The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (88 page)

In 1959, it was to the General Assembly that the Dalai Lama appealed over the suppression of the Tibetan revolt (though its resolution condemning China’s behaviour was without effect).
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Also, it was to the General Assembly that the Netherlands and Indonesia turned in 1962 to implement their deal over West Irian/West Papua. The Assembly created a United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) to administer the territory for seven months before transfer to Indonesian control.
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Again, though it was the Security Council that initially authorized the Congo force (ONUC) in 1960,
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following a Soviet veto, initiative passed to the Assembly, which invited the Secretary-General to continue with the actions the USSR had opposed. This Hammarskjöld did, taking advice from Western and non-aligned, but not from Soviet, sources. The Council was not completely bypassed (in 1961 it twice voted additions to ONUC’s powers), but in 1962 it did not discuss the Congo once, while in 1963 it simply received two reports from Secretary-General U Thant. The Soviet response was a failed attempt to replace the office of Secretary-General by a ‘troika’ representing East, West, and non-aligned countries, and the successful assertion, in conjunction with France, that countries need not pay for UN operations not properly sanctioned and controlled by the Council.
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Later, as the US lost its previous ‘automatic majority’ in the General Assembly, this approach has come to suit its interests too, and Security Council control over the initiation of UN operations has become firmly established.

More important in restricting the range of conflicts the Security Council has (or could have) addressed are such ‘permanently operating factors’ as the veto and the UN’s limited resources, on the one hand, and the availability, on the other, of approaches and remedies outside the UN framework. Little need be said on the veto.
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US-UK vetoes in 1977 and 1987 prevented the expansion of mandatory UN sanctions on South Africa beyond the field of arms supplies. In addition, the veto obviously constrained UN involvement in major Cold War conflicts, whether between the superpowers or their clients. Indeed the UN’s most activist Secretary-General during that era, Hammarskjöld, soon accepted that there was nothing he could do about the Soviet intervention in Hungary (unlike the situation in the Middle East), and steered well clear of central Cold War issues like Berlin.
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‘The UN’, he felt, ‘enters the picture on the basis of its non-commitment to any power bloc’. Its Secretary-General should ‘aim at keeping newly arising conflicts outside the sphere of bloc differences’, and seek ‘to lift [marginal] problems out of the cold war… [I]t is one way we can get over the difficulties created for the UN …by the cold war[,] …if not to thaw the cold war, at least to limit its impact on international life.’
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Since the end of the Cold War, vetoes have been less common, and cast chiefly by the US in connection, not with substantive proposals, but with language condemnatory of Israel. Further, in 1997, China vetoed the dispatch of UN observers to monitor Guatemala’s post-insurgency peace agreement, while in 1999 it vetoed a renewal of the mandate of the UN Preventive Deployment Force in Macedonia, in both cases because of these countries’ recognition of Taiwan. More importantly, as one Council member (Jamaica) observed in 2001, ‘the mere presence of the threat of the veto… more often than not determined the way the Council conduct[ed] its business.’
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This may be an exaggeration. Yet when in relation to Kosovo, Russia made clear that it would veto UN enforcement action against Serbia, while this did not prevent either the threat or the implementation of such action, both were conducted instead through NATO (with at least a notional loss of international ‘legitimacy’). Four years later the prospect of French and Russian vetoes led the US and UK, in 2003, to discontinue their search for a Council resolution explicitly authorizing invasion of Iraq, and to proceed instead on the basis of the more debatable authority conveyed by previous resolutions.

