2.5 UN peacekeeping missions
2.5.1 UN first generation peacekeeping missions
The UN observer mission (UNTSO) deployed in 1948 to monitor, observe and report illegal incursions across the armistice lines between Israel and its Arab neighbours is generally considered to be the first peacekeeping mission deployment by the UN (Durch 1993:85-86). In
7 There are different ways of categorizing the evolutionary phases of UN peacekeeping operations. The most commonly adopted categorization is that the first generation of peacekeeping stretched from the 1948 to mid- 1950s and these were mainly small, unarmed observer missions in the Middle East and Asia. The second generation started with the deployment of a large contingent of armed UN troops in Egypt following the Suez crisis in 1956. This was followed by the deployment of the UN mission in Congo during period 1960-1964. This second generation lasted up to the end of the Cold War. As from 1992, starting with the humanitarian mission in Somalia till now, missions launched by the UN constitute third generation operations that are launched in response to internal conflicts with a bias towards humanitarian considerations.
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old style UN peacekeeping, peacekeepers were portrayed as third parties disinterested in the outcome of a dispute, neutral/impartial towards the disputants as well as non-threatening since they were mandated to use force only in self-defence. This portrayal of peacekeepers influenced Fabian (1971) to entitled his study Soldiers without Enemies depicting the non- threatening posture of traditional peacekeeping operations. According to Hill and Malik (1996:6), the adoption of peacekeeping approach or concept towards resolving international conflict through collective security was a compromise, designed to maintain the United Nation’s relevance in the sphere of maintaining international peace and security which happens to be its primary objective. Osmançavuşoğlu (2000), observed that early peacekeeping missions played a relatively minor role that was largely confined to solving crises in the Middle East and regional conflicts associated with de-colonization, especially crises in which neither superpower had major geo-strategic interests thus forestalling their direct involvement and subsequent escalation of the conflicts. This assessment misses the point that these missions served to formalize the withdrawal of the British and French colonial masters from the Middle East and their replacement by American influence thus effectively keeping the Soviet Union out of this oil rich region.
During the first decade of its existence (1946-1956) the UN deployed three observer missions and commissions to which the term “peacekeeping” was not used. The first mission to be deployed by the UN was the UN Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) deployed during period 1947-1951. This followed a request by the Greek Government for UN Observers to investigate foreign supplies of military weapons and equipment to the communist guerrillas fighting the government. The mission’s task was to investigate outside support for Greek Communist guerrillas fighting the Greek government. Despite being the first UN deployment, this mission is not acknowledged as the first peacekeeping mission because the other parties to the conflict did not consent to the deployment of foreign troops to monitor their activities (Hill and Malik 1996:27-28).
The next observer mission was the deployment of UNTSO in 1948, mandated to monitor the borders between Israel and her Arab neighbours. According to Goulding (1993:452), UNTSO is officially regarded as the first UN peacekeeping operation. The third observer mission was the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) deployed in 1949 following a request from India. The UN responded with the dispatch of observers whose mission remains deployed up to this day after more than six decades of continuous deployment due to the volatility of the Kashmir region.
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The first UN mission explicitly named “peacekeeping” was UNEF deployed to the Sinai Peninsula in response to the 1956 Suez Crisis (Durch 1993:7; MacQueen, 2006). The Suez crisis is considered to be perhaps the first significant step in the conceptual transformation of how the UN responded to international security crises.
Unable to invoke collective security in a situation where two members of the Security Council were embroiled in international conflict against a member state, and constrained by practical and ideological challenges of bipolarity, Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold and sympathetic middle powers devised a way to get the UN involved in the crisis – largely with the encouragement and blessing of the US (Aksu 2003:78). The mission was designed and deployed with utmost attention and emphasis placed on protecting the sovereignty of state parties to the conflict as well as respecting fully host state sovereignty implying upholding the UN principle of non-intervention (Ibid).
UNEF 1 was the first ever armed UN peacekeeping mission in the entire history of the world body and it helped to define the three core principles of traditional peacekeeping namely:
consent of conflict parties; impartiality; and use of force only for self-defence (Pelz and Lehmann 2007:2). These principles will be discussed in detail in Chapter III of this thesis. The mission was deployed in Egypt as a “face saving” initiative to cover the withdrawal from Egypt by Britain, France and Israel (Adebajo: 2011:25). Thus the primary mission of this deployment was not the safeguarding and protection of Egyptian sovereignty, but rather the protection of the international image of the invading powers and ensuring that Egypt remained firmly within the American sphere of influence in the face of growing Soviet influence among liberation movements and former colonies (Al Qaq 2009). The Egyptians welcomed the mission because its deployment saved the country from an embarrassing defeat by the three powerful invading countries namely Britain, France and Israel. It has been argued that Egypt agreed to the deployment of UNEF from a position of weakness since it had been invaded by three powerful armies hence its consent was not truly voluntary. Egypt, however, officially managed to portray the deployment of UN peacekeepers as a national victory against the invading foreign armies.
