Abstract
The United Nations needs its own rapid deployment force, dedicated to serving not one, but all, nations.
The U.N. doesn't have an army, said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000. “We borrow from our governments, so we can put on the ground [only] the troops the governments offer.” In Ivory Coast, tensions could escalate to a genocidal level of violence. And just as in Rwanda in 1994, the United Nations is not likely to send troops to help end the killing.
Rebel forces–disgruntled ex-soldiers–failed to dislodge Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo in a coup attempt last September 19. But they did manage to seize the predominantly Muslim northern half of the country, which had long simmered with grievances against the Christian-dominated government in the south. More than a million people have been displaced in the ensuing pandemonium.
Government supporters have directed brutal reprisals at the country's 5 million immigrants (a full third of the population), whom they accuse of siding wholesale with the insurgents. Immigrants from neighboring Burkina Faso and Liberia have been the targets of particularly vicious attacks. Many Burkinabes have been severely beaten by official Ivorian authorities, had their shantytown dwellings burnt to the ground, and heard increasing talk in the streets about the concept of the “true Ivorian.” State television has called for expelling all Burkinabes from Ivory Coast. In rural regions in the west, as many as 10,000 Liberians have been driven from their homes by machete-wielding thugs, in scenes eerily reminiscent of the early days of the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
The rebels, for their part, have engaged in widespread rape and murder. Amnesty International reports that when the rebels took Bouake, the nation's second largest city, they systematically massacred scores of government police officers and their families. In fact, there are three competing insurgent forces, which exacerbates the chaos and raises the specter of protracted civil war.
The French
An initial French deployment of troops, only days after the coup attempt, was directed solely at evacuating Westerners. On September 29, the French, with American assistance, made a dramatic helicopter descent into rebel-held Korhogo to rescue about 400 people, including Peace Corps volunteers, nuns, and orphans clutching stuffed animals. The Americans departed within days, but 3,000 French peacekeepers remained in the largest French intervention in Africa since the 1980s.
France retains commercial interests in Ivory Coast, sub-Saharan Africa's third-largest economy, and the French government takes responsibility for the 12,000 French nationals who remain. Arguably, it has a sense of noblesse oblige toward this former colony. The peacekeepers' ostensible mission is to protect Westerners and prop up the perpetually shaky truce that was signed in October. The troops have done little to prevent the internecine killings and atrocities that continue, although they have managed to prevent the renewal of open warfare.
The French position began to unravel late last year. On December 27, insurgents ambushed a French patrol, but inflicted no casualties. On January 6 they tried again, managing to wound nine French soldiers in a clash that also left 30 rebels dead. After French President Jacques Chirac brought the parties to Paris and forged a tentative peace accord on January 24, anti-French rioting erupted in Abidjan, the country's largest city.
Rioters (incited behind the scenes by government agents) felt Chirac had “forced” Gbagbo to give away too much–including rebel control of the defense and interior ministries. They attacked a French school, broke the windows of French homes, burned French vehicles, and called for Chirac's death. At the same time, deadly street clashes between Christians and Muslims erupted throughout the country. Many French nationals fled. One official said those who remained were “virtual hostages,” and another described Ivory Coast as “another Vietnam.”
When Gbagbo finally tried on March 14 to formally launch the coalition government that was the centerpiece of the French deal, not a single rebel leader showed up. “There will be no compromises,” said rebel leader Felix Doh. “We are ready to die.” French forces on the ground appeared to be the only thing standing between the rebels and the capital, between anarchy and order.
“After this brief, cheerful message, we'll have more about man's inhumanity to man. …”
It is hard to imagine the French staying on if French troops or civilians are murdered. A rapid evacuation of the remaining French nationals would be more likely–the same kind of retreat that Washington carried out after 18 American soldiers were killed in Somalia in 1993. Decision-makers in Paris and the French public are unlikely to conclude that their country has sufficient vital interests at stake to warrant staying on. The Ivorians–and perhaps most especially the 5 million immigrants–would be left to their fate.
An alternative solution
But isn't there a universal interest in living in a world free of crimes against humanity? That vital interest is behind the proposal to create a standing, all-volunteer U.N. rapid deployment force (UNRDF), an idea first suggested by the first U.N. secretary-general, Trygve Lie. Its purpose, unlike that of national military forces, would be to protect common global interests, not to defend the citizens or interests of a particular state. Soldiers serving in such a force would explicitly state their willingness to protect the innocent in any country and volunteer to risk their lives serving humanity.
A UNRDF, as its name indicates, would deploy rapidly, avoiding the typical three-to-six-month delays of conventional U.N. peacekeeping missions. It could quickly create “safe areas” and secure humanitarian relief operations. It could arrest the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. And it might prevent the outbreak of conflict itself with a swift deployment before genocidal violence breaks out.