Security Council action has been further limited by the UN’s lack of
propres resources
, since it depends almost entirely on the contributions of its members. There is some scope for juggling – if country A will not contribute troops, countries B and C can be approached. But if troops are withheld, the operation cannot be launched; if they are withdrawn, it may have to be wound up. No doubt U Thant bungled his response to Egyptian President Nasser’s 1967 request that UNEF leave Sinai, but the force always had been conditioned on Egyptian consent to its presence. In any event, it would probably no longer have been viable once such major contributors as India and Yugoslavia had determined to withdraw. Likewise, the UN presence intended to sort out Somalia crumbled when the US panicked after losing eighteen men in October 1993: US withdrawal in March 1994 was followed within months by that of India, and the entire enterprise was wound up in March 1995. Fear of a repetition also temporarily prevented the landing of US and Canadian peacekeepers in Haiti in October 1993. More seriously, a major factor contributing to the passivity of the UN in the face of genocide in Rwanda was the killing of ten Belgian soldiers on 7 April 1994. Brussels withdrew its battalion from UNAMIR, followed rapidly by Bangladesh. The then Security Council President maintains that, had the Council not reduced the force to a tiny holding presence,
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it would have disintegrated as other countries pulled out.
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States’ reluctance to incur casualties where they have no interests directly at stake is one constraint. Another is money. It has been said that the UN ‘teeter[s] constantly on the brink of financial calamity’.
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Peacekeeping demands are inherently unpredictable and have, in some years, exceeded all other UN expenses.
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Generally the UN sets financial prudence aside and responds to needs, if necessary leaving in arrears payments due to the providers of peacekeeping forces and services. However, this probably impacts on the speed with which forces can be assembled, and perhaps on their size. For example, in 1993, General Dallaire wanted 8,000 troops for Rwanda, hoped to get 5,000, but had to settle for 2,500.
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It is also contended that ‘funding constraints weighed heavily’ in Secretary-General Annan’s 2000 recommendation to terminate the UN force in Haiti.
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Indeed a recent RAND study, though generally laudatory, sees most UN missions as

In addition, it should be acknowledged that the United Nations is not the only game in town.
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Many conflicts have terminated quite independently of UN involvement, through their own dynamics, through the mediation or intervention of outside powers, or through that of regional organizations. For example, the decisive factor may simply be military success: North Vietnam eventually conquered South Vietnam,
while Eritrea secured independence by defeating the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. Armed struggle also brought Castro to power in Cuba, and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Equally, even formidable rebellions can sometimes simply be put down, as was that of Biafra by the federal Nigerian government. At a lower level, the Philippines, in the early 1950s, ended the Huk insurgency by a mixture of strength and ‘hearts and minds’ conciliation. Countries can also sometimes heal their domestic conflicts without external assistance, as with the negotiated end of white minority rule in the Republic of South Africa.

Such ‘internal’ outcomes are common. So, also, is resolution through the intervention of an external power. At one extreme, this can take the form of skilled low-key mediation. The major Sri Lanka-Tamil Tigers war outlasted the 1987–90 ‘peace-enforcing’ intervention by the predominant regional power, India, but in 2000 Norwegian diplomacy secured at least a temporary ceasefire on the basis of Tamil autonomy.
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Earlier, while certainly not solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the 1993 Oslo agreement succeeded, where previous talks under UN and US auspices had not, in paving the way for a Palestinian Authority in the occupied territories (thus also making politically possible the direct negotiation in 1994 of an Israel-Jordan peace treaty). Further, a 2005 agreement struck through Finland’s mediation may perhaps resolve the Aceh dispute in Indonesia.
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‘Realists’ would find more natural the ending of conflicts by the interposition of a single hegemonial, or at least regionally dominant, power. Again, this can be purely diplomatic. When Turkish invasion of Cyprus seemed imminent in 1967, President Johnson shot his special representative Cyrus Vance off to the area with the instruction, ‘Do what you have to to stop the war’. The next year, after the North Korean seizure of the
USS Pueblo
, Vance’s instructions were, ‘Do what is necessary to stop [South Korea’s President] Park from invading North Korea’.
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In 1996, another ‘highly threatening situation’ between Greece and Turkey ‘was defused by the direct intervention of President Clinton’, US pressure bringing both sides to withdraw their forces from around the disputed Imia/Kardak islets.
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Further, the apparent 2005 settlement of the southern Sudan civil wars (which had long eluded diplomacy of all kinds) was attributed largely to carrot-and-stick US negotiation.
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Arguably, US diplomacy (albeit often cloaked in a multilateral context) underlies a significant proportion of all settlements.