Unashamedly, following the launch of British and French invasion of Egypt on 31 October 1956, Pierson Dixon the British ambassador to the UN, made a passionate attempt to persuade the UN to allow the Anglo-French invasion force to fly the UN flag as peacekeepers (Louis and Owen 1989:683) as the USA had done in Korea in 1950. This mentality of labelling self- serving multilateral missions in small and weak countries as peacekeeping missions appears to
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continue up to this day especially humanitarian peacekeeping interventions. Such missions will be discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters.
According to Urquhart (1987:133), UNEF served as a mid-wife towards the drafting of a set of principles that were to guide the conduct of UN peacekeeping missions for the next four decades. The guiding principles that were to govern the deployment and conduct of peacekeepers included the following:
1) Peacekeeping operations would be deployed with the consent of the nations/ parties to the dispute,8
2) Peacekeepers were allowed to use force only in self defence,
3) Peacekeepers were to be composed of troops voluntarily furnished by neutral countries, 4) Peacekeepers were expected to be impartial and
5) Peacekeeping operations were to be under the control and guidance of the Secretary General for their day- to-day activities.
UNEF’s successful accomplishment of its mandate gave confidence to the UN that resulted in an unprecedented increase in UN peacekeeping missions worldwide, the majority of which were in former colonies in the Sothern hemisphere. The deployment of peacekeepers also served to guarantee that newly independent countries on the periphery remained within the sphere of Western influence thus avoiding their drifting towards the socialist/communist camp led by the Soviet Union (Al Qaq, Op.Cit.). This success story led to the deployment of ONUC during 1960-1964, a more ambitious peacekeeping mission in a civil war setting.
At the height of the Cold War, the UN found little space to manoeuvre and deployed peacekeeping missions in intra-state conflicts as the permanent members of the Security Council jealously guarded their spheres of influence and strongly discouraged multilateral interventions in their client states’ internal affairs (Aksu 2003:80). Examples include the British preference of deploying Commonwealth peacekeepers in Zimbabwe at independence as opposed to UN peacekeepers as this was a former British colony. In French West Africa, France preferred the deployment of own troops or French speaking allies in former French colonies.
8During the Cold War era, the most important consent considered by the UNSC was that of the host
government as deployment of UN peacekeepers could not be successfully implemented without the express approval of the host government. In this regard, as happened in Congo, the non-approval for UN deployment by the secessionists was of little consequence regarding the deployment of peacekeepers. However failure to secure the consent of all parties to the conflict means UN peacekeepers would be operating in a hostile environment where they are most likely to suffer casualties as they would be considered as an invading force.
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This was all in an endeavour to protect and perpetuate neo-colonialism that benefitted the former colonial masters as well as keeping other powers outside that sphere of influence.
Where both superpowers were willing to accommodate and tolerate UN peacekeeping outside of their spheres of influence, the Soviet Union in particular insisted that deployed UN peacekeepers should endeavour to protect the host state’s sovereignty and not intervene in its domestic affairs (Ibid). During the first armed UN peacekeeping mission in Egypt, the Soviet Union made an effort to minimise peacekeepers’ interference with internal politics of the host country. The Soviets maintained the same attitude during the Congo mission as evidenced by the clashes between the superpowers over the UN handling of the Congo crisis of the early 1960s as will be discussed in detail in chapter three of this thesis. Third World aligned or non- aligned countries, shared strong anti-colonial sentiments hence they called for increased UN involvement in settling conflicts in the South as they fought against colonialism (Al-Qaq Op.Cit.). Significantly, both superpowers supported the de-colonization process as they sought to win client states, fill the vacuum left by departing colonial powers and guaranteeing own access to natural resources in newly independent states. In this regard, it was the North–South conflict that gave meaning, impetus and content to the de-colonization process as well as the most crucial factor that made possible the deployment of peacekeepers in the few intra-state peacekeeping missions of this era (Ibid).
A total of thirteen pre-1988 Cold War peacekeeping operations were launched by the UN and these were classified as "largely military in composition and their tasks were to monitor cease- fires, control buffer zones, investigate alleged arms flows, and prevent a resumption of hostilities" (Boutros-Ghali 1992). In other words, they were to maintain calm on the front lines and give time for the peacemakers and diplomats to negotiate a settlement of the dispute that had led to the conflict in the first place (Karns and Mingst 1995:80). Although many of the political negotiations failed, nonetheless, the UN peacekeeping forces prevented the expansion of many conflicts. An important ethical characteristic of the first generation or classical peacekeeping operations is that they involved the post-truce interposition of a peacekeeping force with the consent of the parties to the conflict thus reflecting some degree of respect for host state sovereignty, a practice that was watered down during second and third generation peacekeeping operations.9
9 During the first generation of UN peacekeeping operations, peacekeepers were deployed along the demilitarised zones as happened between India and Pakistan, Greece and Turkey in Cyprus, Israel and
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