The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (86 page)

Many of these goals have, however, often not been met in fragile situations in which donors have repeatedly failed to deliver on their pledges. The UN office in Liberia, under Felix Downes-Thomas, was regarded as too close to Charles Taylor’s government. It narrowly interpreted its mandate as mobilizing donor support for peace-building, and declined to work closely with civil society groups and to report on human rights abuses. It is vital that the UN collaborate with ECOWAS in its future peace-building tasks, particularly with the establishment of a thirty-one-member UN Peacebuilding Commission in December 2005 to mobilize resources for post-conflict reconstruction, along with regional development banks, the World Bank, and the IMF.

Following the recommendations of the UN’s Inter-Agency Task Force on West Africa of May 2001, the decisions by the Security Council to establish a UN office in West Africa and to appoint a Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, to head this office both represented positive steps for UN-ECOWAS cooperation.
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The Council mandated the office to help strengthen ECOWAS’s peacekeeping and electoral capacities and to work with civil society groups in West Africa. The UN office was also tasked with performing the following specific tasks: assist the UN and its sub-regional offices to coordinate strategies in West Africa; monitor and report on political, humanitarian, and human rights developments; harmonize UN activities with those of ECOWAS; monitor ECOWAS’s decisions and activities; and support national and sub-regional peace-building efforts.
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While these are all noble objectives, the curious decision not to locate this office in Abuja – site of the ECOWAS secretariat – has reduced its effectiveness in fulfilling its mandate, particularly in light of the complications of
communication and travel within West Africa. The one success of the office (with fewer than five professional staff) has been the organization of regular meetings between the political and military heads of UN missions in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, and Guinea-Bissau to discuss cross-border issues and to share comparative experiences as part of a regional approach to managing West Africa’s conflicts. The UN office has also conducted research on youth unemployment in West Africa and has been engaged in private sector round tables to attract investment to the region. UNOWA was further involved in the seventh EU-ECOWAS Ministerial Troika in Luxembourg in May 2005, where a Trilateral Framework of Action for Peace and Security was agreed to provide support for ECOWAS in the areas of security sector reform; electoral missions; mediation; peace support operations; and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration.
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The UN Security Council must also provide regional peacekeepers in West Africa and elsewhere, in a timely manner, with the logistical and financial resources they need if such missions are to achieve their goals. The Liberia experiences in 1997 and 2003 revealed that, if these resources and funds are provided by external actors, and if there is a will on the part of the parties to disarm their factions, even a poorly resourced regional body can achieve some success. The second important lesson for the Council is therefore the need to encourage external actors to contribute substantially to conflict management efforts. While external actors like the US and France often fuelled conflicts and/or supported autocrats in West Africa during the Cold War era, Council members have played a more positive role in peace-making efforts in post-Cold War West Africa. Significantly, it took the support of the UK, the US, and France – three western godfathers’ and all veto-wielding Permanent Members of the UN Security Council – to establish a UN presence in their former spheres of influence. The UN mission in Liberia was headed until April 2005 by an American national, Jacques Klein. In Sierra Leone, the UK sent 800 troops to help stabilize a faltering UN mission; led international efforts to mobilize donor support; and used its permanent seat on the Security Council to increase the size of the peacekeeping force to 20,000 – the largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world at the time. London also pushed for the imposition of sanctions (with the strong support of Richard Holbrooke, America’s forceful permanent representative at the UN) against Charles Taylor. Likewise, France ensured the deployment of a UN mission to Côte d’Ivoire in 2004. The International Contact Groups in Liberia and Sierra Leone were also useful mechanisms for mobilizing Council support for, and sustaining interest in, these missions.

The two cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone underline the importance of developing effective strategies and sanctions to deal with spoilers like Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh.
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In Liberia and Sierra Leone, warring factions killed and kidnapped ECOMOG and UN peacekeepers and stole their weapons and vehicles. In both cases, peacekeepers were deployed into countries in which there was no peace to keep and in which certain parties were determined to use violence to force the withdrawal of its peacekeepers. It is difficult to remain neutral under such circumstances, and the Security Council should consider, when appropriate, imposing carefully targeted economic, political, and legal sanctions of the sort that were successfully applied to the RUF in Sierra Leone and Charles Taylor in Liberia. European, North American, and Asian commercial firms played a negative role in supporting Liberian and Sierra Leonean warlords through the illicit export of natural resources and minerals in both countries. In devising sanctions, the Council should also consider the actions of these firms, and, if necessary, punish them.
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Led by Britain and the US, the Security Council imposed economic and travel sanctions, as well as an arms embargo on Charles Taylor’s regime in May 2001. Though ECOWAS leaders opposed these sanctions at the time, the punitive measures appear to have had a major impact in ending the arms-for-diamond trade between Taylor and the RUF. They weakened his regime tremendously and thus helped to end the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The opposition of West Africa’s leaders to sanctioning Taylor’s fuelling of conflicts in the sub-region and the granting of political asylum to the Liberian president by Nigeria underlined the traditional reluctance of the continent’s leaders to punish each other. While Taylor’s autocratic rule and war crimes in Liberia are indefensible (though the Security Council met the former warlord in Monrovia during its visit to the region in October 2000), American pressure saw Nigeria hand Taylor over to the Special Court in Sierra Leone in April 2006. Such selective, self-interested efforts at punishing warlords – apparently based on Washington’s concerns of an alleged link, reported by Douglas Farah, a
Washington Post
journalist, between Taylor-backed RUF Sierra Leonean diamonds and al-Qaeda in America’s global ‘war on terror’ – are, however, unlikely to contribute to boosting the credibility of the evolving international criminal justice regime.
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The final lesson for the Security Council is to find ways of harnessing the important military and financial capacity of local hegemons like Nigeria into more multilateral efforts under a UN umbrella. South Africa has played a similar role as part of UN missions in Burundi and the DRC. The two ECOMOG interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone demonstrated the importance of Nigeria to peacekeeping missions in West Africa. Despite continuing fears expressed by several ECOWAS states and numerous commentators of a bullying Nigeria clumsily rampaging through West Africa like a bull in a china shop, Nigeria appears to be an important presence to the success of sub-regional peacekeeping initiatives.
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In Liberia and Sierra Leone, Nigerian-led ECOMOG forces were able to overcome their logistical shortcomings to protect Monrovia and Freetown from being overrun by rebels in 1992 and 1999 respectively. The Nigerians had also been able to repel the NPFL from Monrovia in 1990 and to restore the Kabbah government to power in Freetown in 1998.

