by Kofi Annan
For the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, at first, the consequences of this change were significant, but manageable. Before 1988, only a dozen peacekeeping operations were launched in all of the UN’s forty-three years. But in the brief period between 1988 and 1992, the Council created another ten. The Council was now able to agree, in a way that they had not been able to before, on its response to crises suitable for the intervention of peacekeepers. UN peacekeepers were now deployed, for example, to monitor cease-fires between Iraq and Iran, to supervise the political transition in Nicaragua and the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, as well as other operations elsewhere.
What then followed from 1992 was an explosion in operations. This was driven not by a peacekeeping mission but by Operation Desert Storm. In response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the Council, in complete unity, passed a resolution mandating the full use of military force as provided for under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. This led to the deployment of 956,600 men and women from 34 countries, resulting in the successful liberation of Kuwait in 1991. It was a UN-authorized, U.S.-led coalition that reversed an overt act of war and conquest by one member state against another—precisely the task for which the UN had been founded.
The full potency of this new and active Security Council was now exposed, stirring a desire among the Council’s members to sustain the Council’s central importance in world affairs. As a result, in January 1992, the first-ever meeting of the Security Council at the level of heads of state and government was held to consider how to take forward this ambition. They commissioned Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to report on how the UN might be utilized in the transformed geopolitical climate. In the resulting document, An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali focused on the civil wars gripping different parts of the world. He noted that these conflicts were now receiving an unprecedented level of international attention and stressed the need for the Council to take the lead in responding to them.
But An Agenda for Peace, crucially, also encouraged the Council to consider peacekeeping—with its long-standing history—as a well-tested instrument for carrying this agenda forward. It suggested moving away from a previous crucial condition for almost all peacekeeping operations: specifically, that henceforth peacekeepers might not necessarily be deployed with the full consent of all the parties to the conflict. This was a small change on the page of peacekeeping principles, but one with potentially huge implications regarding what peacekeepers might be tasked to do.
Even as An Agenda for Peace was released, a new range of major operations in response to civil wars—in the former Yugoslavia, in Somalia, and in Cambodia—had already been launched by the Security Council under the rubric of UN peacekeeping. Managing this task was in the hands of the new United Nations Department of Peackeeping Operations, founded that year to take over the responsibilities of the office of Special Political Affairs led over many years by Sir Brian Urquhart. Yet the department—then led by Under-Secretary-General Marrack Goulding—had barely increased in staff size while managing a gargantuan increase in operations and the numbers of peacekeepers deployed on them worldwide, as well as an acute escalation in the operations’ complexity. It was at this time that I was transferred to the UN peacekeeping office at the UN’s New York headquarters. I came from my previous post as controller of the UN, in the Department of Management, before which I had served as head of UN Human Resources and director of the Budget. I was to support Marrack Goulding from the newly created post of deputy head of the department.
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The possibility of deploying field missions without the full consent of all belligerent parties meant there was a need to be prepared, if necessary, to use force. This simple fact meant that peacekeeping troops would be in need of a very different range of capabilities than usual if they faced armed factions opposed to the aims of the mission’s mandate. This also meant troop-contributing countries might need to accept very different levels of risk, as well as to provide much higher levels of political commitment, attention, and responsiveness alongside the Security Council. This, however, was poorly recognized. The gulf between ends and means began to widen fatefully.
In 1992, the Security Council neglected to consciously create or review the possibilities of a distinctive new set of governing principles and structures for UN peacekeeping. Instead, all the legacy structures and doctrine of UN peacekeeping from the Cold War were carried into this new era.
This meant that the old and creaking Cold War machinery of peacekeeping was being turned to situations for which it was never intended. Peacekeeping had been cobbled together out of the limited possibilities presented within the political constraints of the UN system during the Cold War. The idea that the UN should have its own troops, commanded entirely by its Secretariat, was never accepted by the UN’s member states. As a result, UN peacekeeping operated under a tripartite governing structure, among which relationships and authority over operations were unclear at the best of times. First, there was the Security Council, which had the power to bring into force a UN field operation, and was responsible for determining its mandate, objectives, and parameters as part of an ongoing supervisory role. Second, there was the UN Secretariat, the administrative body of the UN, which had responsibility for overseeing the day-to-day management of these operations, particularly through DPKO and the office of the secretary-general. And third, there were the troop-contributing countries, which retained authority over the forces they deployed on UN missions, and in practice remained in ultimate command of their own troops.
Peacekeeping was therefore reliant upon an often conflicted intergovernmental body for its political master, in the form of the Security Council, while its logistics and administration were run by a UN department whose authority was unclear. And, worse, missions were entirely dependent upon multiple troop-contributing countries whose troops took decisive orders only from their own governments. The chain of command was confused and decision-making responsibility fragmented, with unity of purpose often absent between these three parts.
