The Progressive ResponseVolume 4, Number 34
Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)
Table of ContentsI. Around the WorldBy Tom Barry II. Updates and OuttakesUN PEACEKEEPING: AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE REAL REFORM AT THE UN
III. Letters & CommentsCRIMES AND MALICE IN THE HORN OF AFRICA
I. Around the WorldBy Tom Barry Nine years after she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent political opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi is still “provoking” the military regime in Burma. When Suu Kyi and other members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) attempted to travel outside the capital city of Yangoon, the police blocked their way. Refusing to obey an order to return, the opposition group camped out in two vehicles— maneuver that the foreign minister says is aimed to provoke the military regime into “severe action.” This week Secretary of State Madeline Albright joined the international chorus of world leaders condemning the military junta’s recent repression of the NLD opposition. When defending U.S. unilateral military operations, such as the bombing of Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Albright has been quick to note that the U.S. is the “indispensable nation”—that we “see farther into the future” because America “stands tall.” There is little argument that the United States is indeed the world’s most powerful nation and that its involvement is indeed “indispensable” to the successful resolution of most international crises. Rather it is the moral stature of America that is dubious. In the case of Burma, the indispensable leadership has not been forthcoming. It has not stood tall. Despite its considerable influence with Thailand, the U.S. has not pressured Thailand to adopt a more liberal refugee policy that would address the severe humanitarian crisis on its border with Burma. Instead, refugees from the military junta’s political repression and its system of slave labor have been turned away or denied refugee assistance. Washington does correctly support dialog between the military junta, the NLD political opposition, and Burmese ethnic leaders—but it has not exercised the global leadership or used its economic leverage to promote such a tripartite dialog. As a forthcoming FPIF policy brief by Phil Robertson argues, “The U.S. should call a session of the UN Security Council to pass a resolution condemning Burma’s continued failure to transfer power to the winners of the 1990 election.” Furthermore, “The U.S. must hold the line as a consistent supporter of the restoration of democratic rule, based on the 1990 election. Without U.S. influence in the international community, promoting a comprehensive policy of economic pressure and political persuasion to push for final political status negotiations, the SPDC [ruling military junta] may continue its record of world-class human rights abuse and repression for many more years.” (Robertson, the author of several FPIF policy briefs, currently serves as the Representative for Mainland Southeast Asia at American Center for International Labor Solidarity in Thailand.) It’s clear that the U.S. is willing to exert leadership when U.S. national security and national interests are deemed to be at stake. But its unwillingness to stand tall in cases like Burma bolster the widely held opinion that the U.S. is a moral midget that sees no farther than its own narrowly conceived interests. Colombia: “Make Peace, Not War” Upon arriving in the seaside resort of Cartagena, President Clinton observed: “This is not Vietnam, nor is it Yankee imperialism." In Colombia, Clinton faces a moral dilemma—one that extends beyond his personal affairs to the affairs of this nation he leads. Instead of acknowledging the complicated, embarrassing, incriminating truth of America's involvement in Colombia, he continues to mislead the American public. Colombia is not Vietnam, but the similarities cannot be dismissed. It’s unlikely that thousands of U.S. troops will ever be deployed in the jungle strongholds of the FARC guerrillas, but, just as in Vietnam, U.S. military and police trainers are on the ground (and in the air) in Colombia. And Americans are being led to believe that this “technical assistance” and a $1 billion military aid package are fundamental to protecting democracy. In Vietnam, the good fight that America waged was against international communism. In Colombia, it is against the international drug lords. In both cases, Washington judged that U.S. involvement was necessary to crush the menace emerging from third world jungles. In both cases, the U.S. government opted to mislead the American public about