Problem Number Four

The war in Congo involves 9 African nations and has plunged much of central
Africa into chaos. Millions of people have been killed with no end to the
conflict in sight. On the scale of human misery it is a far greater catastrophe
than Kosovo at its historical worst or Iraq in the wildest fantasies of Noam
Chomsky. A backgrounder to the situation is provided by Global
Security:

The war began on 02 August 1998, when Laurent Kabila tried to expel Rwandan
military forces that had helped him overthrow Mobutu. ... and upon which the
Congolese Tutsis and the governments of Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi
all relied for protection from hostile nongovernmental armed groups operating
out of the eastern part of the country. These groups included:

* the Interahamwe militia of ethnic Hutus, mostly from Rwanda, which fought
the Tutsi-dominated Government of Rwanda;

* Hutu members of the former Rwandan Armed Forces, believed to be responsible
for the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, which also fought the Government of
Rwanda; * the Mai Mai, a loose association of traditional Congolese local
defense forces, which fought the influx of Rwandan immigrants;

* the Alliance of Democratic Forces (ADF), made of up Ugandan expatriates and
supported by the Government of Sudan, which fought the Government of Uganda;

* several groups of Hutus from Burundi fighting the Tutsi-dominated Government
of Burundi.

In the ensuing civil war, elements of the armed forces of Burundi, Rwanda,
and Uganda operated inside the country in support of the rebels; elements of
the armed forces of Angola, Chad, Namibia, and Zimbabwe operated inside the
country in support of the Government; and the nongovernmental armed groups
mentioned above operated inside the country on the side of the Government,
often as guerrillas inside RCD-occupied territory.

Since then, five 'peace agreements' have been brokered without result by the
UN and enforced by Blue Helmets -- which if the Economist is to be believed
arrived in a clown car. In an article provocatively titled Is
this the world's least effective UN peacekeeping force? they report:

The UN peacekeeping force in Congo (MONUC), the world's largest, is
supposed to be disarming these rebels, but has failed to neutralise them.
Indeed, since MONUC was first deployed to Congo in 1999, it has consistently
failed to keep anyone in the region safe. In two Congolese cities in 2002 and
2003, UN soldiers watched as hundreds of civilians were murdered outside their
bases. In May this year, they sat back as an unsavoury rebel chief seized
control of Bukavu, Congo's fourth city, despite the presence of a large and
well-armed MONUC garrison on the outskirts of town. The blue helmets could
easily have scattered the rebels, but the only shots they fired in anger that
week were at civilians demonstrating against their inaction. Three of the
protesters died. ...

Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the UN's unpopularity. Some
Congolese shake their fists or throw clumps of mud at passing UN patrols.
Three months ago, militiamen burned 17 people to death while a detachment of
MONUC troops 200 metres away, whose mandate authorised them to use force to
prevent such massacres, did nothing. �Is MONUC here to do anything apart
from count the bodies?� asked a Congolese witness.

MONUC's reputation has been damaged still further by revelations that some
peacekeepers have been sexually molesting Congolese children. In the latest
incident, a senior French civilian with the mission has been handed over to
authorities in Paris and the UN has launched an investigation which insiders
say will seek to discover whether MONUC has been penetrated by organised
paedophiles who recruit their friends. Last month, a mob in the eastern town
of Goma, apparently under the misapprehension that your correspondent was
connected to MONUC, smashed the windows of his car and tried to strangle him.
He escaped only by pulling a wad of dollars out of his sock and throwing it in
the air, and then driving off in the ensuing maul.

Some of these charges are grudgingly accepted by UN headquarters who argue
that although the Blue Helmets are useless they are really quite useful. What is
necessary is to make them larger so that even while they remain useless they may
also grow more useful.

MONUC's chiefs have argued that they do not have enough troops for the job.
They have a point. Though the UN Security Council has ordered the force to be
expanded from about 10,000 to 16,000, military experts guess it needs about
50,000. It won't get that. Why, then, is the UN in Congo at all? MONUC argues
that, though small, the mission serves as a deterrent. But whom does it deter?
The ragtag militias that effectively control the north-eastern region of Ituri
delight in taking potshots at peacekeeping units. Deterrence, argues Jim
Terrie of the International Crisis Group, a lobbying organisation, depends in
part on potential enemies' belief �that you will actually do something.
[But] there is very little belief that MONUC will do anything.� MONUC has
already indicated that it probably will not stop a Rwandan invasion. This may
be because Rwanda has signalled that it will make only a brief foray into
Congo to kill the rebels who threaten it, and then leave. But if so, that
would hardly satisfy the people of eastern Congo. ...

The International
Crisis Group, a nongovernment organization which lobbies governments to
adopt policies which it believes will lead to world peace makes a more
sophisticated version of this argument. They argue
that if UN Peacekeepers were given more power, training and military capability
they would cease to be inutile and take the crisis in hand. No peace can be
expected in the Congo unless "the Security Council takes seriously the
important recommendations Secretary General Kofi Annan has made for improving
MONUC ... MONUC should be at least doubled from its present 10,800". Other
recommendations by the International Crisis Group include:

• a stronger mandate that includes the authorization to respond robustly to
  any attack or threat of attack, including, if necessary, in a pre-emptive
  manner;


• improved command and control of military operations and better integration
  of military and civilian objectives;


• enhanced access to and/or embedded technical capabilities for intelligence
  and surveillance; and


• increased levels of better-trained and prepared troops.

