK BEARINGS
• 19. ENVOI
• A NOTE ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS
• ENDNOTES
• Imprint Page