United Nations Peacekeeping in Africa Since 1960

Norrie Macqueen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317877332
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

United Nations Peacekeeping in Africa provides an exploration of United Nations military intervention in Africa, from its beginnings in the Congo in 1960 to the new operations of the twenty-first century.

The scene is set by an examination of the theoretical bases both of United Nations peacekeeping and of Africa's post-independence politics and international relations. The peacekeeping project in Africa is then described on a region by region basis – Central Africa, Southern Africa, West Africa, the Horn and Trans-Saharan Africa – with comparisons and contrasts within and between each part of Africa highlighted throughout. A number of key questions are considered:

how have developments in the broader international system affected conflicts in Africa?
what are the internal and external forces which have caused African states to 'fail' and 'collapse'?
how have external powers 'used' UN Peacekeeping in pursuit of their own political agendas?
what determines success and failure in African peacekeeping?

are there African solutions to African problems which could supplant UN involvement?

As well as providing an account of UN involvement, the book is concerned to explore the long historical origins of the African conflicts with which the UN has been engaged. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, United Nations Peacekeeping in Africa provides an invaluable examination of the complex issues surrounding UN interventions in Africa.

Chapter One
The Setting

The History, Politics and Law of United Nations Engagement with Africa

In his award-winning book of reportage from post-genocide Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families, the American journalist Philip Gourevitch recalls a tense night on a remote road in an area infiltrated by anti-government guerrillas. A cry is heard from a nearby settlement and men from his convoy immediately dash off to investigate. Later, a soldier explains the reaction:

[T]he whooping we heard was a conventional distress signal and … it carried an obligation. ‘You hear it, you do it, too. And you come running… No choice. You must. If you ignored this crying you would have questions to answer. … We all come running, and the one that stays quiet, the one that stays home, must explain. Is he in league with the criminals? Is he a coward? And what would he expect when he cries? This is simple. This is normal. This is community.’¹

Intended or not, this could be taken as a comment on the inadequate response on the part of the UN and the international ‘community’ it represented to the events of 1994 in that country. The ‘Rwandan way’ here described (and probably idealized) is a prescription for purposeful intervention as a rèsponse to threat, whether at the level of the village or of the international system. The UN’s actual performance in Rwanda, coming in the wake of its intervention in Somalia and following the collapse of the peace process in Angola, represented for many another stage in the accumulating ‘failure’ of peacekeeping in Africa in the mid-1990s. It was a perception strengthened by events beyond Africa as well, in Bosnia and to an extent in Cambodia, where major UN undertakings had also struggled to live up to expectations.

In fact, this pessimistic assessment represented something of a reversal in the view hitherto. The performance of the UN in Africa prior to these tragedies was more successful than the pervasive sense of failure that spread from the mid-1990s might suggest. UN intervention had been crucial to the essentially peaceful achievement of Namibian independence in 1989-90. Although ultimately failing in its mandate to oversee a comprehensive resolution of Angola’s decades-old civil war, the UN had been wholly successful in the specific task of managing the withdrawal of Cuban forces from the country in 1990 and 1991. The small observer mission in northern Chad – deployed just weeks before the Rwandan genocide began – contributed to a lasting solution to a previously intractable border problem with Libya. The record was far from uniformly bad, in other words.

These more successful interventions benefited from the diplomatic setting in which solutions were developed. All of them involved the management of clear-cut international agreements reached by well-established states, usually with diplomatic backing from beyond Africa. But this was not of itself a prerequisite for successful UN peacekeeping. Credit could also be claimed for the resolution of civil war and the management of democratic transformation in Mozambique in 1992 and 1993. The United Nations also left the Central African Republic (where it had been operating in a special relationship with other inter-governmental agencies) in a much better state than when it arrived, even if the transformation wrought was less striking and potentially less durable than those in Namibia and Mozambique.