the true character of U.S. interventionism. That defining character is imperialism. We can thank Clinton for bringing back that term into the contemporary political debate. During the Vietnam war, the debate over whether the U.S. was an imperialist power raged across America—from the protests on the streets to the college classrooms to the halls of Congress. It seems that the last time that talk of imperialism entered the public realm was when President Reagan condemned the Soviet Union’s “Evil Empire.” Lately, discussion about the international political economy mostly revolves around whether the New Economy is real and whether the U.S. is indeed the “indispensable power.” But no talk of empire or imperial interests. More straight talk is needed. According to Clinton, escalating U.S. involvement has only one objective: to eliminate “the cancer of narcotrafficking.” Clinton attempted to assure Colombians and Americans alike when he said, “We have no military objective. We support the peace process.” As if the U.S. was no longer concerned about leftist insurgencies like that of the FARC, which is now commonly regarded as perhaps the most powerful internal force in Colombia. The war on drugs cannot alone explain why the U.S. is sending 60 Black Hawk and Huey helicopters to this conflicted nation. Writing in the “Boston Globe,” a Colombian journalist said that Clinton’s denial of a military objective “flies in the face of common sense….Can any informed person really believe this?” More clarity about what’s really happening in Colombia comes from General Fernando Tapias, commander of Colombia's army, who said: “There will be peace. But first there will be war.” There is no one explanation of why the U.S. has elected to join the fracas in Colombia, just as there was no one reason to explain U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Clearly, the U.S. is indeed concerned about the continuing flow of cocaine from Colombia into U.S. society. Washington is also increasingly worried about political instability sweeping through Latin America. If the civil war continues, there is also fear that it may extend beyond Colombia’s borders, involving neighboring nations in a cycle of violence that will undermine economic stability in Latin America. As economic polarization deepens in the region and poverty spreads, there is also an underlying concern that the type of revolutionary prescriptions offered by the FARC may once again gain a hearing among the region’s peasants, students, and underclasses. The strategic mix is different this time around. But U.S. involvement in Colombia is just as ill-conceived as it was in Vietnam—and just as likely to intensify the bloodshed of the civil war. It is not the imperialism of the Gunboat Diplomacy era, nor the empire-building of the cold war. But it is the imperialism of a regional and global hegemon that is more inclined to warmaking than to peacemaking. (Around the World is a weekly column of news and commentary by Tom Barry, FPIF’s codirector.)
II. Updates and OuttakesUN PEACEKEEPING: AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
United Nations peacekeeping is yet again at a crossroads: it may finally succeed in establishing itself as the preeminent force for conflict prevention and peace, or it could continue operating with a severe mismatch of mandates and resources. Which option will materialize depends on the policies of UN member states, particularly those of the United States. Following a brief but stellar rise, UN peacekeeping virtually collapsed in the mid-to-late 1990s. Operations undertaken by the “blue helmets” in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda were widely considered to have ended in failure, eclipsing successes in Nicaragua, Mozambique, Namibia, and Eastern Slavonia/Croatia. Right-wing Republicans in the U.S. Congress eagerly heaped blame on the organization and cultivated the view that it was not to be entrusted with challenging missions. But what seemed like a moribund organization has reemerged as a beehive of activity. In the last two years, the UN has taken on several new challenging missions in different parts of the world. The peacekeeping budgets and the number of people involved in the missions reflect this rollercoaster development. From peak expenditure levels of about $3.5 billion per year in the mid-1990s, expenditures dropped to a low of $838 million in the July 1998-June 1999 budget year. But then, appropriations for July 1999-June 2000 doubled to $1.6 billion and are now projected to top $2.2 billion for July 2000-June 2001. The number of troops, observers, and civilian police peaked at almost 80,000 in the mid-1990s, falling to 12,000 in 