peacekeeping operations. The peacekeeping “holy trinity” of consent, impartiality, and non- use of force was violated during all the three phases of military intervention in Somalia. The cardinal principles of UN peacekeeping were replaced by the “concept of campaign authority,”
which was derived from the UN Security Council mandates that sanctioned the missions and not the legitimacy derived from observing the cardinal and normative peacekeeping principles (Aoi 2011:7). This was done in an effort to operationalise the “New World Order” concept coined by President Bush senior following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
4.5.1 Ethical violation of the principle of host state consent
Mersiades (2006) observed the significance of securing host consent as well as that of the local non-state actors when he stated that “consent equates to an absence of active opposition, violent or otherwise, to the presence of peacekeepers in the country ... consent not only equates to a passive acceptance of peacekeeper authority, and it can also translate to active support”
(Mersiades 2006:205). When deploying peacekeepers in circumstances of ongoing civil war, it is critical that mechanisms of obtaining consent from the dominant players are established and maintained if peacekeepers are to continuously get cooperation from the belligerents during the entire tour of deployment (Ibid.). Failure to do so ultimately result in non-consenting parties to the conflict seriously disrupting and frustrating peacekeepers’ efforts as happened to the UN mission in Congo.
In the case of Somalia, the process adopted by the UN Secretariat in securing host state consent was fraught with legal and ethical irregularities considering that the Secretariat had to
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improvise and upgrade the most senior country representative at the UN to make a request for humanitarian peacekeeping intervention in Somalia as highlighted above. The second time the UN violated Somalia’s national sovereignty was when it authorized the deployment of an additional 3000 troops on 28 August 1992 without consulting any of the warlords in Somalia, including the Special Representative of the Secretary General. Initiatives such as these demonstrated the organized hypocrisy of the UN peacekeeping operations. This is so in that if the troop increase was meant to address genuine and commonly agreed concerns in Somalia, at least the Special Representative and the two most powerful warlords should have been informed or consulted. The fact that they were not deliberately consulted implies that there was a hidden agenda behind the troop increase that naturally raised suspicion once it became public knowledge.
At the request of the Secretary General Boutros-Ghali the UN Security Council through Resolution 775 of 28 August 1992 authorized the expansion of UNOSOM I peacekeepers to 3,500, without notification of the warlords who were signatories to the initial ceasefire earlier signed in New York (Murphy 2007:54). To make matters worse and to demonstrate that there was organized hypocrisy and a hidden agenda about the entire mission, Ambassador Sahnoun, the Special Representative of the Secretary General in Somalia, was neither consulted nor informed of the decision in advance to increase the size of the peacekeepers. This error of omission served to undermine Ambassador Sahnoun’s authority and credibility among the Somali warlords and portrayed him as duplicitous in the eyes of Aideed who was furious about the unexplained increase of UN troops. This development equally served to undermine Aideed’s dominant military authority in the theatre of operations. Instead of insisting on finding ways of securing consent from the various warlords as Ambassador Sahnoun was doing, the Boutros-Ghali in collaboration with the US secured Security Council authorization to launch a peace enforcement mission to impose the will of the UN and the US on the Somali people in violation of that country’s national sovereignty. The absence of a central government in Somalia gave the UN Secretary General and his team the impression that they could violate Somalia’s sovereignty with impunity which was indeed unethical.
UNITAF later known as Operation Restore Hope was authorized through UNSC Resolution 794 of 1992 to ‘use all necessary means to establish as soon as possible a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia’. The use of force by UNITAF was justified on the basis of the alleged ‘magnitude of the human tragedy caused by the conflict in Somalia”
(Welsh 2008:541) yet the magnitude of human suffering was on the decline as noted above.
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Kapteijns (2013:424) observed that this mandate was not just unusual in its authorization of the use of all necessary means, but also that it disregarded Somalia’s national sovereignty, as it was based on the argument that the crisis in Somalia, posed a threat to “international peace and security” as outlined in UNSC Resolution 794 of 1992. It is evident from this discussion that Somalia’s national sovereignty was deliberately violated by UN/US intervention peacekeeping missions whose primary objectives have been erroneously portrayed as
“humanitarian intervention” to save civilian lives in Somalia.
4.5.2 Unethical violation of the principle of impartiality
The peacekeeping principle of impartiality was the biggest casualty right from the start of the UN/US operations in Somalia. Fox (2000:10) observed that the main aim of Operation Restore Hope/UNITAF was to alter the political-military environment in Somalia with the ultimate intention being to alter the balance of power in Somalia prior to the withdrawal of the US military, an environment that was viewed as allowing effective distribution of food aid by donor agencies. Important to note is the fact that the moment a UN peacekeeping mission aims to alter the status quo in the host country, it amounts to interference with the existing structures and systems of that country and ultimately violates the sovereignty of the host state.
Approaches such as these by UN peacekeepers trigger local resistance by those elements whose survival and social status would be negatively altered by the presence of foreign troops in their country. This view is in sync with the argument presented by Gelot and Soderbaum (2012:240) that an intervention cannot be a neutral or impartial act because it introduces new political, social and economic opportunities and rewards for both interveners and intervened upon at various stages of the intervention especially when we consider that interventions often end up embroiled in local power struggles and dynamics. UNITAF and UNOSOM II increasingly became embroiled in Somali politics in order to alter the political-military situation in Somalia without the consent of the Somali people whilst at the same time the missions were clearly violating the principle of impartiality.
