The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (25 page)

In January 1995, the Danish government announced that it was approaching a number of countries for support in establishing a working group to develop a multinational rapid-deployment brigade. The plan, outlined in reports issued in August 1995 and September 1996, was for support for UN peacekeeping missions that are based on
Chapter VI
of the Charter.
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It was also predicated on the assumption that each
country would retain the right to decide whether or not to participate on a case-by-case basis, so this was not a proposal for standing forces in the normal sense. The Multinational Standby High Readiness Brigade for UN Operations (SHIRBRIG) was established on 15 December 1996, and gradually became a reality in 1996–2000 with maximum overall troop numbers of about 5,000. From November 2000 it was the basis of several deployments, including as part of the UNMEE peacekeeping operation in Ethiopia and Eritrea. By early 2007 SHIRBRIG had sixteen states as members of the scheme, plus seven as observers.
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Thus, unlike certain other proposals made in 1995, SHIRBRIG was actually implemented, but was notably modest in its size, purposes, and deployments. It was nothing like the UN standing force with an enforcement capacity that many had wanted to see: rather, it was a distinct part of the UN’s existing peacekeeping standby arrangements.

By late 1995 the idea of a UN standing force to tackle major emergencies had entered serious decline. It ceased to be a major focus of discussion, being replaced by more modest ideas and organizational changes aimed at incremental improvement, including through certain regional initiatives. The nature of the decline was evident in successive reports, and in the weak response of member states and the UN Security Council to the crisis in Darfur from 2003 onwards.

Proposals for a UN rapid reaction force received only brief coverage in a November 1995 report of the UN’s Joint Inspection Unit on the military component of UN peacekeeping operations. True, this report recommended further examination of ‘a more effective and reliable system of response by the United Nations to emergencies, building on the best aspects of two basic approaches: standby arrangements system and rapid reaction force’. Yet the report’s brief examination of the rapid-reaction force idea was sober. After a summary of past proposals for such a force, including the recent Dutch development of the concept, it laid out a litany of difficulties:

After 1995 there was some continued development and advocacy of the UN standing force concept, mainly in the US.
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The idea continued to have some support from states, but also provoked opposition, and ceased to be a main focus of discussion within and beyond the UN.
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An informal group called ‘Friends of Rapid Deployment’, that had been initiated at the UN in 1995, did not meet at all in 1998 and 1999. Already in December 1996 the decline of the idea was evident from Kofi Annan’s statement on the eve of taking up the post of Secretary-General:

Despite progress on UNSAS and related projects in the late 1990s, the UN remained chronically unable to deploy forces quickly in operations that might be complex or contested. This was one of many considerations that led to the establishment in 2000 of a Panel on UN Peace Operations, chaired by the highly respected former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi. In its hard-hitting report the Panel stated that ‘few of the building blocks are in place for the United Nations to rapidly acquire and deploy the human and material resources required to mount any complex peace operations in the future.’ It concluded its discussion of ‘rapid and effective deployment’:

The follow-up to the Brahimi Report was respectful but, on the matter of UN forces, disappointingly unspecific.
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The subject of forces permanently under UN control was not a focus of discussion. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, whose report in December 2001 advanced the idea of responsibility to protect populations at risk, was silent on the subject of a standing UN force.
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The UN High-level Panel report of December 2004 – while it duly noted a European Union decision to establish standby high-readiness battalions that could reinforce UN missions, and also made favourable reference to some similar moves by the African Union – did not discuss the idea of rapid-reaction forces as such, nor did it mention Charter Article 43. This report relied more on the idea of standby arrangements. Its conclusion on these matters was hortatory in tone but lacked political traction: ‘States with advanced military capacities should establish standby high readiness, self-sufficient battalions at up to brigade level that can reinforce United Nations missions, and should place them at the disposal of the United Nations.’
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When, a few months later, the UN Secretary-General issued a report taking forward the High-level Panel’s various proposals, its treatment of future arrangements for UN forces was centred, not on any of the proposals for a UN rapid reaction force, but rather on the existing UN Standby Arrangements System, and on ‘the establishment of an interlocking system of peacekeeping capacities that will enable the United Nations to work with relevant regional organizations in predictable and
reliable partnerships’.
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The General Assembly’s World Summit Outcome document of September 2005, while embracing the concept of ‘responsibility to protect’, was not willing to provide any new means whereby that responsibility might be exercised: standby arrangements, and liaison with regional organizations, were where the main aspirational focus lay.
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In 2006 there was no sign of change from this position. The idea of a UN standing force was not dead, but it was in suspended animation. Meanwhile, the modest substitute for it, standby arrangements including high-readiness brigades, had not significantly changed for the better the UN’s capacity to act quickly in tragic situations.

