The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (23 page)
Authors: Adam Roberts,Vaughan Lowe,Jennifer Welsh,Dominik Zaum
This proposal, like some others (including the 1995 ‘Netherlands Non-paper’), was not limited to peacekeeping as traditionally understood; nor was it limited to the role of a quick-reaction force, to be replaced by regular peacekeepers as soon as possible. A standing force along these lines was seen as giving the Security Council (and, more debatably, the Secretary-General) a capacity for a fast military response in certain crises: for example, in assisting a state threatened by external attack, or in enforcing a ceasefire in an incipient international or civil war. Such a deployment might be without the consent of at least one of the parties to a conflict, and it might be carried out before there was a ceasefire agreement.
The disaster of war, genocide, and vast refugee flows in Rwanda in 1994 did more than any other crisis to generate support for proposals for a standing UN force. Between 6 April and about 19 July 1994 a huge number of Rwandans were murdered – estimates are in the region of 800,000 to one million.
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Already in January, Major-General Roméo Dallaire, the UN Force Commander in charge of the UN peacekeeping force (UNAMIR) in Rwanda at the time, had given a detailed warning of the danger of mass exterminations of Tutsis.
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Then and subsequently, he felt that the UN’s failure to respond facilitated the mass killings. As he put it in 1995:
In Rwanda, the international community’s inaction was, in fact, an action which contributed to the Hutu extremists’ belief that they could carry out their genocide.
… UNAMIR could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. As evidence, with the 450 men under my command during this interim, we saved and directly protected over 25,000 people and moved tens of thousands between the contact lines. What could a force of 5,000 personnel have prevented? Perhaps the most obvious answer is that they would have prevented the massacres in the southern and western parts of the country because they didn’t start until early May – nearly a month after the war had started.
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Many other observers have argued similarly that when the large-scale killings of Tutsis by the Interahamwe militias began in April 1994, a quite modest-sized international military force could have stopped the slaughter. This is a serious argument, which was to play a significant part in the development of the various proposals for UN forces made in 1995 by Boutros-Ghali and by the Dutch and Canadian governments.
That the UN Security Council has the legal capacity to initiate military action to stop acts of genocide is indicated by its Charter-based powers to take action against threats to the peace, and also by the 1948 Genocide Convention, Article VIII, which specifies that any contracting state ‘may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide’.
In briefest outline, the background to the UN’s authorization of forces over the Rwanda crisis was that in 1993 there was increased fighting in Rwanda, mainly between the predominantly Hutu government and its opponents in the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF was supported principally by the Tutsi minority, many of whom were in exile, and was operating mainly from Uganda. Attempts to organize a political settlement centred on the Arusha accords, signed on 4 August 1993 after long negotiations under UN auspices between representatives of the Rwanda government and the RPF. These accords sought to achieve an end to the war between these two parties, and to establish a broad-based transitional government. There were repeated difficulties in implementing the accords. The deaths of the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in a suspicious air disaster at the capital, Kigali, on 6 April 1994 became the trigger for systematic killings of Tutsis in Rwanda, which began immediately afterwards. During April a huge number of Tutsis fled, mainly to Tanzania.
A peculiarly grisly feature of the crisis is that Rwanda was a member of the UN Security Council from 1 January 1994. Thus the government that was instigating or tolerating mass killings also had a voice in the international response to them. However, the Security Council’s shortcomings in this crisis were not due to the presence of Rwanda. The Permanent Representative of Rwanda was ignored, and Rwanda did not hold the presidency of the Council as it would have done under the normal country-alphabetical rotation of that posts.
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In 1993–4, in connection with the events in Rwanda and to support attempts to reach a political settlement, the UN Security Council established three forces in Rwanda. The first two were UN peacekeeping forces, while the third was a UN-authorized force under French command.
1. The first UN force to be established was the United Nations Observer Mission Uganda–Rwanda (UNOMUR), a small military observer group which operated
on the Ugandan side of the Uganda–Rwanda border for almost exactly one year from August 1993 to verify that no military assistance was reaching Rwanda. Its authorized strength was 81. It was established on the basis of Security Council resolution 846 of 22 June 1993. It took into account the Arusha accords, eventually signed on 4 August 1993.