Offensive military operations mounted to disarm some factions in the Kismayu region and Mogadishu the capital, were clear evidence of UN favouritism which backfired as militias resisted disarmament leading to outright offensive action against the peacekeepers turned combatants. According to Chris Alden (1997:3) the official and public targeting of General Farah Aideed in which an offer of USD 25 000 was made for his capture or death destroyed any remaining perception of neutrality and impartiality, subsequently, resulting in the overall loss of credibility and legitimacy of the UN mission. UN troops were embroiled into the
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factional fighting and ended up being both partisan and legitimate military targets of Somali militias as they had lost their international peacekeeping immunity.
The peacekeeping debacle in Somalia that resulted in the hasty withdrawal of US troops under UNOSOM II underlines the critical importance of impartiality in UN peacekeeping operations.
According to Adebajo and Landsberg (2007:181) the Special Representative of the Secretary General during UNOSOM II’s tour of duty Admiral Howe’s handling of the situation in Somalia seriously undermined the mission’s ability to positively influence events and served to worsen the operating environment in the theatre of operations. UNOSOM II relinquished and totally disregarded any pretences of neutrality or impartiality in handling critical and contentious issues involving some of the warlords in Somalia (Collison and Muggah 2010:290).
Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst (1997:79) observed that the illusion that traditional peacekeeping methods emphasizing neutrality and impartiality were adequate to handle state failure in Somalia was finally swept aside when Aideed's forces ambushed a group of Pakistani soldiers on June 5, 1993, killing 24. What these authors fail to realize was that the militias had not consented to the massive deployment of foreign troops in their country and more so that the militias were responding to attempts at disarming them without their consent.
4.5.3 Ethical challenges to the use of force for UN humanitarian peacekeeping missions The ethical legitimacy for the use of armed force during humanitarian peacekeeping interventions was established after the Cold War. UN peacekeeping experiences of the early 1990s witnessed a growing frequency of the Security Council authorization of the use of force other than in self-defence during operations in Yugoslavia, Somalia and later Sierra Leone. In the case of Somalia, poor execution of the mandate through excessive use of force and violation of Somalia’s national sovereignty compromised the international support for the mission casting doubt on the justifiability of humanitarian intervention.
UNOSOM II used force in defence of its mandate as well as offensively when trying to enforce disarmament of the militias, which also violated the principle of impartiality. Substantial offensive military force was used after the 5th of June 1993 incident when 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed by suspected Aideed’s loyalists. This incident marked the beginning of continuous offensive operations in which the UN mission was preoccupied with the attempt to capture Aideed (Shawcross 2001:100), who was suspected to have authorized the attack on Pakistani soldiers. The continuous military offensive operations marked a significant shift in the conduct
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of the humanitarian mission, “as it involved, for the first time since the Cold War, the deployment of UN military troops to go after a specified enemy” (Ibid.).
Futile attempts at capturing or killing Aideed and his senior subordinates resulted in the most violent offensive military operations launched by US troops, in what was clear excessive use of force. Wheeler (2000:116) noted that during the UN-sanctioned US operations in Somalia,
“it is estimated that 6,000–8,000 Somali citizens were killed as the US employed force indiscriminately” in complete violation of the principle of the use of force and that of impartiality. The most brutal offensive operations launched at the Olympic Hotel were initiated and conducted by US Special forces acting outside the UN chain of command (Fink 1995:192).
The outcome of this offensive operation was shocking. Chesterman (2001:143) estimates that
“at least 500 and as many as 1,000 Somalis – many of them civilians – were killed in the fire fight.” There was clearly no sense of proportionality or self-restraint in the use of deadly force by American soldiers as they massacred mainly civilian Somalis, a situation that came to haunt them three months later when 18 American Special Forces were killed on 3rd October 1993.
Wheeler and Roberts (2012) state that a total of forty-three American Soldiers and Marines were killed in Somalia, within a period of only four months. This demonstrates the degree of resistance to the presence of unwelcome foreign troops in Somalia.
Armed with a Chapter VII mandate that authorized the use of force, the UNOSOM II peacekeepers aggressively attempted to disarm the Somali population and bring the entire country under the direct control of the UN in direct violation of Somalia’s national sovereignty.
Adekanye (1997) observed that “the method for disarming the Somali war-lords soon changed to that of weapons confiscation, without any compensating offer or guarantees of security to the warring clan leaders. The attempt at pacifying the Somali population was meant to create a conducive environment for the reconstruction of central government following a comprehensive security sector reform that would have guaranteed the establishment of a liberal capitalist system of government without the popular approval of the Somali population (Al Qaq Op.Cit.:72).
Stung by its own experiences when eighteen American troops were killed in October 1993 during a botched military mission, Washington withdrew her troops. The UN sponsored mission that was intended to sort out the “humanitarian” challenges faced by Somalia crumbled soon after the US panicked after losing eighteen troops in one battle encounter. The US withdrawal in March 1994 was followed within months by that of India, and the entire
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enterprise was wound up in March 1995 (Dunbabin 2008:502). This left the Somali population in no better position than prior to the deployment of UN troops.