Great Power interventions are not limited to diplomacy. In 1965, the US moved troops into the Dominican Republic to forestall what it saw as a prospective Castro-style takeover by crypto-communists. Its action was retrospectively ‘legitimated’ by the Organization of American States, which established an ‘Inter-American Peace Force’. Despite its Brazilian command, the force remained essentially under US control, and managed the country until elections in 1966.
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Similarly, in 1983, the US took advantage of the murder of Grenada’s Marxist Premier by more extreme colleagues to move in troops and hold elections. Nor, of course, have Great Power interventions always been so limited. For example, when months of repression in East Pakistan created a massive refugee problem, India went to war in 1971 to liberate what became Bangladesh (and incidentally cut Pakistan down to size).

‘Spheres of influence’ are not what they once were, but they may still serve to limit or exclude significant UN involvement. Thus (besides ‘covert action’) the US has mounted overt or semi-overt interventions in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (the ‘Bay of Pigs’ in 1961), the Dominican Republic (1965–6), Grenada (1983), and Panama (1989–90). Until 1989, the USSR maintained a sphere of much tighter control in Eastern Europe, which it preserved in 1956 through unilateral intervention in Hungary. And, though Gorbachev abandoned first the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ and then communist Eastern Europe itself, the break-up of the USSR was followed by numerous Russian interventions, covert and – in conjunction with the Commonwealth of Independent States – overt, in what was claimed as the special area of the ‘Near Abroad’. France, too, for decades after decolonization, exerted major influence over much of francophone Africa, backed by the small-scale use of military force to stabilize the Congo (Zaire) in 1978 (Shaba 2) and 1991 (both in association with a rather reluctant Belgium), and Chad (especially in 1983).

Countries may act alone. However, they often prefer to act through, or at least with the blessing of, regional organizations in which they predominate. Thus the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia was conducted through the Warsaw Pact. A document produced by the Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS) refers to ‘perceptions’ in the 1990s that ECOWAS forces ‘were an instrument of Nigerian foreign policy’. The document observes that the ‘presence of a dominant actor’ was ‘crucial to effective peace initiatives [in Liberia and Sierra Leone], and Nigeria helped in many ways to play this role, despite both internal and external misgivings’, whereas ‘its absence in Guinea-Bissau and Côte d’Ivoire’ had ‘a negative impact’.
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It was to Australia that the Solomon Islands’ prime minister appealed for aid in April 2003, and the plan for intervention was then put to a Pacific Islands Forum meeting in June. A ‘Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands’ (RAMSI) resulted, but it was very much Australian-led and could be seen as benign neo-colonialism. NATO itself, where the ‘Supreme Allied Commanders’ are all American, may constitute another such grey area of muted primacy. For example, the US desire to intervene in Kosovo in 1999 enjoyed strong north European (and in particular Anglo-French) support, but the strategy of intervention by air power alone was very much the United States’ choice, and when this initially seemed counterproductive, it took US will, and alliance discipline, to keep a reluctant Italy and still more reluctant Greece in line.

In such other regional organizations as the Arab League and the African Union, primacy is less marked. Both have, on occasion, intervened to halt, or forestall, conflicts. Thus the Arab League accepted Kuwait’s independence in 1961, and deployed a multinational force to take over from Britain the task of protecting it from Iraqi annexation. Later, in 1972 and 1979, it twice persuaded North and South Yemen to draw back from the brink of war. And, in 1989, with the Lebanese civil war long mired in stalemate, it reassembled the Lebanese parliament in a Saudi resort, resulting in a constitutional compromise, the election of a new President, and the giving of a green light to Syrian military intervention to compel acceptance of the new regime. The African Union is a much younger organization, but one ready (unlike its precursor the OAU) not only to negotiate to end conflicts, but also to mount peacekeeping/humanitarian interventions. Its first, the African Union Mission in Burundi (AMIB), enjoyed considerable success. Less obviously productive, at least so far, has been the 2004 deployment of a protective African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) in Darfur, a disaster area where African leaders were insistent on claiming, and the UN was long happy to concede, the leading role.
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