Two key developments regarding multinational standby and rapid-reaction force arrangements in the years after 2000 were regional in character (in Europe and Africa), and were not tied exclusively to support for UN-managed or UN-authorized operations. There is considerable logic in this approach. (1) It does not always make sense to restrict well-trained rapid-deployment forces to acting only in cases on which the UN Security Council can agree. (2) If a standby force with intervention capability is to be maintained in a high state of readiness, it is likely to require training and logistical arrangements which are best managed regionally.

In Europe, an initiative at the European Union summit meeting at Helsinki in 1999 resulted in the concept of EU Battlegroups – a combined-arms battalion-sized force package with various forms of combat support. The viability of the general concept was confirmed by the EU’s deployment of a French-led EU force in
Opération Artemis
– a UN-authorized action in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003. As from 1 January 2007 the EU announced that it had two battlegroups, and the capacity to run ‘two concurrent single Battlegroup-size response operations’. An EU battlegroup is composed of approximately 1,500 troops, and has been officially defined as ‘the minimum militarily effective, credible, rapidly deployable, coherent force package capable of stand-alone operations, or for the initial phase of larger operations’.
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The EU indicated that such a force would be intended to address ‘the whole spectrum of crisis management operations’. It was seen as strengthening the EU’s ability to respond to UN requests, but
(unlike SHIRBRIG, mentioned earlier) was not confined to UN-approved operations. The force’s flexible character was emphasized:

In Africa in July 2002, the African Union established a Peace and Security Council, one of the aims of which is the establishment of an African Standby Force (ASF) capable of rapid deployment anywhere in the continent for a wide variety of possible AU missions.
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As implementation of the plans for this proposed force began in 2003, it was hailed as ‘an African solution for African problems’, and as a means of responding to the UN’s problem of overload. Progress on the ASF has been slow. Difficulties have included the lack of a strategic airlift capability, and the lack of funds in light of the fact that there was barely enough money to support the African Union mission that operated in Darfur from 2004 onwards.

In the many-sided armed conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan from 2003 onwards, involving insurgency and repression, there were mass killings and expulsions of inhabitants by predominantly Arabic-speaking
Janjaweed
armed groups with Sudan government complicity. In 2004 the African Union set up its mission in Darfur (AMIS), endorsed by the UN Security Councils.
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Although progressively enlarged, and receiving some assistance from the US and NATO, this African peacekeeping mission was plainly inadequate for the difficult task of protecting the inhabitants. At the same time, the UN’s capacity to raise forces to address this long-running major humanitarian crisis also proved inadequate. In August 2006 a Security Council resolution called for additional capabilities for the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), a peacekeeping force originally set up in March 2005 and operating mainly in the separate situation in southern Sudan. UNMIS was now to have over 17,000 more troops, and its mandate was to include deployment to Darfur and presence in camps for displaced people so as to prevent attacks on them. It was envisaged as taking over from AMIS, and was given
Chapter VII
powers. The Sudan government’s consent to this deployment was only ‘invited’, not formally required.
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This was the first country-specific resolution to refer to the previous resolution on the protection of civilians in armed conflicts.
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It was not followed by prompt UN action to protect the inhabitants of Darfur. Troop-contributing countries were unwilling to take part in any UN deployment to which Khartoum did not agree.
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In December 2007, with Sudanese consent, the AU/UN Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) was established. This peacekeeping force was hampered by administrative obstacles, ongoing conflict, and lack of resources. In the first five years of the killings and expulsions, the international community had provided little protection. The size of the area and the complexity of the problem made it appear improbable that a UN standing force could have stopped this disaster: something larger was needed.

The many lines of criticism of the various proposals for standing UN forces can be summarized under the following ten headings:

1. The
practical tasks
envisaged for UN standing forces have been so numerous and varied – and in some cases, so large-scale – that any force would have difficulty in preparing and training for them, and coping with them. The tasks have included: preventive deployments in threatened countries or regions; entering situations of incipient crisis to prevent, for example, the outbreak of civil war or genocide; reinforcing harassed peacekeeping forces and providing them with enhanced enforcement capability; protecting threatened civilians; and protecting humanitarian relief efforts. If these tasks remained on the agenda of a standing force, it would be likely to be required for more crises than it could manage. This problem is not only quantitative, but also qualitative: the variety of types of military expertise, equipment, and force structure required would be beyond a single specially constituted UN force on anything like the scale that has been envisaged for it.