The mission in Côte d’Ivoire has been sustained by the presence of 4,600 French troops. France is, however, unlikely to be a more natural and reliable hegemon in West Africa than Nigeria. Pax Nigeriana, though, faces both opportunities and obstacles in a post-Cold War West Africa. The country’s enormous political and socio-economic problems and the aversion of Nigerian public opinion to future costly interventions may prove to be major constraints for elected civilian governments as opposed to the military brass hats who launched the interventions into Liberia and Sierra Leone. Most ECOWAS countries, however, no longer question the need for Nigerian leadership but rather its penchant for a unilateral diplomatic style that offends the sensibilities of smaller, poorer, and weaker states. Nigeria must learn to speak softly, even as it carries a big stick.

What do the three cases of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire suggest about the future of UN peacekeeping in Africa? The need for UN peacekeeping in Africa is clear: nearly half of the fifty UN peacekeeping missions in the post-Cold War era have been in Africa; the continent currently hosts the most numerous and largest UN peacekeeping missions in the world; and the world body has established sub-regional offices in West Africa, the Great Lakes, and Central Africa, as well as peace-building offices in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, and the Central African
Republic. In 2006, seven out of the seventeen UN peacekeeping missions in the world were in Africa,
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and nearly 90 per cent of its personnel were deployed on the continent. Both the 2004 High-level Panel report and the Secretary General’s response,
In Larger Freedom
, called on donors to devise a 10-year capacity-building plan with the African Union and advocated UN financial support for Africa’s regional organizations.
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This is particularly welcome in light of our three case studies as well as the AU’s peacekeeping difficulties in Sudan’s Darfur region between 2004 and 2006 which led to its call for the UN to take over the mission. Africa must, however, remain vigilant to ensure that this capacity-building plan is implemented, given the penchant of many donors to make similar unfulfilled promises in the past. The difficult experiences of regional peacekeepers in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, as well as in Lesotho, Burundi, Rwanda, Comoros, and Sudan, are all clear signs of the need for better-equipped and richer western peacekeepers to continue to contribute to efforts to maintain peace and security in Africa. It is important that the Security Council not turn peacekeeping in Africa into an apartheid system in which Africans and Asians spill most of the blood and the West pays some of the bills. The Council’s support for African solutions to African problems’ often appears to many Africans as a cynical attempt to convert a Cold War battle cry by Africans to rid their continent of foreign meddlers into an excuse to abandon the UN’s proper peacekeeping responsibilities in Africa.

Finally, a potentially useful mechanism that was employed in West Africa was the visits to the sub-region by UN Security Council members. Three missions of UN Security Council permanent representatives visited West Africa in October 2000, July 2003, and June 2004. The main purpose of these three visits was for Council members to gain a better understanding of the situation on the ground in this volatile sub-region. They thus met heads of state; diplomats; rebels; and civil society actors. The missions urged more effective UN action in deploying peacekeepers and civilian staff; called for greater support for ECOWAS’s peace-making and peacekeeping efforts; saw the need for greater coordination of the UN’s efforts in various sub-regional peacekeeping missions (the genesis of the regional approach); advocated greater support for civil society actors; championed support of electoral and post-conflict peace-building efforts; and called for an end to a ‘culture of impunity’ by sub-regional warlords through targeted sanctions.
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These trips allowed the Council’s ambassadors to gain first-hand experience of the situation on the ground and to assess the views and personalities of the key actors in West Africa’s three destructive wars. These three missions also provided Council members with insights that were useful for making decisions in New York. Such high-level field missions can bring home to parties in dispute the Council’s seriousness to understand and address their conflicts. They can also bring hope to the populations of conflict-ridden regions like West Africa that they have not been forgotten by the international community.

J. P. D. DUNBABIN

T
HE
UN Charter confers on the Security Council ‘primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security’.
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Moreover, UN members must ‘make available’ to it ‘armed forces, assistance and facilities’
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and, using these, the Security Council should ‘take such action… as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace’.
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That is not the world we know – indeed only a minority of post-1945 conflicts have generated serious UN intervention. This
chapter demonstrates such non-involvement on the part of the Security Council, explores factors explaining it, and, more briefly, analyses certain factors shaping the ‘peace-building’ role into which the UN’s post-Cold War activism has been largely channelled.