Keeping the peace
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
October 29, 2006

In spite of failures and setbacks, the U.N. is our best bet for lasting peace.

A welcome break from war: Lebanese children with a U.N. soldier in Southern Lebanon. Photo: AFP

THIS United Nations Day (October 24), with headlines around the world about North Korean and Iranian nukes (real or potential), it's instructive to look again at the U.N.'s record in the area of international peace and security. Over the years, more than 170 U.N.-assisted peace settlements have ended regional conflicts. And in the past 15 years, more civil wars have ended through mediation than in the previous two centuries combined, in large part because the U.N. provided leadership, opportunities for negotiation, strategic coordination and the resources to implement peace agreements.

Effective solutions

During my years in peacekeeping after the Cold War, I devised a simple three-point mantra. The U.N.'s successes, I argued, depend on three things: a realistic mandate, one that is doable and worth doing; resources (financial, human and military) that are commensurate with the mandate; and a third element on which both mandate and resources are dependent — political will. Without political will you will not get a strong and feasible mandate and you will not get the resources to fulfil it, so you end up either putting a superficial bandage on a deep wound, as happened to us in Bosnia, or not going in at all, as happened in Rwanda, or pulling out too soon, as happened in Somalia. The U.N. has clearly acted unwisely at times, and failed to act at others, resulting in failures and setbacks that are regularly cited against it. But had the mantra been followed, the outcomes could have been different.

There are other things we clearly need to fix. The UN must mount effective peace-keeping operations more rapidly: currently they take too long to deploy and are uneven in quality. We need to bring the Western countries back into peacekeeping in a bigger way — currently the armies of the developed world are largely not serving under the blue flag (Lebanon is a recent exception, and one hopes the start of a new trend).

Beyond parochial interests

Yet, I do believe that we are the most successful practitioner, and will likely remain the means of choice, to monitor peace treaties. And when territories must be administered while political solutions evolve and the modus operandi for lasting peace are established, the world will continue to turn to the U.N., since it transcends any one Government's interests but acts in the name of all. But where others have the capacity, the resources and the will to keep the peace — NATO in Afghanistan and Kosovo, the European Union in Bosnia, though not yet the African Union in Darfur — the U.N. should stand aside and bless their efforts. And where the task — enforcing peace in Iraq, for instance — is clearly beyond us, we should confine ourselves to political, electoral, and constitutional assistance (as well as humanitarian and development work where feasible) and let wars be fought by warriors, not peacekeepers.

I strongly feel, too, that the downsizing of the U.N.'s presence in East Timor in 2005 was a mistake that, given the chance to step back in time, I believe we would not make again. In May 2005, some three years after Timor-Leste became independent as the 191st Member State of the United Nations, the U.N. phased back its engagement in that country. The last of the U.N. peacekeepers, who had played a prominent role since 1999 in restoring peace to the ravaged land, departed, leaving behind a small group of civilian advisors to assist the government, initially under an exceptionally able Indian diplomat, Kamalesh Sharma.

With hindsight, the soldiers' departure clearly came too soon. Less than one year later, the hard-won peace broke down. For the second time in a decade, tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes and the country was on the brink of war. In June 2006, Timor-Leste's first President, Xanana Gusmao, asked the U.N. to send the peacekeepers back, and in August the Security Council responded, beefing up the U.N. presence and tasking it with stabilising the country.

That nation-building is a long, arduous and difficult task few would deny. But just how much international assistance is enough? The answer will vary from place to place and circumstance to circumstance. And we will never get it right unless we pay particular attention to the nexus between peacekeeping and peace-building. Far too often (think of Angola and Haiti in recent years) conflicts re-ignite not long after the peacekeepers have left, and all their good work is tragically undone.

So the organisational change I'd emphasise at the U.N. is to strengthen the new Peacebuilding Commission, a body charged with managing the transition from keeping a peace to building a stable society. Its capacities are yet to be defined and much work remains to be done to ensure its effectiveness. But it pulls together Security Council members, troop contributors and development agencies (including the World Bank) in order to ensure that conflict gives way not just to peacekeeping but also to development and to democratic institution-building, so that peace is truly sustainable.

The value of democracy

Though it's not explicitly envisaged in the Peacebuilding Commission, I'd also involve the U.N.'s Democracy Fund, newly created to support the growth and development of democracy. It is a source of some pride to me that India is a major contributor to this fund, as befits a leading democracy, and that we have not left it only to the West. If the U.N. can act to support democratic forces in post-conflict societies, we will help fulfil the founding ideals of our Charter, and also prevent the horrible waste of lives, effort and money that has occurred because peace, once established, proved too fragile to last.