2. The second UN force, United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), was set up in November 1993, on the basis of Security Council resolution 872 of 5 October 1993. Originally, its authorized military strength was 2,548 military personnel. It operated within Rwanda, a principal purpose being to facilitate the implementation of the 1993 Arusha accords. It had 2,539 military personnel at 31 March 1994. On 21 April 1994, following the murder of ten Belgian peacekeepers and the outbreak of mass killings of Tutsis, the Security Council decided, controversially, to reduce UNAMIR’s strength to 270 personnel.
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By 13 May it had in fact been reduced to 444.
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The Council persisted for too long in seeing the problem in the more familiar terms of implementing a ceasefire. Only at the end of April did the Secretary-General call on the Council to deal with the massacres of civilians.
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In mid-May, in response to revelations of the full horror of events, the Council belatedly expanded UNAMIR’s mandate to enable it to contribute to the security and protection of refugees and civilians at risk, and its authorized strength was increased to 5,500 troops.
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This increase remained notional, because not one of the nineteen governments that had undertaken to have troops on standby for UN peacekeeping agreed to contribute to this force under these arrangements.
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The extended mandate was repeated and reaffirmed in a resolution in early June, which referred to ‘reports indicating that acts of genocide have occurred in Rwanda’, and underscored that ‘the internal displacement of some 1.5 million Rwandans facing starvation and disease and the massive exodus of refugees to neighbouring countries constitute a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions.’
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Failing to secure new contingents, and to take action in Rwanda, UNAMIR was ill-supported and ineffective. However, in subsequent months, especially after the RPF victories in June and July, the number of UNAMIR personnel was belatedly increased, reaching 5,522 by 31 December 1994.
3. Following the failures surrounding UNAMIR, on 22 June 1994 the Security Council accepted an offer from France and other member states to establish a temporary operation inside Rwanda under French command and control. This
became the French-led
Opération Turquoise
in western Rwanda in summer 1994. The Council stated that in accepting the French offer it was acting under
Chapter VII
of the Charter, and it authorized France to use ‘all necessary means to achieve the humanitarian objectives’ set out in earlier Security Council resolutions.
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The deployment of the French under UN auspices actually exacerbated some of UNAMIR’s problems, as the French role was seen (rightly or wrongly) as favouring the government (largely Hutu) forces, and preventing the RPF from achieving total victory throughout the country.
The conditions within which these three forces operated changed after 4 July 1994, when the RPF captured Kigali. The killings of Tutsis gradually ceased, but now there was a new flood of refugees, this time Hutus seeking to avoid the anticipated retribution of the country’s new masters. While many of these refugees went to camps inside Rwanda, over one million of them fled the country, mainly to camps established just inside Zaire (in 1997 renamed Democratic Republic of Congo), at Goma and Bukavu. In 1994 the US sent troops to help run these camps. The UN continued to encounter severe problems in getting states to provide contingents for peacekeeping forces in these refugee camps on the borders. Boutros-Ghali sent out appeals to sixty governments for troops and equipment for a peacekeeping force to protect 1.2 million Rwanda refugees in camps in Zaire, and did not get a single positive response: a repeat of the frustration of May 1994.
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Particular reasons why the Rwanda experience was seen as pointing in the direction of some kind of UN standing or quick-reaction forces include the following:
• The Interahamwe, the main group carrying out the killings in 1994, did not constitute an impressive military force. Its Tutsi victims might well, therefore, have been saved by a modest-sized external military force.
• The weakness of existing UN standby arrangements for peacekeeping forces was demonstrated in Rwanda. As in Somalia in December 1992, so in Rwanda in May 1994, the UN failed to secure national contingents for a UN force in any reasonable time frame, and then had to authorize a single country to act in respect of an urgent humanitarian crisis. Such a system of authorization involves an implied reproach to international organization, yet in the absence of some kind of UN rapid-deployment force it may be the only way of addressing certain endemic conflicts and failures of government.