1999. Rising again, peacekeepers totaled 37,000 in August 2000 (in addition to about 11,700 civilian personnel). Four missions initiated in 1999 and 2000 precipitated this latest upswing. They are the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL); the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET); the UN Observer Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC); and the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). The UN Security Council has authorized 13,000 peacekeepers for Sierra Leone (and Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked for an increase to 20,500 in August 2000), 10,790 in East Timor, 5,537 in the Congo, and 4,756 in Kosovo. (The fragility of a peace accord in the Congo casts doubts on when, if ever, the UN mission will be deployed; only about 260 observers have thus far been dispatched.) Further increases will come as an existing mission in southern Lebanon is bolstered from 5,000 to 8,000 troops and as a new observer force monitoring a cease-fire between Ethiopia and Eritrea grows to an expected strength of about 4,200. The challenges inherent in these new missions are manifold. For example, UNAMSIL was created in October 1999 to oversee a peace agreement between the weak government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a brutal force that imposes its will through massacres and mutilations. But the agreement was revealed as a sham when RUF forces, unwilling to disarm or relinquish their control over lucrative diamond smuggling operations, ambushed UN peacekeepers in May 2000 and reignited the fighting. The Security Council’s preference for “peacekeeping on the cheap”—having dispatched an undersized, ill-equipped, and ill-trained peacekeeping force—nearly resulted in an embarrassing failure. The Council only belatedly moved to reinforce the peacekeeping contingent, and the United States decided to train several thousand West African soldiers to augment the UN mission. It remains to be seen whether these efforts will bear fruit. The challenge posed by these new missions is aggravated both by the continued ad hoc nature of UN peacekeeping and by the organization’s financial crisis. When there is success, it is taken for granted. But in the event of setbacks, members of Congress and other UN critics unfailingly rush to condemn the world body as hopelessly ineffective. The UN’s revival is tenuous at best. Toward a New U.S. Policy on UN Peacekeeping First and foremost, the United States needs to pay off its legally owed arrears quickly and without the crippling conditions that Congress now routinely attaches. New assessments need to be paid in full and on time. Peacekeeping cannot succeed on a shoestring budget. Even an adequately funded UN peacekeeping system is a bargain compared with annual U.S. military budgets of $300 billion or more. The United States has long opposed the creation of any permanent UN peacekeeping force, considering it an unwanted appendage. However, experience suggests the need for a robust, versatile system that can be available to accomplish a broad variety of delicate tasks in time to make a difference. For that purpose, it would be sensible to establish several different tiers or branches within a larger, permanent peacekeeping structure, staffed by well-trained, well-coordinated, and experienced volunteers. These tiers could cover the range of specialized activities found in most UN peacekeeping missions, which are currently ad hoc in manner. They could include military observers, to help hostile armies disengage and to patrol cease-fire lines; specialists in disarming and demobilizing former combatants; civilian police, to help reestablish order after a civil war ends; a roster of legal and administrative personnel; human rights observers; demining experts; specialists in electoral assistance; and others. The UN also needs better early-warning capacity and a strengthened conflict-prevention capability. But consideration should eventually be given to a more controversial idea: the establishment of a rapid intervention force that is able to provide protection for civilians under assault, perhaps by setting up "safe zones" secure enough to prevent the mass killings that occurred in the ad hoc safe zones in Bosnia. Such a force could be relatively small (perhaps in the range of 5,000 to 10,000) but should be backed up by specially trained national forces. By prior arrangement, such forces would need to be designated in advance by their governments and quickly released for UN duty, once a Security Council resolution determined a need for them. Greater care is needed in training and preparing peacekeeping personnel for the specific challenges awaiting