UN peacekeeping on the rise

Marching Orders
How Canada abandoned peacekeeping – and why the UN needs us now more than ever

UN peacekeeping on the rise

Did Canada make the right decision when it abandoned its United Nations peacekeeping commitments in favour of U.S. or NATO-led interventions?

In March, this report’s author debated the University of Calgary’s David Bercuson on CBC Radio’s The Current about the validity of UN peace operations. Bercuson said,

As far as UN-led operations, Steven [Staples], there just aren’t any left in the world today and you ought to really know that. These old Blue Helmet operations which our army stopped doing back in the early 90s, no one is doing them any more. And the reason they’re not doing them is because they’re not effective.23

In fact, the opposite is true. The UN is involved in more peacekeeping operations today than ever before, and even defence think tanks have found that they are effective – more effective than U.S.-led combat missions.

The United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations provides monthly reports on UN peacekeeping missions. The report from August 2006 documents 66,786 military personnel wearing blue helmets in 18 UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs), comprising 64,038 troops and 2,748 military observers.24

If peacekeeping is dead – as Bercuson asserts – what are these 66,786 soldiers doing?

According to the United Nations, 97 countries are contributing uniformed personnel to the peacekeeping mentioned above. But a handful of countries are providing the majority of boots on the ground: Bangladesh (10,156), Pakistan (9,820), India (9,279), Jordan (3,811) and Nepal (3,524) together account for 57 per cent of the more than 63,000 blue helmet troops.25

This level of activity is unmatched in the UN’s history. Of the 61 UN peacekeeping operations launched since 1948, one-quarter are under way today (18), and half of those have been launched since 2001 – mostly in Africa.

The truth is, the UN is running out of peacekeepers and simply can’t keep up with the demand.

The Annual Review of Global Peace Operations is published by New York University, and its editor, Bruce Jones, warns that a crisis is inevitable if more countries don’t contribute troops. “This year marks half a century since the United Nations launched its first large-scale peace operation – a deployment of troops to the Sinai desert during the Suez crisis. But 2006 also could mark a tipping point for the organization’s overstretched peacekeeping forces,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times in March.26

Jones argues that the international community is pushing the United Nations to take on a new strategic role without providing it with adequate resources, troops and materiel. And despite the frequent criticisms of the UN over the last decade, its operations are larger than the foreign military deployments of any country other than the United States.

From 1999 to 2005, the number of UN peacekeepers rocketed from 12,700 to 60,300, with mandates to deploy a record 90,000 Blue Helmets, according to the report.

And according to Jones, the need for troops will only grow in the future, raising the total number to well over 120,000 – especially since the UN recently authorized a 20,000-strong peacekeeping mission to relieve overstretched African Union troops in Darfur.

The United States supports this mission, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told an emergency meeting on Darfur recently, “If the notion of the responsibility to protect the weakest and most powerless among us is ever to be more than an empty promise, then we must take action to save lives.”27

If the new Darfur intervention goes forward, it will push the UN way beyond its previous peacekeeping peak in the early 1990s, when more than 80,000 troops served in more than a dozen international missions, including major operations in Cambodia, Bosnia and Somalia.

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