UN: An internal UN report reflects the harsh reality of the new robustness of its peace-enforcing missions, writes Colum Lynch in New York
On July 6th, 1,400 heavily armed UN peacekeepers from Brazil, Peru and Jordan, backed by Argentine and Chilean helicopters, marched into a Haitian slum for an early morning raid on the home of Emmanuel "Dread" Wilme, a gang leader who was agitating for the return to power of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Operation Iron Fist killed Wilme and at least six other gang members, according to a confidential UN account of the raid.
But the bloody gun battle between the UN forces and Wilme's followers failed to dislodge the gang from its Port-au-Prince slum base and led to the injury of dozens of civilians, primarily women and children, according to UN officials and an American doctor who tended the wounded.
The 12-hour UN operation in Cité Soleil signalled an escalation of force in Haiti, where the Brazilian-led UN mission had been criticised for months by the United States and others for its failure to confront Haiti's armed gangs.
It also reflected a shift in tactics for UN peacekeeping troops, who by the mid-1990s were going out of their way to avoid combat. Now, the blue-helmeted troops are showing a renewed willingness to use considerable firepower against armed groups that they deem a threat to peace efforts.
"There has been a fundamental shift in peacekeeping that very few people have noticed, where UN peacekeepers are actually taking proactive, offensive pre-emptive action against threats," said Nancy Soderberg, a former US ambassador who oversaw UN peacekeeping for the US mission to the United Nations from 1997 to 2000. "The United States learned this when they invaded Haiti in 1994. Basically someone tried to attack them, they blew them away and that was the end of that."
The United Nations largely retreated from combat after the troubled UN operation in Somalia in the early 1990s, where a hunt for Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed contributed to 113 UN combat deaths and raised questions about the capacity of peacekeepers to quash even ill-equipped armed factions.
The confrontation also resulted in a disastrous US raid on an Aideed stronghold in Mogadishu that left 18 US soldiers dead and triggered a US pull-back from UN peacekeeping.
More recently, the United Nations has used more aggressive offensive tactics in Haiti, Congo, Sierra Leone and Liberia, where Irish troops are a robust rapid-reaction force. In Congo, UN troops supported by Indian-piloted attack helicopters killed more than 50 rebels in a single raid on a marketplace in March.
Such fighting has contributed to an increase in UN combat fatalities over the past two years. The death toll for UN peacekeepers increased from 64 deaths in 2003 to 91 in 2004. The count reached 64 in the first six months of this year. There have been 22 combat fatalities in Haiti and thee Democratic Republic of Congo, including nine Bangladeshi peacekeepers killed in February in an ambush in Ituri, DRC.
Ms Soderberg, a former Clinton aide with responsibility at one stage for the Irish peace process, is now a vice-president of the non-profit International Crisis Group, which, she says, has urged the Security Council to explicitly authorise peacekeepers in Congo to use force pre-emptively to counter possible threats from armed groups.
But she said the UN will have to balance such assertiveness against the potential for civilians to become caught in crossfire.
The UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti was established in April 2004 to maintain peace after a US military force withdrew.
US forces had gone to Haiti to restore peace after armed opponents of the government launched an insurrection against President Aristide. The US pressed Mr Aristide to flee into exile or face likely death at the hands of the insurgents.
Confronted with violent opposition from Aristide loyalists, the UN mission has stepped up its military tactics in recent months to ensure stability in advance of elections.
Operation Iron Fist began at 4.30am as an advance unit of Peruvian peacekeepers slipped into the neighbourhood of Bois Neuf in Cité Soleil to launch a surprise attack on Wilme's residence.
The force quickly encountered resistance from well-armed and well-trained followers of Wilme, who opened fire from three directions. The Peruvians responded forcefully, blasting 5,500 rounds of ammunition, grenades and mortars at Wilme's residence.
A Brazilian mechanised company providing perimeter security for the Peruvians, was attacked by 30 to 40 gang members. Wilme's fighters pinned the UN peacekeepers down for seven hours, targeting them with sniper fire and Molotov cocktails as they struggled to extract two armoured personnel carriers from the mud. Battling their way out, the Brazilians fired more than 16,700 rounds of ammunition in the densely-populated neighbourhood.
David Olson, an American doctor who recently served in Haiti with the French agency Médecins Sans Frontieres, said Operation Iron Fist caused "a lot of collateral damage".
Olson said 27 Haitians, mostly women and children, streamed into his clinic after the July 6th operation. Olson said he could not establish who was responsible for the injuries, but he said that up to half the victims claimed they had been wounded by the UN peacekeepers.
He said one woman in her 26th week of pregnancy suffered a bullet wound in her uterus that killed her baby. He recalled tending another woman who had been struck by a bullet that sliced through a wall in her home.
"I asked her who shot her and she said 'Minustah', a French acronym for the UN Stabilisation Mission. She was sitting in her house going about her day and got a bullet in the back."
The United Nations does not compile records on civilian deaths during peacekeeping operations, but the top peacekeeping official, Jean-Marie Guihenno of France, conceded: "there may have been some civilian casualties" during the raid.
"We have been looking very closely at those accusations," he said. There is no reliable estimate on the number of civilians or gang members who died during the operation.
A UN account of the operation concluded "the area remains under gang control. Security forces are still unable to enter into the inner areas of Cité Soleil or conduct foot patrols."
Still, Mr Guihenno said it was necessary to stand up to armed groups that threaten to undermine peacekeeping missions.
But he said UN commanders had to strike a balance between engaging in all-out warfare and resorting to the passive military posture that characterised UN operations in Srebrenica.
"You don't want any Srebrenica, and you don't want Mogadishu," he said.