them. Soldiers trained for combat duty cannot be expected to be proficient in the delicate tasks of defusing conflicts and patrolling tense civilian areas. The UN needs to ensure that peacekeepers can be transported quickly to their deployment areas and that they have ready access to equipment commensurate with their tasks. Last, but not least, the personnel strength, contingency planning capacities, and communications infrastructure at UN headquarters in New York need to be substantially scaled up and supplemented by a mobile command headquarters. Currently, there are only 32 UN officers providing planning and guidance to almost 30,000 troops and only nine UN staff for about 8,600 civilian police in the field. Some of these ideas exceed what current political realities permit. But for starters, the recommendations issued by an independent "Panel on UN Peace Operations" in August 2000 would help reduce the ad hoc character of UN peacekeeping, eliminate many of the arbitrary limitations of the current system, and give the UN a greater chance at succeeding in complex peace missions. If permitting the UN to establish a permanent peacekeeping structure is more than Washington or other UN members states can currently stomach, then they could at least implement the panel's suggestion to set up national pools of experienced personnel, to be made available at the UN's request. The initial U.S. reaction to the panel's report was positive, though it remains to be seen how much U.S. policy will actually change. Fundamentally, the United States needs to decide whether it wants multilateral peacekeeping to be a serious option. On the one hand, Washington wants to retain the ability to act unilaterally. On the other hand, it does not want to be dragged into conflicts that it judges insignificant or too messy to resolve, like those in Rwanda, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and the Congo. It wants the UN to be available for such purposes and to serve as a convenient scapegoat when things go wrong. The broader—and more troubling—context is that Washington does not want to be bound by the very rules governing international conduct that it urges others to respect. U.S. policy toward UN peacekeeping bears the tell-tale signs of an exceptionalism that rejects common, reciprocal obligations. The struggle over peacekeeping policy is also a struggle involving the legitimacy of international law and institutions. Both struggles hinge on cooperatively reconciling the contradictions of national sovereignty in a globalizing world. (Michael Renner <mrenner@peconic.net> is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute.)
Sources for More InformationCenter for Defense Information Council for a Livable World Education Fund Project Global Policy Forum International Peace Academy Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Center United Nations Association of the United States (UNA-USA) UNA-USA Washington Office UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations United Nations—Peace and Security Section UN Security Council UN Security Council Documents U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Organization Affairs
REAL REFORM AT THE UN Few Americans would dispute that the United Nations plays a crucial role in saving lives, protecting children, and improving health of people around the world. Despite years of UN-bashing in Washington, the global organization remains one of the most popular institutions among U.S. voters. At the end of the cold war, the U.S. used the UN to provide a multilateral coalition framework to legitimize the essentially unilateral anti-Iraq mobilization of Desert Storm. As other post-cold war conflicts erupted in the early and mid-1990s, the UN was assigned peacekeeping tasks, in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere—largely in the impoverished global South. The U.S. and its allies refused to provide the financial, military, and strategic backing required to implement these mandates. When these missions failed, the UN, rather than Washington and the other major powers, was blamed. The UN shifted from instrument of U.S. foreign policy to scapegoat for U.S. policy failures. By President Clinton’s second term, in 1997, the largely rhetorical White House support for the UN dropped dramatically. The election of the U.S.-backed Kofi Annan as UN secretary-general, replacing the U.S.-excoriated Boutros Boutros-Ghali, improved only the atmospherics, not the substance of U.S.