Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Intervention

Peacekeeping is often contrasted with other forms of U.N. involvement in military and political crises

around the world. There is the peace enforcement measure taken under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter,

involving the explicit use of force to pursue an agreed end, such as the Gulf War of 1990–91. Also, there

is peace-making, the active involvement of the U.N. in the search for a peaceful settlement, through

mediation and the use of good offices. Post-conflict peace-building, which involves action to identify and

support structures designed to strengthen and consolidate peace often started prior to the end of a conflict,

to hasten the establishment of peace on firm foundations. Undertakings such as the repatriation and

reintegration of refugees, mine clearance, and disarmament fall under the rubric of peace building.

There have been new horizons in the modalities of peacekeeping as the international community becomes

more embroiled in containing civil wars or other crises involving both domestic and international threats

to peace. This new tendency has been described in peacekeeping operations as robust peacekeeping,

cease-fire enforcement a forceful variant of the traditional peacekeeping.

Peacekeeping essentially attempts to overcome a coordination problem between two adversaries: the

peacekeeper seeks to ensure that both parties to a conflict understand the agreed-upon rules of the game

and that compliance with or deviation from these rules is made transparent. Enforcement, on the other

hand, in the international community, through escalating measures that threaten war-making and military

defeat, attempts to force an aggressor off its track. Strategically, the United Nation’s new domain

resembles a suasion game: because there is no clear-cut aggressor, U.N. forces, by presenting a credible

military threat, seek to convince all conflicting parties that violence will not succeed. International force

is brought to bear not to defeat but to neutralize the local forces. The military objective of the strategy

then is to deter, dissuade and deny.

Robust peacekeeping, or peacekeeping with credible and effective force, becomes especially relevant in

situations where peacekeepers are asked to provide humanitarian assistance in the face of opposition by a

warring faction seeking to use starvation or disease as instruments of war. Its relevance is even more

apparent when peacekeepers are called upon to intervene in the prevention of genocide, carnage, or other

acts of mayhem in the context of an ongoing civil war.

In the first crisis situation the provision of humanitarian assistance the peacekeepers will either have to

surrender their mandate or force their way into the theatre of conflict to deliver food, medical supplies,

and other forms of life-sustaining necessities. It is possible to advance a rather broad interpretation of

self-defense to include the authority of U.N. peacekeepers to open fire on hostile soldiers at a roadblock

bent on denying passage to a humanitarian convoy. However, local U.N. commanders, very much aware

of their organization’s institutional weakness, hardly attempt to live out this notion of self-defense. The

initial consent of the parties in conflict to the deployment of peacekeepers may even be withdrawn

completely, at least for a period of time. A historic example of this possibility is the withdrawal by then-

Egyptian President Nasser in May, 1967 of his country’s consent to the United Nations Emergency Force

(UNEF I) to deploy troops on its territory during the 1956 Egyptian-Israeli conflict.

Another examples of U.N. operations in Congo (Kinsasha) from 1960–64, and Somalia from 1992–95

illustrate the point that such operations may initially be deployed as traditional peacekeeping operations,

but could subsequently be transmuted into operations with authority to use force on a considerable scale

when it becomes clear that the traditional mode would not achieve the overall purpose of maintaining

peace and security. In the case of Somalia, the U.N. Secretary-General, after recognizing that traditional

peacekeeping could not effectively deal with the situation, compelled the Security Council to establish the

United Nations Task Force (UNISOM I or Task Force) led by the United States, whose assignment was to

build a more secure environment for humanitarian deliveries. A regular peacekeeping operation would

then take over after the military situation had been put under control. The Task Force was ineffective

because of the absence of the requisite degree of compulsion, as well as the presence of warlords in

control of various parts of the territory, which made it unworkable for the U.N. commanders to establish

an all-embracing agreement on the delivery of humanitarian assistance. Thus, the Security Council

subsequently had to establish a new U.N. force under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter (UNISOM II, 1993–

95) with the mandate to enforce secure conditions for humanitarian operations more effectively.

In the second crisis situation, involving attempts to stop atrocities such as genocide or mass killings, the

main postulate of traditional peacekeeping, namely, the deployment of non-lethal weapons in a posture of

self-defense, clearly becomes inapplicable. This was manifested most tragically in the inability of U.N.

forces to stop the massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs in Sebrenica in 1995. In both crisis

situations, the measures required carrying out the assigned tasks or to meet the expectations of the

international community could hardly be distinguished from forcible humanitarian intervention (T.

Ocran).

Humanitarian intervention has been defined as the justifiable use of force for the purpose of protecting the

inhabitants of another state from treatment so arbitrary and persistently abusive as to exceed the limits

within which the sovereign is presumed to act with reason and justice. It is also defined as dictatorial

interference by a state in the affairs of another state for the purpose of maintaining or ordering the actual

conditions of things. Humanitarian intervention does indeed take a variety of forms: material assistance

through relief, aid, or sanctions which consist of coercive, but nonmilitary pressure to end abusive

practices; and the dispatch of military forces to remedy massive human atrocities. It is the latter form that

is most forcefully challenged or contradicted in the current debate.

References

T. Modibo Ocran . A journal The doctrine of humanitarian intervention in light of Robust Peacekeeping