In traditional peacekeeping during the Cold War, this had often led to slow and disorganized deployments, problems in the direction of troops, and great difficulty in equipping and sustaining the force. But most of these problems had been in field missions in relatively stable environments involving the monitoring of clearly delineated boundaries between warring countries, as I witnessed personally in 1973 in Egypt. The inherent weaknesses in the system of peacekeeping operations were never exposed in such missions in so serious a manner as to produce any momentum for reform. The system was sufficient to allow the deployment of peacekeeping forces, regardless of any shortcomings along the way.
The new interest in civil wars made things very different. Due to their greater complexity and the number of factions and subfactions involved—but particularly the unclear boundaries between belligerents due to the typical involvement of irregular forces—such wars are far more fluid, unstable, and prone to rapid changes on the ground than those of wars between countries. With the new ambitions of peacekeeping missions in civil war zones around the world, the situation was set for those weaknesses, contradictions, and strains in the governing structures of UN peacekeeping to be tested as never before.
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Compounding this problem was the style of management embraced by Boutros-Ghali as secretary-general. He took great pains, in particular, to control and restrict the flow of information to and from the Security Council. Almost all information for the Council was conveyed through his personal representative, Chinmaya Gharekhan. Troop commanders were very rarely allowed to brief the Council directly, nor were officials at DPKO, including its head, the under-secretary-general. Boutros-Ghali maintained strict, private control over his own personal communications with representatives and leaders of member states, as well as special representatives of the secretary-general (SRSGs), who run the political side of the operations on the
ground. This meant that, at any stage, we in DPKO could never be sure who knew what, or what had been agreed to in the day-to-day running and direction of operations. DPKO sat within a chain of command, below the office of the secretary-general and the instructions of the Security Council, while in support of troop contributors who retained priority of command.
Underlying the management challenges of peacekeeping in those years was the opportunism of some member states. They had seized on the instrument of peacekeeping to carry forward their humanitarian ambitions, deploying troops under the UN to be managed by DPKO, but in a manner that often abdicated their responsibilities. In the very short term, they took credit for acting in the face of humanitarian crises, but simultaneously avoided reckoning with the tough realities of the situation. They took few steps to prepare their populations and parliaments for the tasks—and risks—their troops would be required to face. At DPKO we realized that these missions required force, and were encouraging others to understand this, too. But UN peacekeeping had long been perceived as a task that traditionally involved almost no risk to the troops involved. And it was still in this style that peacekeepers were deployed. Hiding behind the label of “peacekeeping,” governments sent troops into civil wars whose conditions were fundamentally different to traditional peacekeeping.
SOMALIA: FAMINE AND CIVIL WAR
“When you drop a vase and it breaks into three pieces, you take the pieces and put it back together. But what do you do when it breaks into a thousand pieces?” This was how Mohamed Sahnoun, the UN SRSG to Somalia, described the dilemma the country had come to pose by 1992. It had not taken long for Somalia to shatter. In January 1991, President Siad Barre had fallen from power in Somalia. This caused a power struggle that swiftly saw the unraveling of the country’s densely knit structure of clans and kinship networks. By November 1991, hostilities had escalated and violence gripped the capital, Mogadishu, with fighting between factions supporting, respectively, the interim president Ali Mahdi Mohamed and the chairman of the United Somali Congress, General Mohamed Farrah Aidid. From then on, the country’s authority structures disintegrated in a proliferation of armed factions and gangs that saw the war—or, rather, a series of multiple and ever-shifting mini-wars that made up the larger conflict—engulf the whole of Somalia.
UN humanitarian relief agencies were fully engaged in Somalia from March 1991, shortly after the fall of Barre. But with the spreading contagion of the conflict and its accompanying fundamental breakdown of Somali society, the UN presence was not enough to stall terrible consequences for the population. Services and systems of trade and food distribution disappeared as the months rolled past. Over half of the population, 4.5 million people, became threatened with severe malnutrition, and an estimated 1.5 million were considered at immediate risk of death.
The images on the news programs and reports on the television in 1992 were some of the worst I have ever seen. Somalia seemed to be a landscape of emaciated bodies—some dead, others barely alive—men, women, and children alike. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis were dying.
However, the problem was that simply delivering supplies had little decisive effect. This was not a famine created by the weather and an inept food-distribution system that could be remedied in the short term through humanitarian relief alone. While a devastating drought had created the initial food shortage, this famine was one created by armed men willfully obstructing the most basic means of survival to entire sections of a population. Delivering humanitarian aid was not enough to deal with a famine born from a brutal civil war.
It would have been immensely difficult for any force to just move in and stop such a major and complicated civil war, nor was there any precedent for such action. In UN culture and experience, negotiation and a deal between factions was seen as the only feasible manner through which the UN could try to create a secure environment for humanitarian relief. On December 27, 1991, the outgoing secretary-general, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, initiated the first attempt by the UN to broker a political deal that might bring a cessation of hostilities, allowing the secure access of the starving population to humanitarian supplies.