-UN relations. The Clinton administration, while claiming to support payment of the debt, did little to mobilize popular support for the UN, and Clinton himself never used his presidential persuasiveness to urge popular involvement. Dues continued to be withheld, and the U.S. arrears stayed at about $1.6 billion--well over half the total debt of the severely strapped UN. In Congress, Senator Jesse Helms’ control of the Foreign Relations Committee brought new attacks on the UN and calls for U.S. unilateralism. Helms escalated his calls for UN reform, thinly veiled attacks on the organization itself. By the end of the decade, when the festering Kosovo crisis loomed in the Balkans, Washington openly bypassed the UN altogether, anointing NATO instead as simultaneous legitimator and implementor of war against Yugoslavia. The U.S. sidelining of the Security Council in NATO’s decision to go to war in Yugoslavia in early 1999 was a major blow to the UN’s credibility. Clinton’s multilateralism was history. Peaking with the spring 1999 Kosovo crisis, the UN was largely sidelined from U.S. strategic considerations. In Iraq, the U.S. maintained the fiction that the crippling economic sanctions first imposed in 1990 really represented a UN consensus, but the decisionmaking remained in Washington. New crises--in Sierra Leone, East Timor, and Congo--brought a resumption of UN peacekeeping activity, and new criticisms of the U.S. for its failure to pull its own weight. When the biggest UN Blue Helmet operations in years were fielded in East Timor and Sierra Leone in 1999 and 2000, Washington refused even to consider sending troops and had to be prodded even to provide minimal airlift assistance. The U.S. still opposes creation of the UN Charter-mandated standing force that could provide emergency deployment capacity of UN-accountable Blue Helmets under the control of the secretary-general. And it has refused to provide the strategic, financial, and political backing for creation of a powerful new Department of Preventive Diplomacy at the UN, to provide nonmilitary responses to emerging crises. The growing UN financial crisis and demands by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the UN enlarge its ties with the private sector as a quid pro quo for paying U.S. dues have been met with a growing pool of UN and UN agency “partnerships” with transnational corporations. This trend began with CNN mogul Ted Turner’s gift of $1 billion to UN programs and escalated to Annan’s 1999 call for a “Global Compact” between the UN and transnational corporations. Such UN “partnerships” paralyze the UN’s ability to help galvanize international opposition to corporate ravaging of economies, human rights, and the environment of the global South and threaten to provide a UN imprimatur, or “blue-washing,” of otherwise pariah corporations. International initiatives, fostered by shifting coalitions within the UN and by transnational social movements, are transforming and empowering international law. They include the International Criminal Court, the convention against antipersonnel landmines, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and more. The U.S. has refused to endorse any of them. The role of the UN is virtually absent from the 2000 election campaign. In brief references, Republican George W. Bush said U.S. dues to the UN should be paid “only if the UN’s bureaucracy is reformed” and only if Washington’s “disproportionate share” of UN dues is reduced. Vice President Al Gore called for full payment of UN dues. The UN faces a serious economic crisis, caused primarily by Washington’s refusal to pay $1.6 billion in back dues. The debt has led to financial uncertainty in important UN program areas (development, health, and human rights) and has stimulated global hostility toward--and loss of diplomatic influence by--the United States. The U.S. is the only nation that conditions its UN Charter-required dues on UN fulfillment of unilaterally determined “reform” demands. There is no question that reform--real reform--is required. The UN has long-standing problems involving lack of transparency in decisionmaking, undemocratic abuses of power, and more. Organizational and bureaucratic problems exist as well. The secretary-general’s 1997 reform program called for dramatic changes in management, human and financial resources, information and outreach, core activities, and more. The 2000 Millennium Assembly provides a good opportunity to revisit the UN policy of the United States--a policy that has increasingly undermined multilateralism as a framework of resolving international peace and security issues. As long as Washington continues to support the UN only on a tactical, instrumentalist basis, the organization’s true importance as a global entity will continue to erode. (Phyllis Bennis <pbennis@compuserve.com> is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN.)