What this shows is that perceptions of success and failure in an area as politically and diplomatically fraught as multilateral military intervention are inevitably volatile. They tend to be shaped disproportionately by the most recent impressions. The aim of this book is to present an overview of the United Nations’ peacekeeping role and experience in Africa during the last four decades of the twentieth century and in this way provide an opportunity for a more distanced – and therefore more sustainable – judgement. It will pursue this primarily on the basis of a region-by-region, mission-by-mission analysis. But before we embark on that some broad conceptual and historical issues have to be explored. Firstly, we have to investigate the general evolution of the activity that has come to be described – sometimes very imprecisely – as ‘peacekeeping’ in the post-1945 period. Secondly, we must attempt to incorporate Africa’s late colonial and post-colonial experience within broader international processes. These preliminaries are important to an understanding of some central questions. Why, for example, has the United Nations responded to African crises in the particular, sometimes inappropriate and inadequate, ways it has? What factors – of history, politics or international law – have constrained and limited these military interventions? On the other side, what has determined the character of the African crises that the UN has been called on to respond to? Why has the African state, both in its external behaviour and its internal dynamics, been so vulnerable to the violent conflicts that have brought multilateral intervention?

The elusive concept of ‘peacekeeping’

The term ‘peacekeeping’; has come to be used to describe almost the entire range of activities that can be carried out by international military personnel. The variety of these ‘peacekeeping’ functions has probably found a broader application in Africa than in other parts of the world where UN military missions have been deployed. These activities have ranged from discreet observation and monitoring carried out with the lightest of touches to the enforcement of outcomes by large, combat-configured forces. Between these two extremes lies what might be called the ‘classic’ concept of peacekeeping based on the physical interposition of an external third force exerting moral rather than physical pressure between antagonists.

Initially, though, the military function of the United Nations was intended to take a quite different form. The roles of observation, interposition and monitoring that became the staple activities of UN military intervention from the mid-1950s onwards in fact had no place in the original conception of the UN’s role which was worked out as the organization’s Charter was formulated in the mid-1940s. At this stage the intention was that the United Nations would deploy military power as a forceful instrument in a global system of collective security. This vision was shared, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by all five of the powers that became permanent members of the Security Council (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China). At the centre of these plans was Chapter VII of the UN Charter. This covered ‘Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression’ and presented an extensive and precise series of commitments to be undertaken by all member states. These involved, at their most exacting, the placing of national military resources at the disposal of the Security Council once it had determined that an act of aggression or threat to international peace had taken place. The underlying aim of this ambitious approach to international security was to ensure that the United Nations would succeed where its predecessor, the League of Nations, had failed in the 1930s. One of the most notorious of these failures had in fact been in Africa when Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) fell victim to the aggressive expansionism of fascist Italy in 1935 and 1936. The League’s abandonment of Abyssinia was for many the defining moment in the decline of the organization as a significant force in international relations.

Article 39 of Chapter VII of the UN Charter made the Security Council responsible for deciding when a situation required collective security action and what form that action should take. The options available followed an escalating scale until, by article 42, the Council was empowered cto restore international peace and security’ using the cair, sea or land forces of Members of the United Nations’. Article 43 then detailed the commitments of member states: the provision of forces and facilities to enforce Security Council decisions against ‘aggressor’ states. The blueprint suggested that the ensuing United Nations operations would be co-ordinated by a Military Staff Committee composed of the chiefs of staff of the five permanent members of the Security Council.

The high ambition of Chapter VII, however, was simply incompatible with the global bipolarity that soon characterized international relations in the post-1945 era. The division of the world between two competing blocs quickly overtook the international system after the UN’s foundation and formed the structure within which the cold war was pursued. At the centre of the collective security system laid out in Chapter VII of the Charter was an assumption of co-operation and consensus among the five permanent members of the Security Council. With the United States and the Soviet Union constituting the two poles of the bipolar system, this emphasis on the big powers as a cohesive ‘police force’ regulating the behaviour of others was clearly misplaced. How could there be any prospect of viable collective security when the decisions of the Security Council, which was required to manage it, were subject to veto by its mutually hostile permanent members? In such a divided international system virtually all international crises would be seen through the opposed ideological lenses of the two sides. The objective identification of an ‘aggressor’ in any crisis, which was central to the collective security concept, would be impossible. The Charter itself offered no help in this. Although repeatedly making use of the term, it offered no definition of ‘aggression’ and so provided no legal compass. Similarly, the notion that the military staff of the permanent members could act as a unified command was nonsensical. It hardly needed the Korean War, fought out between the forces of east and west from 1950 to 1953, in which the UN played an ambiguous and ideologically partial role, to expose finally the emptiness of the original collective security ambition.² The United Nations, its blue flag co-opted opportunistically by the west to legitimize its campaign, emerged from the affair with its authority and credibility somewhat compromised. While its standing in western perceptions was probably enhanced, the circumstances of the conflict and the ‘international’ response raised reasonable questions in the broader world about the organization’s even-handedness.