At first this seemed to gain some traction, and an agreement on the implementation of a cease-fire was brokered between President Mahdi and General Aidid in Mogadishu on March 3, 1992. As part of this deal and subsequent agreements, in April the Security Council created the UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM). This was a peacekeeping mission of fifty unarmed observers to monitor the cease-fire in Mogadishu, including further troops who would accompany humanitarian convoys delivering relief around the country.
On August 25, 1992, we heard from the Red Cross that eleven of its workers had been killed in the southern Somali port of Kismayo. This was a particularly bad case among scores of other attacks on relief workers and supplies in the days and weeks before. Nine days earlier, on August 16, I arrived in my office at DPKO in New York to discover that gunmen and looters had blocked food trucks in Mogadishu. UN World Food Programme workers attempting to move food aid from the capital’s port to the communities beyond were once again being thwarted with force. That was not all: at the same time, a band of gunmen had just broken into the harbor at Kismayo and stolen 250 tons of food.
Relief workers in the Somali countryside were providing us with increasingly harrowing reports of the conditions of the population, and the consequences of this denial of food aid: at Baidoa, 150 miles from Mogadishu, children were dying daily at the actual feeding centers, even though those centers had been established over a month before. As the relief workers explained to us, the road from Mogadishu to Baidoa was now strewn with bodies.
It was horrifyingly clear, as these all too regular events went by, that political reconciliation was not taking hold, peace was not settling, and looting by armed gangs was continuing to disrupt and stop humanitarian supplies. The reality of the situation on the ground repeatedly demonstrated that the capabilities of the UN mission were inadequate. By the end of August 1992, the Security Council approved a series of moderate measures to expand UNOSOM’s observation and escort operations, as recommended by Boutros-Ghali.
But regardless of efforts to deliver aid, as long as the fighting continued in Somalia’s fluid civil war, so would the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in much of the country—and this then worsened steeply from November 1992. As the effort to deliver food and the volume of aid expanded, so did the level of effort to disrupt it. Whole factions, not just loose gangs, were now openly blocking the delivery of food. Huge amounts of supplies were being delivered to the country, but only a tiny portion of this was reaching the starving.
At DPKO, our prime concern was getting food to the people. This meant more troops dedicated to ensuring the safe delivery of supplies. The situation was outrageous for all to see: food warehouses at Somalia’s ports were now full, while an estimated 3,000 Somalis were dying every day, with perhaps 300,000 already dead. It was a situation, as I said at the time, that diminished every one of us a little more each day.
A more urgent and purposeful course of action was clearly necessary. We believed that capabilities and a mandate to use force were going to have to be provided if we were to get the bulk of the food beyond the ports and airfields and into the hands of the starving. On November 29, 1992, Boutros-Ghali responded to a request from the Council for options on how the uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian supplies might be achieved. He recommended mandating the use of force, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, as the only feasible option.
In response, on December 3, 1992, the Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 794, mandating the use of “all necessary means to establish as soon as possible a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia,” including, under Chapter VII of the Charter, the deployment of a new, unified military force. This was issued with the understanding that the United States would take the lead in delivering this new military ca
pability. The next day, on December 4, the U.S. outgoing president, George H. W. Bush, authorized Operation Restore Hope, declaring his recognition that “only the United States has the global reach to place a large security force on the ground in such a distant place quickly and efficiently and, thus, save thousands of innocents from death.” On December 9, the spearhead of an American force of 28,000 of some of the world’s most professional soldiers landed in Somalia, to be supported by 17,000 additional troops from twenty other countries.
The Security Council and the troop contributors saw this as a decisive measure that would rapidly stabilize the situation in the country. So sure were they of this, the Council emphasized the operation should be of only a short duration “to prepare the way for a return to peacekeeping and postconflict peacebuilding.”
Despite this intervention, a situation resembling “postconflict peacebuilding” remained far beyond the horizon. Once humanitarian supplies had been securely delivered to the main relief areas of Somalia by the U.S.-led task force, its effort came to an end. Responsibility for the situation transferred to a new UN operation in March 1993, in the form of UNOSOM II; the same month I replaced Marrack Goulding as head of DPKO and received the rank of under-secretary-general.
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The U.S.-led task force was highly successful in securing population centers in much of Somalia and ensuring the delivery of humanitarian supplies to 40 percent of the country—but the fighting still continued afterward. For this reason, Boutros-Ghali recommended to the Security Council that UNOSOM II be provided with a Chapter VII mandate to use force as in Operation Restore Hope, and to disarm the factions in Somalia in order to restore law and order in the country. The result was Security Council resolution 814, adopted on March 26, 1993, which U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright declared “an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country as a proud, functioning, and viable member of the community of nations.”