III. Letters and CommentsCRIMES AND MALICE IN THE HORN OF AFRICA
As I write this at the end of August, 2000, in the tiny African country of Eritrea, population 3½ million, almost one-half (47%) of the people are refugees, many with little or no shelter. Of these, almost half are children under the age of 5. An invasion by Ethiopia, population 60 million, caused this calamity, now taking place in the middle of the rainy season, with that infamous baby killer, malaria, beginning its grim harvest. Over 1½ million Eritreans, whose homes, businesses, and farms (those which have not been looted or destroyed) are now part of Ethiopian-occupied Eritrea. Or what is almost as bad, within artillery range of the Ethiopian army. If this isn’t depressing enough, every day seems to bring postings about Eritrean refugees with new reports of killings, rapes, and wanton destruction by the Ethiopian army in occupied Eritrea. Every morning’s email seems to bring more reports of the continuing ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, as Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean ancestry are arbitrarily arrested and deported by the ethnic minority Tigrayan regime in power. Last week saw the abandonment of the recent U.S. policy of depraved indifference for one of breathtaking prevarication, throwing U.S. support behind claims of ethnic cleansing, except this time the evil doer is... Eritrea? Yes, the U.S. has once again turned reality upside down, condemning “the dangerous and uncoordinated manner in which civilians detained by Eritrea are being deported or repatriated to Ethiopia...,” echoing the Ethiopian regime’s fabrications “that its nationals in Eritrea were being persecuted in the aftermath of war between the two countries” and warned of serious consequences unless the abuses stopped. Finishing their declaration with the BIG LIE, the Ethiopians stated: “In the light of the foregoing, Ethiopia appeals for the last time to the international community to save Ethiopians from a regime [Eritrea] that is committing war crimes in this day and age against innocent and unprotected civilians." The Ethiopians have confidence in the western press not challenging any of this horse manure. With the likes of Patrick Gilkes, Peter Biles, and Nitta Bhalla reporting from Addis Ababa for the BBC African Service, eagerly parroting Ethiopian claims as credible, why should they worry? Why question the word of Ethiopian P.M. Meles Zenawi? The man who, when questioned about what reason he had for the deportation of his own citizens, said, “If we don't like the color of your eyes we can deport you”--all 72,000 and counting? Some ask if the Eritreans are mistreating the Ethiopians in Eritrea? My answer is: Don't ask me, ask Amnesty International, International Committee for the Red Cross, World Food Program, Save the Children, and others. They have all admitted that the Eritreans are doing as much as can be expected for internally displaced Ethiopians in Eritrea in the face of enormous difficulties, what with half their population being refugees. Should we be viewing these increasingly strident war drums as the prelude to another invasion attempt of Eritrea by Ethiopia? What else could explain this sudden blast of aggression by Ethiopia and the support for it by the United States? Why would Ethiopia want to continue this war by invasion, especially considering how desperate things are in Ethiopia? With the latest news from Addis Ababa reporting 16-hour power cuts every three days--this from the “Ethiopian Monitor” of Aug. 15. The economic and social situation in Ethiopia today is in shambles. People are finding it hard to make both ends meet. As the economy crumbles in the capital, famine continues to stalk over 10 million Ethiopians in the countryside, with the rains coming for many too little too late. The next crops’ seeds are already a memory, eaten weeks ago. Why is the U.S. continuing to support this latest round of insanity by an Ethiopian regime? To put it simply: 1) Eritrea, born after thirty years of armed struggle, one of the smallest, resource-poor countries in Africa, is the only country in Africa not in debt to/under economic control by the IMF or World Bank, and 2) Eritrea, until the Ethiopian invasion, had the fastest growing economy in Africa. Eritrea is a role model of revolutionary independence and self-sufficiency, and as such is a threat to the system of neocolonialism which dominates Africa (and much of the rest of the world) so ruthlessly. Once the people in the rest of Africa, and other parts of the world, begin to find out about this Little Country that Could, what is to stop them from challenging the status quo in their own backyard? If Eritrea can do it, what is holding South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, or even Mexico back? The U.S.A. has never hesitated to crush upstart countries before, why should the leopard change its spots now? Especially a country of such proud, strong BLACK people like Eritrea. The bottom line is “show me the money,” and I will show you who is behind this invasion. Reports dating to June 26 (in “Africa Analysis”) tell of the diversion of U.S. aid to Ethiopia to arms purchases from Russia and the Ukraine to the tune of $300 million. The investigation of this money trail leads to an international labyrinth. One thing is clear, and that is Ethiopia has spent at least $1 billion on the invasion of Eritrea since the beginning of 1999 and she didn't get that amount of cash selling coffee. History is full of criminal acts of aggression committed by regimes desperate to divert domestic discontent by attacking an external enemy. In this case, Ethiopia is a willing proxy, whose crimes are made possible by the money and support of the world’s only superpower, the USA. - Thomas Mountain <brotom@lava.net>
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