It was clear by the early 1950s that if the UN was to have any meaningful security role in the cold war it would have to be in a form other than ‘conventional’ collective security. In fact some pointers towards such a role were already present. The UN had already been involved in ‘military’ operations in two parts of the post-colonial world. Military observer missions had been established in Palestine and Kashmir in 1948 and 1949 to supervise peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours and India and Pakistan, respectively. While not peacekeeping ‘forces’ as such, these operations were based on methods of observation and interposition that were to become characteristic of the peacekeeping ‘model’ that later emerged. It was in 1956, though, that the first ‘peacekeeping operation’ as widely recognized was put in place. This was the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), which was deployed to separate the warring parties after the Anglo-French invasion of (and Israeli attack on) Egypt. As with Palestine and Kashmir, Suez was essentially a conflict rooted in problems of post-colonial adjustment. At this time, in the mid-1950s, the United Nations seemed well positioned to deal with such crises. In a world in which imperial ideologies were increasingly discredited at the western pole of the cold war as well as the eastern one, it was becoming evident that intervention by former imperial powers in post-colonial crises was unacceptable.³ The Suez conflict drove this home when the United States made it clear to its European allies, Britain and France, that their behaviour was unhelpful to the western cause. Washington as much as Moscow was aware of the importance of manoeuvring for the favour of the new emerging ‘Third World’. In such a situation the UN could provide a convenient neutral force in containing local conflicts and reducing their capacity to destabilize the already hostile relations between east and west.

Multilateral intervention by the UN thus came to be accepted by the superpowers as preferable in some situations to unilateral interference by politically or historically interested parties. Firstly, it offered a means of inoculating troubled new states against entanglement in the politics of the cold war. Secondly, it could contain local conflicts and prevent their spread to the broader, possibly unstable, international regions in which they occurred. Thirdly, UN intervention could protect the sovereign independence of fragile emerging states. In this it served the interests of the more powerful states in the world by underpinning the basic architecture of the international system. The building blocks of this ‘systemic’ structure were territorial states. Peacekeeping, in other words, could shore-up the so-called ‘Westphalian’ system on which the prevailing conception of the political and diplomatic world was based.⁴ This ‘systemic self-interest’ became an important – though often under-acknowledged – aspect of UN interventions, and has remained such into the twenty-first century. It has been a particularly significant part of the UN’s interventions in Africa since the early 1960s, as we shall see. The issue acquired a greater urgency in the minds of western policy-makers after the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. Subsequently the ‘failed state’ came to be seen as a problem not merely within its own borders and immediately around them but for the world as a whole. Without the rules and norms imposed by membership of the international system, and their acceptance by a responsible state, territories such as Afghanistan could all too easily, it seemed, become the geographical bases of global terrorist networks.

A key actor in the establishment of the Suez operation in 1956 and the subsequent elaboration of the peacekeeping concept was the second secretary-general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden. Hammarskjöld indeed would later come to be seen, not altogether accurately, as the father of modern peacekeeping. His cerebral and introspective character, along with the circumstances of his death in Africa while pursuing peace in the Congo, secured a particular posthumous image. He came to be celebrated as a heroic servant of peace determined to construct a distinct role for the United Nations as a force for conflict resolution that would replace the now defunct collective security function.

Crucially, Hammarskjöld understood the importance of political and institutional independence for the United Nations in the cold war. In pursuit of this independence he and his supporters in the UN secretariat and in key national delegations were both constrained and empowered by the absence of any established ‘constitutional’ basis for peacekeeping. No reference to the concept existed in the Charter. The original vision articulated in Chapter VII was for the UN to act as an enforcer of collective security, and this was not peacekeeping. Peacekeeping, as represented by UNEF and already suggested by the missions in Palestine and Kashmir, was about consent, neutral interposition and moral presence rather than enforcement. The nearest the Charter came to accommodating this idea was in Chapter VI dealing with the ‘Pacific Settlement of Disputes’. Article 34 gave the Security Council authority to ‘investigate’ any situation of ‘international friction’, and article 36 charged it with recommending ‘appropriate procedures or methods of adjustment’. But nowhere was there any explicit reference to the mechanisms of what would come to be known as peacekeeping. Later references to peacekeeping being grounded in ‘article six-and-a-half’ – poised between the ‘Pacific Settlement of Disputes’ and the enforcement actions dealt with in Chapter VII – might evoke its operational character, but were legally meaningless.

