These factors also impacted the willingness of states and some regional organizations to undertake non-UN peace operations, especially in areas where the UN was unwilling to operate, notably in the former Soviet Union and parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
4.2 The nature of the transformation
Although rapid by historical standards, the transformation occurred over a number of years and in a relatively ad hoc fashion, whereby early successes encouraged heightened demand for more – and more complex – peace operations. Moreover, the normative and qualitative transformations came after the initial quantitative expansion, which saw established between 1988 and 1993 twenty-two UN-led and twelve non-UN peace operations, together with one UN-authorized mission (see Appendix).
Although the sheer number of new missions represented a transformation in its own right, it did not represent a straightforward, chronological transition between different generations of peacekeeping. Instead, the period experienced first a re-engagement and then a gradual expansion of peace operations conducted along similar lines to those during the Cold War and only then the emergence of a new type of operation in Somalia and Bosnia. Significantly, even these two missions began as relatively traditional types of operation but developed gradually into something wholly different to what had come before.
The first nine new UN operations, mandated between 1988 and 1991, represented a re-engagement with Cold War-style peacekeeping more than a radical transformation. The first five involved monitoring the withdrawal of foreign forces (UNGOMAP, UNAVEM I), monitoring a ceasefire (UNIIMOG) and supervising and overseeing a peace agreement (UNTAG, ONUCA). All but one – UNAVEM I in Angola – were concluded by 1991. Arguably the main signs of change were the relatively large civilian components in the missions in Namibia and Central Americas and ONUCA’s roles in election monitoring and disarming and demobilizing former rebels (Weiss et al. 1994: 61). All five of these missions were also broadly successful.
UNGOMAP successfully verified the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan (Birgisson 1993); UNIIMOG’s 400 observers helped cement what was originally a fragile peace between Iraq and Iran (Urquhart and Sick 1987); while the UN’s first attempt to build peace in Angola, UNAVEM I, was a modest contribution which sowed the seeds for a more active UN role, embodied in UNAVEM II (Fortna 1993). In Namibia, UNTAG stood out as the UN’s largest and most ambitious mission since ONUC in the 1960s yet succeeded in overseeing South Africa’s withdrawal and Namibia’s transition to independent statehood (Howard 2008: 52). Finally, ONUCA in Central America managed to reduce the cross-border supply of arms and fighters into Nicaragua and build confidence between the government of Nicaragua and the Contra rebels (Smith and Durch 1993). All this seemed to suggest that UN peace operations were capable of building peace and transforming war-torn societies in a wider range of circumstances than had hitherto (since ONUC) been thought possible.
Partly as a result of these early successes, the next couple of years saw a new raft of large and complex operations, perhaps most notably in Cambodia, Somalia and Bosnia. The first of these new types of mission, UNTAC, was deployed to manage the transition from war to peace in Cambodia; UNOSOM I was first used to monitor a ceasefire in Somalia and assist in the delivery of humanitarian assistance but was subsequently transformed into a much larger state-building enterprise; and UNPROFOR was initially sent to Croatia and Bosnia to supervise a ceasefire but was also repeatedly expanded. As we will discuss later, however, many of the additional tasks were grafted onto these missions in an ad hoc fashion without much in the way of strategic thinking about their overall function or doctrinal thinking about what was required to accomplish these goals. Meanwhile, the UN continued to deploy smaller traditional-style missions in Haiti (UNMIH), Liberia (UNOMIL), Rwanda/Uganda (UNOMUR) and Georgia (UNOMIG). These missions also saw a significant increase in the countries providing UN peacekeepers, with fortyone new states taking part between 1988 and 1993 (Findlay 1996: 3). Another twenty-one states became involved in non-UN missions during this time, most as part of either the US-led multinational force in Haiti (1994) or OSCE and CIS missions in the former Soviet Union (ibid.: 6).
This expansion of seemingly effective peace operations encouraged a shift in the normative expectations about what peacekeepers ought to do and a qualitative change in the tasks they were given. In short, it bolstered the post-Westphalian idea that the spread of democracy constituted the best path to global stable peace (e.g. Fukuyama 1989). A few years later, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1996: §15) recognized an ‘emerging consensus’ on the value of liberal democracy and a concomitant increase in the number of peace operations given election oversight tasks.
In early 1992, Boutros-Ghali established the new Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and released his important report An Agenda for Peace. Here, he concluded that UN missions had ‘brought a degree of stability to areas of tension around the world’ and that ‘the established principles and practices of peace-keeping have responded flexibly to new demands of recent times, and the basic conditions of success remain unchanged’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992: §§46, 50). To that end, he called for further areas of expansion, including more resources, arrangements for UN standby forces, the recruitment of more civilian personnel, especially police, more and better training, the prepositioning of logistical supplies to permit rapid deployment and avoid equipment shortfalls, and the provision of free-of-cost heavy lift capability (ibid.: §53–4). He also called for the creation of ‘peace enforcement units’ that should be kept entirely separate from and more heavily armed than peacekeeping units (ibid.: §44). Although it was an optimistic document, An Agenda for Peace issued a thinly veiled warning to UN member states that it was imperative that they back up their new mandates for larger and more complex peace operations with the requisite resources.
In summary, the transformation of peace operations at the end of the Cold War was gradual and ad hoc. It began with a re-engagement with small-scale traditional monitoring missions. When these proved effective, the Security Council began adding new tasks and expanding the remit given to other operations. Unfortunately, An Agenda for Peace did not spell out ways of reforming the UN to meet the challenge of managing these more complex operations. However, Boutros-Ghali did sound a warning: giving the UN more tasks without the requisite material or doctrinal resources was a recipe for disaster. This proved true in terrible fashion before the end of 1994.
4.3 Failures and retreat
As it turned out, the UN’s members did not provide peacekeepers with sufficient resources to accomplish the increasingly ambitious mandates authorized by the Security Council in environments where peace and ceasefire agreements were often precarious. This left those responsible for managing peace operations with an awful dilemma: whether to soldier on, making do with the limited resources, authority and political support, or advocate withdrawal. This is precisely how Boutros-Ghali (1994: §45) described the dilemma facing UNPROFOR in 1993: ‘the choice in Croatia is between continuing a mission that is clearly unable to fulfil its original mandate in full or withdrawing and risking a renewed war that would probably result in appeals for UNPROFOR to return to restore peace. Given such a choice, soldiering on in hope seems preferable to withdrawing in abdication.’
Although the UN received much of the blame for what happened in Angola, Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda – some of it rightly – its member states played crucial roles. It was member states, not the UN Secretariat, that crafted mandates and determined resources. Moreover, the bungled ‘Blackhawk Down’ operation in Mogadishu in October 1993 that marked the beginning of the end of UNOSOM II was conducted by US soldiers (not UN peacekeepers); the DPKO had warned the Security Council that without adequate resources the so-called safe areas in Bosnia would be vulnerable to attack; and the decision to stand aside during Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 was taken against the advice of the UN’s force commander on the ground. Nevertheless, it was these four missions that provide the crucial context for understanding the retreat from UN peace operations in the late 1990s.
The first signs of major UN failure came in Angola in 1992.