UN Peacekeeping: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Here is a question for candidates vying to become the next United Nations chief: What will you do once taking charge of the world body’s problematic, largely ineffective peacekeeping forces? Candidates for the UN Secretary General role officially launched campaigns this week. Chile’s former president, Michelle Bachelet; the current International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, Rafael Grossi of Argentina; and a former vice president of Costa Rica, Rebecca Grynspan, presented their case to the General Assembly. All three are longtime insiders, perhaps too steeped in the UN’s way to change it. Whoever is selected in October will replace Secretary General Antonio Guterres next year. Diplomats and Turtle Bay officials almost uniformly tell the Sun that in less than a decade Mr. Guterres drove the UN to irrelevancy. Rather than “reform,” the next secretary general must find a way to “relaunch” the decaying institution, a former national security council official who oversaw international organizations in President Trump’s first administration, Hugh Dugan, tells the Sun. Peacekeeping is one area that stands to be rethought. A case in point: the 8,253-troop UN Interim Force in Lebanon. Americans and Israelis have long seen it as irrelevant and worse. Last year the UN Security Council agreed. Rather than automatically extend its mission, UNIFIL was ordered to dissolve by the end of 2026. But for now, as war rages, the troops deployed in southern Lebanon are still there — as cannon fodder. Over the weekend a French UNIFIL trooper was killed, leading to accusations of a war crime. President Emmanuel Macron of France accused Hezbollah of killing the peacekeepers. Bizarrely, the UN called on the terror organization to prosecute the perpetrator. “This is the third incident in recent weeks to have resulted in the deaths of peacekeepers serving in Lebanon,” Mr. Guterres gravely noted in an X posting. The UN could return its unprotected troops to UNIFIL’s Naqura headquarters, at least until major military operations quiet down. Instead, Mr. Guterres renders them sitting ducks — and claims that peacekeepers’ deaths are caused by the lack of peace. UNIFIL troops “are fulfilling their mandate,” Mr. Guterres’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, tells the Sun. “They will continue to do so. They’re also helping protect civilians. The safety and security of peacekeepers can be assured if the parties involved in this conflict decide to stop targeting them and attacking them.”Peacekeeping: Problematic from the startThe first peacekeeping operation, the UN Truce Supervision Organization, was established in May 1948 to oversee agreements between assailing Arab countries and the new state of Israel. It was charged with observing ceasefire lines drawn at the end of the war. That “green line” ceased to exist after Arab countries again tried to quash the young Jewish state in 1967.UNTSO nevertheless remains, stationed at Jerusalem with a mandate that hasn’t changed since 1948. Despite concerted efforts, mostly by several American ambassadors to the UN, several similar “zombie” missions with now-defunct mandates, continue to operate. Who benefits?“Somebody is making money,” Mr. Dugan, who runs an advisory firm, Multilateral Accountability Associates, tells the Sun. For countries that contribute peacekeepers, he adds, “it helps finance their forces back home, it keeps these guys trained, and it gets rid of some of their miscreants.”Countries that contribute UN troops are paid a monthly salary of $1,428 per soldier. That can pad some national budgets. Typically, poorer countries tend to keep their best military recruits at home while sending to the UN those who tend to be undisciplined or poorly trained.Peacekeepers are all too frequently accused of abusing locals in their areas of deployment. In several documented cases UN troops offered food to starved young girls in exchange for sexual favors. This year, a UN internal report detailed rape of children as young as 12-year-olds by Kenyan troops of a multinational force sent to quell gang violence in Haiti.Peacekeeping: The GoodDespite problems, the UN’s most powerful members, including America, deem the deployment of peacekeepers to danger zones a less expensive option than sending their own militaries there. The UN can help in war-plagued areas that are deemed less crucial to national security.Some UN peacekeeping missions in Africa — Namibia, Mozambique, Liberia, and Sierra Leone — are widely hailed as success stories. They helped end local skirmishes and civil wars. Unlike most UN peacekeepers, which are banned from using force other than for self defense, a force known as MONUSCO, is heavily armed. To maintain peace in Congo, it uses such advanced weapons as attack helicopters . UNIFIL: Diminished HopeInitially established in 1978, after Israel’s war to end the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s presence in Lebanon, UNIFIL’s mandate was beefed up after the 2006 Lebanon war. It was charged with assisting the Lebanese army to assert sole control over southern Lebanon and disarm Hezbollah. It was beefed up by European troops in an attempt to increase confidence in the peacekeepers’ abilities to fulfill the mission.During UNIFIL’s twenty years as a renewed force, Hezbollah amassed tens of thousands of rockets and missiles in an area that was supposed to be free of weapons. UNIFIL did little to prevent Hezbollah from digging tunnels for the purpose of invading northern Israel. All this while the peacekeepers were stationed right next to known Hezbollah posts. During the war of 2006, four UNIFIL-affiliated troops were killed in an Israeli air strike. One of the casualties, Hess-Von Krudener of Canada wrote to his former commander, Major General Lewis McKenzie right before his death. The Israeli strikes have not consisted of “deliberate targeting, but rather been due to tactical necessity,” Krudener wrote in the email, which was seen by the Sun.“What he was telling us was that Hezbollah fighters were all over his position, and the IDF were targeting them,” General McKenzie explained in a televised interview. Despite such evidence, and although errors are common in wars, Secretary General Kofi Annan immediately accused Israel of deliberately targeting the UN forces. In reality there was no reason for Annan to leave UN peacekeepers several feet from Hezbollah posts, and turn them into human shields for a terrorist group. Today, that lesson seems to have been lost on Mr. Guterres. Will his successor learn it?

UN Peacekeeping: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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