The very existence of such a force might serve as a deterrent, diminishing the possibility that disputes would erupt in violence in the first place. Today, local bullies act with impunity because they know that outside powers are unlikely to send forces to stop them. As Canadian scholar Peter Langille has written, this fosters a “culture of impunity, premised on the assumption that one can get away with mass murder … as long as the interests of the great powers are not challenged.”
Decision-making dilemmas
During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then-U.N. secretary-general, asked 19 countries to contribute troops to a U.N. force to go in and stop the carnage. All 19 countries turned him down. President Bill Clinton said of the dilemma: “We cannot dispatch our troops to solve every problem where our values are offended by human misery … we are prepared to defend ourselves and our fundamental interests when they are threatened.”
Yet, as the secretary-general has said, “I swear to you, we could have stopped the genocide in Rwanda with 400 paratroopers.”
According to a 1999 poll, 64 percent of Americans support the development of an international army.
If a U.N. rapid deployment force were available, with highly dedicated and well-trained volunteers in place and ready to go, it would free the American president from precisely the kind of agonizing choice that Clinton faced in 1994, when he was asked to risk American military casualties over something remote from American interests, or to do nothing as thousands of innocents were gruesomely slaughtered.
In the current moral universe it is simply taken for granted that not a single drop of American blood can be shed unless the United States has a sufficient stake in the conflict. Yet surely there are individual Americans who would volunteer when the United States does not. As Michael Kinsley asked while the Rwanda inferno was raging: “Why not … a permanent, volunteer expeditionary force explicitly committed to being available for service in humanitarian interventions where American national interest … is not necessarily paramount?”
An idea whose time has more than come
The idea of the UNRDF was elaborated in William Frye's seminal 1957 book, A United Nations Peace Force. Gov. Bill Clinton advanced the idea during his first presidential campaign in 1992, and former President Ronald Reagan endorsed it in a speech at Oxford University that same year, calling it a proposal for “an army of conscience.” The idea was expanded by Brian Urquhart in a landmark 1993 New York Review of Books article, “For a U.N. Volunteer Military Force.” One of the central recommendations of the Commission on Global Governance's 1995 report was the creation of “a highly trained U.N. volunteer force that is willing, if necessary, to take combat risks to break the cycle of violence.”
According to a 1999 poll, 64 percent of Americans support the development of a “truly international army that can be used in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Rwanda.” Another poll reported that 53 percent favor “a standing U.N. peacekeeping force made up of individuals who were not part of a national army but had volunteered to be part of the U.N. force.”
In the last Congress, two congressional Democrats, James McGovern of Virginia and Amo Houghton of New York, introduced House Resolution 938, the “U.N. Rapid Deployment Act,” co-sponsored by more than 50 members. This legislation has been pushed stubbornly for years by nongovernmental organizations like the World Federalist Association, the Campaign for U.N. Reform, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Refugees International, and the Council for a Livable World. It compares the present system to “a volunteer fire department that has to find fire engines and the funds to run them before starting to douse any flames.”
Obstacles
A number of practical questions would need to be satisfactorily answered before any such force could be established. How large should it be? How would it be trained? Where would it be stationed? How would it recruit? Where will the money come from in an already chronically underfunded United Nations?
Larger political questions emerge as well. Is the Security Council–where a veto by a single country can prevent the rest of the world from acting–the body to have the authority to dispatch the force? What should be the criteria for an intervention? Could we integrate UNRDF with non-coercive inducements–offering carrots as well as sticks to encourage good behavior and discourage bad? Is there a need for two kinds of forces–military units ready to use force to bring mass organized violence to an end, and a civilian police corps to maintain law and order afterward? And might the latter be the key to prevent the former from having to stay on indefinitely? What would happen if the UNRDF, engaged in combat, starts to lose? Would great power military forces have to go in to bail it out?
Practical necessity, moral imperative
None of these questions are inherently unanswerable. And if we fail to answer them, we can expect to see the same wearying scenario unfold repeatedly in the new century. Conflict erupts in the wake of a coup or an ethnic or religious civil war. Sophisticated Western forces zip in, evacuate their citizens, and zip out, leaving the local population to its fate.
A few years ago, two commercials repeatedly aired back-to-back during the NBA playoffs. The first was sponsored by Amnesty International, and featured celebrities reading passages from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The second was sponsored by the U.S. Army, and featured American soldiers swinging into action, with flashback images of various coaches and grade school teachers whom a new recruit could make proud. Both ads were moving and heroic in tone. And the two running sequentially, just possibly, might have led some viewers to conclude that they could put a stop to brutal human rights violations around the world by joining the U.S. Army.
But it is not the purpose of the U.S. Army to enforce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That army exists to protect the citizens and the interests of the United States. The prevention of crimes against humanity requires armed forces whose mission is to protect the interests of humanity.
“Everyone is afraid,” one terrified Ivorian woman said as the prodigious American war machine whisked Americans away to safety last fall. “We'd like to be helped too.”