Your opinion on UN Peacekeepers/Peacekeeping forces?

Question

Hi-

Only nuanced responses, please. I am looking for thoughtful, learned opinion.

What is your opinion on UN peacekeepers/forces? When should they deployed? What is your normative opinion of the system?

Answer 1

The idea and concept are excellent and it is a shame that the failures have led to a condemnation of the UN in general and the concept in particular. If you take a look at the history of peacekeeping since its inception you will realise good work has been done under very difficult circumstances. Peacekeeping is not a solution in itself to any conflict. That is a political and diplomatic function & responsibility and if that process fails then peacekeeping caanot achieve its objectives  either , because it is one of a means to an end, not an end in itself.

That being said , some peacekeeping operations have been a dismal failure because of abysmal planning but especially because of under-funding and under- resourcing and the failure of member countries to live up to their committments of support. Fundamentally, the UN is only as effective as member countries allow it to be and the present crisis in Darfur is an excellent example of this.

Answer 2

The UN is a joke.  If we were smart we'd stay away from them.

Answer 3

UN peacekeepers have got to have one of the hardest jobs in the world.  Not only can they really fight back hard against combatants, but they take all the grief of not being able to accomplish anything.  At least they are putting forth effort and they do save lives, sometimes they even bail out the United States.  In 1994 in Somalia, the U.S. made an attack on the resident warlord of Mogadishu Mohammed Aidid and it ended up failing quickly.  After many of their men were wounded or killed, the UN stepped in to provide support and get them out of there.

When should they be deployed?  Who knows.  It is up to the will of the General Assembly and the Security Council.  Personally, its very subjective.  Yes, they should intervene to stop an act of humanitarian crisis.  How do we define a humanitarian crisis?  I have no idea, but something like Darfur sounds good enough, or Somalia, or Rwanda, or Bosnia, or Myanmar.  We want to help in these situations, but we must keep in mind that this allows for the norm of intervention to occur anytime that something goes wrong somewhere.  Some could argue that the lacking U.S. response to Katrina could be seen as a humanitarian crisis.

Answer 4

who willcontrol techniques under construction and the command

Answer 5

They are normally deployed by the Security Council under the terms laid out in Chapter Six of the UN Charter. And that requires the agreement by the belligerents, in advance of deploying the peacekeeping mission.

Overall I think they do a good job of being an "armed wedge" in  between warring forces that allows diplomatic activities to begin to resolve the situation. But, given recent attacks by indigenous belligerents on the peacekeepers, I think it's time for a signficant change in the language of the Security Council resolutions that authorize creation of these peacekeeping missions. That is language which warns all of the belligerents that any attack on any of the peacekeeping force deployed under Chapter Six of the UN Charter will automatically convert that force into a peace enforcement mission  as defined in Chapter Seven of the UN Charter and the mission commander will have the power to use all necessary means to restore the status quo.

Answer 6

oxymoron. They are peacekeepers, but they have weapons they aren't supposed to use. Peacemakers don't have weapons! Let's redo all things related international relations;

UN resolutions, bills, trade agreements, embargoes, etc, to get in tune with the 21 century.

Answer 7

The UN is worthless, they are corrupt elitist group that takes advantage of the US.  The UN does what it can to undermine the US even though we are their largest contributors.

Answer 8

i agree with the first answer. why do we even need the UN? they haven't been able to solve anything. just another part leading toward a one world government.

Answer 9

The perception is that when they send "troops" to a conflict, it is really only for window dressing. About 12 guys show up in really cool looking uniforms, in white vehicles with U.N. stenciled on the side, and then . . . they stand around looking at passports and talking to shop keepers.  I mean, what have they done?  It should be UN peacekeepers between North and South Korea, not US soldiers. It should be UN peacekepers, by the thousands, between Israel and the Palestinian territories. It should be UN peacekeepers between the Northern Kurds and the Turks. But no, they are shining their boots and putting wax on their white Humvees.  It should be UN peacekeepers, again by the thousands, in the Afican hot spots. Think about it, what are the members of the UN getting from their 'peacekeeping' investment? Nothing as far as I can tell.  Do they really do anything besides show up for photos, with the pictures showing up in the lobby of the UN as if the peacekeepers actually did something?  The 8 year olds have a gang in my neighborhood and they use water balloons and squirt guns and I think they would be too much for the UN "soldiers" to handle.

Answer 10

The Failed Missions of  UN Peace Keeping Force:

1956: The Middle East

The first peacekeeping force was deployed in the Sinai Peninsula in 1956, at the proposal of Canada's Foreign Minister, Lester Pearson.

He suggested "a truly international peace and police force... large enough to keep these borders at peace while a political settlement is being worked out".

The peace keepers were to cover the withdrawal of British, French and Israeli forces from Egypt, following their invasion in the wake of the nationalization of the Suez canal.

The invading powers agreed to withdraw in return for certain promises which the peacekeeping forces were to guarantee. The UN deployed the United Nations Emergency Force, which kept the peace for 10 years.

However, in 1967, President Nasser of Egypt ordered the UN troops to withdraw. They had no choice but to leave, and within days war broke out again.

When Israel attacked on 5 June, 14 remaining UN soldiers were killed.

1992: Somalia

After the end of the Cold War, the Security Council extended its "peacekeeping" activities to include "humanitarian intervention".

However, when peace keepers arrived in Mogadishu in 1992, they found they were not wanted.

The Somali warlords had little respect for the blue helmets of the UN, or for the US soldiers who were bolstering the UN force.

Some peace keepers were killed, and the bodies of dead US soldiers were paraded through the streets of Mogadishu.

When a US helicopter was shot down, Washington decided to withdraw its troops.