The absence of a clear constitutional base would lead in future years to many political difficulties with the peacekeeping project – in particular over its authorization and financing. But it also provided Hammarskjöld and his aides with a conceptual tabula rasa on which to build a new military role for the UN, one capable of accommodating the realities of bipolarity without relying on the moribund collective security mechanisms of Chapter VII. In 1958 Hammarskjöld produced a so-called ‘Summary Study’ derived from the political and military experience of UNEF in Suez. The intention of this was to identify ‘certain basic principles and rules which would provide an adaptable framework for later operations which might be found necessary’.⁵ The Summary Study was therefore a blueprint for peacekeeping. It consisted, perhaps inevitably, of a rather idealized set of prescriptions based on a fairly slim body of prior experience. Some of it had little relevance beyond Suez and, as we will see, many of the issues it raised and the precepts it advanced would be of limited application to later experience in Africa. Nevertheless, the principles outlined in the Summary Study were soon distilled into a general ‘definition’ of peacekeeping.

Peacekeeping, the Summary Study made clear, was not ‘the type of force envisaged under Chapter VII of the Charter’. Consequently, there was no legal requirement for the protagonists in the conflict to accept intervention. These parties were generally characterized as ‘host states’ in Hammarskjöld’s original conception, which saw the peacekeeping role as essentially one involving governments in conflict with other governments. While this was wholly appropriate to Suez (and later conflicts in the Middle East) it would have only very limited relevance to subsequent peacekeeping projects, especially in Africa, where conflicts were frequently in whole or in part ‘intra-state’ rather than inter-state. What Hammarskjöld did not envisage and what has proved repeatedly to be a feature of UN interventions in Africa was a situation in which a designated ‘state’ in any meaningful sense simply did not exist. Had the Summary Study been constructed just two years later, the experience of the Congo, where the state was both politically contested and territorially fragmented, would no doubt have been incorporated in it. As it was, however, the Suez force, and the missions in Palestine and Kashmir before it, had been ‘validated’ by the clear consent of established, internationally recognized states. But in the African context this was frequently not available. ‘Ownership’ of the state was fiercely contested in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s just as it had been in the Congo in the 1960s. In Angola and Mozambique it was tenuous, while in Somalia the state had simply ceased to exist. But the principle of consent of the parties remained central to peacekeeping whether those parties were states or less formal entities. Where there were more or less responsible states involved, however, ‘consent’, in the terms of the Summary Study, should not be allowed to mutate into interference in the conduct of the operation. For this reason individual ‘status of forces agreements’ were to be reached between the UN and the state in which operations were to take place. Again, this was a principle often difficult to translate into effective practice in the African context.

In this matter of state-UN relations, the Summary Study proposed that a number of operational benchmarks that had been established by the Suez operation should henceforward be regarded as general principles. Here too there were to be resonances that were not always positive in Africa in the coming decades. One of these was the issue of freedom of movement for peacekeepers within the operational area. Although this would appear to be a minimum prerequisite for effective peacekeeping, the unrestricted movement of non-national armed forces in a state obviously went to the centre of the issue of sovereignty. While the right to freedom of movement might be readily enough agreed at the point at which an operation was established, changing circumstances locally and changing mandate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• EDITORIAL FOREWORD
• CONTENTS
• Maps
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Setting: The History, Politics and Law of United Nations Engagement with Africa
• 2. Patrolling the Ethnic Frontier: Central Africa
• 3. Managing Delayed Decolonization: Southern Africa
• 4. Controlling the Warlords: West Africa
• 5. Reconstructing and Defining the Post-Cold War State: The Horn of Africa
• 6. Making Borders: Trans-Saharan Africa
• 7. Conclusions: ‘Firing into a Continent’ – or Making a Difference?
• Appendix I: Chronology
• Appendix II: UN Peacekeeping Operations in Africa
• Bibliography and Further Reading
• Index