If these proposals sound like the recent recommendations to 'reform' the UN
writ small, it is no coincidence. The high level panel constituted by Kofi Annan
to propose recommendations to rescue the World Body from the twin threats of
irrelevance and its inability to restrain the United States included Gareth
Evans, who is President and Chief Executive of the Brussels-based
International Crisis Group (ICG). Evans delivered an address called Shifting
Security Parameters in the 21st Century which contains nearly all of the
elements now being proposed to reform the UN. In this model the currrent threats
to world peace are:

1. international terrorist organizations


2. WMD proliferation


3. failed states


4. an out-of-control United States

But to address the first three, the first step is to solve problem number
four.

The more worrying phenomenon is the outright rage and hatred which U.S.
dominance is also generating, particularly concentrated in many parts of the
Arab and Islamic world. ... The U.S. can�t do anything to alter its size, or
much to moderate its relative clout, or anything to redress the disappearance
of the Soviet Union as a power balancer. ... But what one can ask of the U.S.,
like anyone else, is that it think carefully about what its national interests
actually are in this highly interdependent, globalised world we all now
occupy, and recognise that it is no longer sufficient to define them in terms
of security and economic benefits, both narrowly conceived. No country,
however big or powerful, can solve by itself all the problems that affect it,
whether the issue is terrorist violence, weapons proliferation, narcotics or
other organized crime, refugee flows, health pandemics or environmental
spillovers: the cooperation of others is essential, and that cooperation will
only in turn be won if there is a willingness to help others solve their
problems. In short, all of us, including the U.S. should think of national
interest not just in terms of traditional security and economic interests, but
as embracing a third element: the national interest in being, and being seen
to be, a good international citizen.

The key to arriving at the state where alles in ordnung is to get the
rogue United States to understand the necessity of rules and to accept who makes
the rules.

The Problem of Rules --  There has undoubtedly been a a growth of
cynicism and scepticism about the existence and bindingness of the
international rules governing the use of force. Under the guise of acting to
meet threats of one kind or another, states � and the U.S. in particular �
have been seen as making up rules as they go along, going to war when they
should not be, and not going to war when they should. ... The most urgent need
in the international security debate, from whatever point in the ideological
spectrum one approaches it, is to try to re-establish consensus about what the
basic rules, or principles, governing the use of force should be, and how they
should be applied in practice. I suggest that in all cases there is a basic
over-arching checklist of six principles, or criteria, that must be worked
through in determining whether it�s right to fight - applicable whether the
threat is external or internal; or whether the threat is constituted by armies
marching, by WMD acquisition, by terrorism, or by tribal machetes.

And since no single country "however big or powerful" can set forth
these rules that unlooked-for-task must fall to the tired shoulders of the
United Nations. That is why the ICG believes that MONUC should have the right to
use pre-emptive force while America is read the Riot Act. The ICG admits that
the rickety World Atlas is, in its present state, unlikely to lift a soup spoon,
but like MONUC in the Congo, there is nothing that a few steroids paid for by
its richer members won't cure. Evans goes straight to core recommendation that
was eventually adopted by the reform panel: increasing the size and power of the
Security Council.

United Nations. Secretary General Kofi Annan last year is just one of the
many who have argued that UN institutional architecture is badly out of date
and desperately needs reform � designed as it was for its original
membership of 51 states, not its current 191, and reflecting in the
composition and powers of the Security Council the power balances of 1945, not
the world of 2003. The decisions of the Security Council, he said, �increasingly�lack
legitimacy in the eyes of the developing world, which feels that its views and
interests are insufficiently represented among the decision-takers.� And he
has now appointed a High Level Panel � on which I have the pleasure of
sitting along with, among others, Amre Moussa - to come up with answers on
this and related issues.

But Evans and the International Crisis Group are wrong. The key problem
facing the United Nations is lack of accountability not to its constituent
institutions, though it lacks that, but to the individual inhabitants of the
world. Its inefficiency, corruption and fantasy policies are the result and not
the cause of its problems. Nowhere is that failure more evident on a macro scale
than in Kofi Annan himself and his management of the Oil-For-Food Programme.
That difference shows up at all levels, even in the micro scale. David
Ignatius, writing from Kuwait, describes how men fighting for their lives,
given the freedom, can find the means to do it.

When a nationwide insurgency (in Iraq) exploded in April, the roads turned
deadly. The reservists quickly became combat veterans, and the frightened
civilian drivers were replaced by civilian recruits who understood the
dangers. Capt. George Petropoulos, an ex-cop from Milwaukee, arrived around
the time of the April insurgency. He immediately started doodling with designs
for improvised armor for the Army's 16-wheelers. He showed how the armor could
be fabricated from locally bought steel, at a cost of about $1,600 a truck.
Army mechanics bolted steel plates on trucks as fast as they could, and now
many of them have what Petropoulos calls his "feel-good armor." The
Army bungled initially by sending only 900 armored Humvees to Iraq, but here,
too, there was a process of adaptation. Thousands of improvised armor kits
were rushed to the war zone, and the Army is working round-the-clock to harden
the vehicles. U.S. officials say there are now about 15,000 armored Humvees in
Iraq, with more on the way every day.

This can be contrasted to the problem-solving skills of MONUC as described by
the Economist.

Morale among the blue helmets is not high. Many regard their posting to
Congo as the height of misfortune. Some are ashamed to be part of such an
indolent force. During massacres in Ituri's main town of Bunia last year, some
Uruguayan peacekeepers suffered nervous breakdowns after watching atrocities
they had been ordered not to prevent. One reportedly told his psychiatrist
that goats were talking to him. When asked what they were saying, he replied,
�They're shouting: �Help me! Help me!'�

That's basically the message of UN reform proposals: "Help me! Help
me!"