A year later, in 1995, the UN also withdrew, confessing failure.

1993: Bosnia

Although the UN can claim some successes in the former Yugoslavia, it also suffered humiliating setbacks.

In Bosnia, the world was slow to act as civil war broke out between Serbs, Muslims and Croats.

When Bosnia first asked for UN monitors on its borders with Serbia in 1992, the request was turned down, because there was no precedent for "pre-emptive" peacekeeping.

The result was that Serb military and supplies poured across the border, shelling civilians, and besieging towns like Sarajevo.

The United Nations Protection Force, Unprofor, was only deployed in 1993, when the International Court of Justice ruled that genocide was taking place.

But the Security Council gave the peace keepers limited firepower, and a weak mandate which made it difficult for them to protect the civilian population against atrocities.

In the summer of 1995, lightly-armed peace keepers stood by powerless as thousands of men in Srebrenica were murdered in what they had been told was a "safe haven".

Rwanda: 1994

After the humiliations of Somalia and Bosnia, the Security Council was reluctant to get too deeply involved in Rwanda.

At the time of the first reports of genocide in May 1994, there was already a small UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda.

But it was ill-equipped to deal with the scale of the bloodshed, and most countries immediately withdrew their contingents.

Eventually the Security Council approved a force of 5,500, but most of the troops were not forthcoming.

The UN has since admitted that it failed to prevent the genocide, and ignored warnings of what was to come.

East Timor: 1999

East Timor could yet be seen as a success story for UN peacekeeping - or at least UN intervention.

Although the human and economic cost of the conflict was huge, the Australian-led intervention force successfully oversaw the withdrawal of Indonesian troops.

The force had the advantage of a strong UN mandate: to use "all necessary means" to carry out its mission.

However, pro-Jakarta militias managed to destroy most of the country's infrastructure, leaving the UN with an unprecedented challenge to rebuild the country almost from scratch.

The UN has found itself in complete control of a country without a government - a job for which it has limited resources and no experience.

Sierra Leone: 2000

The UN's involvement in Sierra Leone is its largest peacekeeping effort to date.

But many of the peace keepers were ill-equipped and poorly trained.

The rebels managed to steal UN weapons, tanks and uniforms, and kidnap hundreds of UN peace keepers.

When the Nigerian-led force, Ecomog, withdrew because of domestic pressures, the peacekeeping operation descended into chaos.

The UN force was mainly drawn from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South Asia - countries which had little experience of working together, and whose soldiers were badly organized.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8925...

Nearly 200 United Nations peace keepers have been disciplined in the past three years for s*x offenses ranging from rape to assaults on minors, the UN has admitted. Yet none appears to have been prosecuted.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/poli...

The United Nations is facing new allegations of sexual misconduct by U.N. personnel in Burundi, Haiti, Liberia and elsewhere, which is complicating the organization's efforts to contain a sexual abuse scandal that has tarnished its Nobel Prize-winning peace keepers in Congo.

The allegations indicate that a series of measures the United Nations has taken in recent years have failed to eliminate a culture of sexual permissiveness that has plagued its far-flung peacekeeping operations over the last 12 years. But senior U.N. officials say they have signaled their seriousness by imposing new reforms and forcing senior U.N. military commanders and officials to step down if they do not curb such practices.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/art...

Living in the shadow of the Oil-for-Food controversy is another major United Nations scandal that may cause untold damage to the world body’s already declining reputation. U.N. peacekeepers and civilian officials from the U.N. Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo stand accused of major human rights violations. At least 150 allegations have been made against the Mission’s personnel. The allegations involve rape and forced prostitution of women and young girls across the country, including inside a refugee camp in the town of Bunia, in northeastern Congo. The victims are defenseless refugees, many of them children, who have already been brutalized and terrorized by years of war and who looked to the U.N. for safety and protection. The U.S. Congress should act to ensure that the U.N. personnel involved are brought to justice and that such barbaric abuses are never repeated.



The United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) employs about 11,500 peacekeepers from 15 countries, in addition to 650 civilian staff. The biggest peacekeeping contingents are from Uruguay, (1,778 soldiers), Pakistan (1,700), South Africa (1,387), Bangladesh (1,304), India (1,302), Nepal (1,225), and Morocco (801).

Established in 1999, MONUC is currently authorized by Security Council Resolution 1493.

http://www.unwatch.com/congo.html

In 1994, an estimated 800,000 people died in Rwanda, as the U.S. and the international community failed to mount an intervention to stop genocide. Senior U.S. officials later expressed regret, and acknowledged that this crime against humanity should have invoked a more urgent and active response. It is reported that President Bush reviewed a memo on the Rwandan genocide early in his presidency and wrote “Not on my Watch” in the margin of that document.

Less than a decade after the Rwandan genocide, the U.S. was faced with another unfolding genocide in Africa, this time in Darfur, western Sudan. In early 2003, the government of Sudan and its proxy militias unleashed a scorched earth campaign, targeting civilians from three African communities in Darfur and causing untold death and destruction.

http://www.africaaction.org/resources/pa...

The recent revelation of widespread sexual abuse by United Nations personnel of refugees in southern Sudan, many of them children, has cast another pall over the reputation of the United Nations. Incidents of sexual exploitation in U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world have become depressingly routine. Abuse by U.N. peacekeepers has taken place in the Congo, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Guinea, Liberia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, and Cambodia—in four continents altogether. Congress and the Bush Administration must act to help ensure that those responsible are brought to justice and that future abuses are prevented.

http://www.speroforum.com/site/print.asp...

Answer 11

They should never be deployed, because they are useless. They are not allowed to take military action when confronted, their standing order is to withdraw from the contested area. If there is too much "hostility", they are withdrawn from the country.THAT makes them useless.