After 1994, a broad consensus emerged that action should have been taken to stop the genocide. In retrospect, states and individuals accepted a responsibility to do what they had not been willing to do at the time. However, a few voices suggested that the UN’s abysmal performance had been unavoidable. As Michael Barnett wrote in his inside account of US and UN decision-making over Rwanda, the UN’s
failure to respond forcefully was ‘the
only
available choice given the reality on the ground, what member states were willing to do, the rules of peacekeeping, and the all-too-clear limits of the UN. Rwanda was beyond those limits.’
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There are some grounds for doubt as to whether the principal lesson of the Rwanda disaster is that the UN needs a standing military force.
(a) The UN did already have some forces (UNOMUR and UNAMIR) in the area. The problems were that it was fearful of the risks to them, conscious that their original mandates were of declining relevance, uncertain how to use them in a rapidly deteriorating situation, and only able to achieve very limited results with them.
(b) Large forces – more than a brigade – might in fact have been required to stop the widespread and systematic genocide.
(c) It is hard to be confident that in the first half of 1994 the whole of any UN standing force would have been available for immediate service in Rwanda: in all probability it would have been already fully occupied in several crises elsewhere at that time.
(d) Even if a UN standing force had been sent to Rwanda, it might have been there at the ‘wrong’ time. Such a force might have got involved in Rwanda during the crises there in 1993; and might then have had to leave later that year under proposed arrangements that it should have a purely vanguard role, preparing the way for more regular UN peacekeeping forces. Thus it might have left before the genocide began.
(e) It is not immediately clear what exactly the mandate for a larger UN force in Rwanda should have been. Should it have established safe areas for Tutsis, and if so could it have prevented them from becoming involved in the war on the side of the RPF? Or should it simply have supported the RPF forces, as some advocated?
(f) A particular problem with the appeal for reinforcements for UNAMIR in May 1994 may have been that it was not coupled with a clear indication of what particular forces were needed for what particular actions. It is possible that had there been a clearer request, geared to a clear central purpose (e.g. to establish safe areas for Tutsis), the outcome might have been different.
(g) Some actions to stop the genocide that were advocated but not undertaken, such as jamming the inflammatory government radio stations, did not themselves need a large number of troops. (However, they might have exposed the UN peacekeeping forces in the area to reprisals, and thereby increased the need for armed protection.)
(h) A principal UN weakness, exposed by the Rwanda problem, was the lack of a flexible range of options between the peacekeeping mode (with its emphasis
on impartiality and consent) on the one hand, and enforcement against aggression on the other: this needed attention as much as the question of standing forces.
(i) A further UN weakness exposed by the Rwanda crisis is the way in which some governments vote for a resolution on the Security Council, but are then unwilling to take even the minimum of action to put their money where their mouth is.
Behind all these particular problems lies the larger and more terrible one that there was simply a lack of solid interest and definite will to do much about Rwanda. Afterwards, there was widespread agreement that international military action should have been taken in 1994. Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, and others went to Rwanda and said so. However, it is much easier to be brave retrospectively than at the time. In 1994, actual and potential troop-contributing states were reluctant to take risks with their troops’ lives in what was perceived as an uncertain cause. There was a sense of hopelessness at the UN and in national capitals as to whether the Tutsis could be saved from genocide, and whether any approximation of a stable political order could emerge in Rwanda. The bitter experience of intervention in Somalia, from which the US and other powers were in the process of extricating themselves at the very time the Rwanda crisis erupted in 1994, added to the mood of caution. Finally, the international community’s inaction in this crisis owed something to the unfortunate fact that it erupted at the very time when governments and international bodies were becoming increasingly cautious about over-committing themselves in the many post-Cold War crises. For example, both the US and Canadian governments and the UN Security Council were attempting to devise guidelines for the circumstances in which peacekeeping operations should or should not be established. The criteria laid down in these documents put much emphasis on preconditions, such as a stable ceasefire between belligerents, that were not present in Rwanda in 1994.
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