UNITED NATIONS’ military operations may have reached their limits, with the two largest peacekeeping operations stretched to breaking point in the past year, the organisation’s chief peacekeeper warns in a report to be published today.
The warning from Alain Le Roy, under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations, appears in a forward to the annual peacekeeping survey of the New York-based Centre on International Co-operation.
It comes a year after the centre’s last review criticised the security council for authorising new global peacekeeping missions in spite of warnings that demands on troop contributors were overtaking their ability to deliver.
The UN is responsible for 18 peace missions worldwide that deploy 112,000 uniformed personnel at the cost of almost $8 billion (€6 billion) a year. “UN peacekeeping is now at an all-time high,” according to Mr Le Roy.
In the light of the near-collapse last October of the peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of Congo, the UN’s largest, the security council has finally taken note.
France and the UK have launched a review on how best to fix a system that one diplomat at the UN described as “breaking at the seams”.
The crisis was highlighted during a rebel offensive in eastern Congo in October, when protesters stoned a UN compound over the alleged failure of peacekeepers to halt the rebel advance.
National units of the UN force refused to deploy without orders from their own officers. Lieut-Gen Vicente Díaz de Villegas of Spain quit after only three weeks in command of the UN force. Defending his decision not to put forces under his command at risk, he said: “There was no assessment of the risks and threats . . . There was no plan for intelligence gathering and no reserves.”
Mr Le Roy acknowledges that in Congo and in Sudan’s Darfur province “UN peacekeepers found themselves in dangerous and violent situations that stretched their ability to function to the very breaking point.” The centre’s report warns of “the steady blurring of the lines between peacekeeping and war fighting”.
It notes that developed countries were reluctant to commit their forces.
A majority of UN peacekeepers still comes from developing countries, notably Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, while developed world peacekeepers are deployed principally in non-UN missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans.
The review sponsored by France and the UK will look in part at whether UN forces can be scaled back in territories where they have served their purpose.
In an era of financial stringency, it was unlikely that funding states would agree to increase global expenditure.
The economic pressures were highlighted this month when Poland announced it was pulling out of UN missions in Chad, Lebanon and the Golan Heights, in part because of spending cuts.