28th May 2000

The gang that couldn't shoot straight

The US news media, which are rarely sympathetic towards the world body, have lambasted the UN for fielding inept, ill-equipped and ill-trained soldiers in its various peacekeeping operations.

Even the communications equipment carried by some contingents in Sierra Leone were described as "substandard," while President Frederick Chiluba of Zambia complained last week that his troops were given outdated maps. But mercifully, the Zambian troops did not land in the wrong African country.

The American news media always had an apt description for the Italian mafia: the gang that couldn't shoot straight. The description may well apply to UN troops. The only thing the average UN soldier has not done so far is to shoot himself on the foot.

"We have never assumed responsibility for training peacekeeping troops," UN Spokesman Fred Eckhard admitted. "We expect the contributing governments to do that."

In Sierra Leone, some of the UN troops not only surrendered their weapons but were also stripped off their uniforms by a ruthlesss rebel group called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) whose speciality was to chop off the hands and legs of its enemies.

The UN troops in Sierra Leone are mostly from Zambia, Kenya, Jordan, Nigeria, Ghana, India and Bangladesh.

With Western powers refusing to risk their soldiers on UN operations, Annan has been forced to fall back on Third World soldiers.

What else can I do? asks Annan, who in effect, has told the world's major powers: You don't give me resources, you don't give me troops, you don't give me the staff — and still you want me to perform miracles.

The UN is blaming its misadventures largely on budgetary cuts, lack of trained staff and faulty equipment. "We are doing peacekeeping these days on a shoestring," Eckhard said.

The UN peacekeeping budget is floating in a sea of red ink. Member states owe a total of $1.54 billion dollars, of which $1.2 billion is owed by the United States. The UN, in turn, owes millions of dollars to troop-contributors both for equipment and soldiers. Eckhard said the UN's infrastructure to launch peacekeeping operations and sustain them was cut back throughout the mid-1990s. "Frankly, governments have not given us the strengths we need here at headquarters to do the kind of professional job we would like to do," he said.

"Our numbers have been reduced. Our budgets have been cut,: he said. This was also due to the fact that by the late 1990s, all UN peacekeeping missions were looking as they were winding down.

And then they created large missions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and East Timor, and they have now authorised a large one for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The UN, however, has to be credited with a few peacekeeping successes, including Namibia, Mozambique and El Salvador.

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Michael Maren, author of "The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity," said that Sierra Leone was the latest "humiliation" for the UN in a string of peacekeeping failures that include Somalia and Bosnia.

"It is sure to contribute anecdotes and ammunition to the critics in the US who regard the UN as useless and not worthy of our support," he said.

Maren, however, argued that either way, the effort to intervene in Sierra Leone's civil war, was doomed from the start.

"It was the product of wishful thinking on the part of Western countries, which have the world's best financed, armed and trained armies, but thought they could dispatch their commitment to peace in Africa by hiring under prepared Third World soldiers and putting them in blue helmets," he said.

Maren also pointed out that the Nigerians had earlier kept the peace in Sierra Leone, as they had also done earlier in Liberia, by being as "ruthless as the rebels they were against."

They earned the rebels' respect by playing their game. But this is not an option for the UN because it has to adhere to strict rules of engagement and scrutiny of the international media.

The failure of UN troops in Sierra Leone has once again revived the proposal for either a UN standing army of a UN rapid reaction force which will be battle-ready to move into war zones at short notice. But the US is strongly opposed to a UN army. In the alternative, Annan has appealed to countries such as the US, Britain, France and other Western nations to provide troops for a rapid reaction force.

Eckhard said that although the Secretary-General had consulted with several unidentified governments, no country has so far offered any military troops. A more potent military force is required in order to stabilise the situation in Sierra Leone, Eckhard said.

The presence of some well-armed British paratroopers, mainly to evacuate British nationals, did help defuse the situation in Sierra Leone, although they have not been involved in any skirmishes.

Meanwhile, the UN is throwing in more troops into Sierra Leone: the number of troops originally mandated by the Security Council was 11,000. Last week it was increased to 13,500, but it could eventually reach a hefty 16,000.