UNO: WHAT TRIBE IS THAT?

Panel 2 of a triptych: A book review for Peacehawks of Hammarskjoeld: a Life, by Roger Lipsey, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2013.  738 pp; illus, footnotes, indexed, bibliography.

by Jamie Arbuckle

Introduction

There have of course been several books about Dag Hammarskjoeld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations.  The most authoritative was Sir Brian Urquhart’s Hammarskjoeld[1] first published in 1972; Urquhart combined immediacy – he was there – with scholarship. More recently (2011), there has been the extremely useful and readable work by Manuel Froehlich. [2]

Do we need another biography of Dag Hammarskjoeld?  As we wrote in the first panel of this triptych[3], we believe that there are some stories that are so important to us that they need to be retold afresh in each generation, and there is no redundancy in the retelling.  Each generation needs to hear, in  its own voice and in its own time, the vital stories of the times.  The past is not necessarily fate, but it is often prologue. And living in history is like map reading: if you know where you were and how you have gone, you should know where you are, and you can have a good idea where you are going. Updating the map from time to time can never be of no use.

And so, just over a half-century after his untimely death, another biography of Dag Hammarskjoeld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, should be a welcome addition to our knowledge toolkits. We therefore offer this review to our followers at Peacehawks.

This review will cover four points, the literary high ground, as it were, of this book and of the story it tells:

1.     The first area we will cover is to review the book as an excursus on  Markings[4];

2.     We will review the birth of peacekeeping operations, which occurred on Hammarskjoeld’s watch and under his ultimate responsibility;

3.     Hammarskjoeld more or less invented the role and the functions of the special representative  of the secretary-general; and

4.     Finally, Hammarskjoeld gave form and enduring substance to the role of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

PEACEKEEPING IN OUR TIME: PAST THE AGE OF CONSENT?

PEACEKEEPING IN OUR TIME:

PAST THE AGE OF CONSENT?

By Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks

Introduction

Have you heard the one about how many Peacekeepers it takes to change a light bulb?

Actually, any number will do – but the light bulb has to want to change.

To know where we are going, we need to know where we are, and to know that, we usually need to know where we have been.  To look ahead, then, we often need to look back.

One of the most critical factors in modern peace operations has, since the creation of the United Nations, been the issue of consent to and the continuing support for an operation.  The  UN is hard-wired for consensual operations; it’s in the DNA, in the Charter:

Article 2.1: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all of its members”; and

Article 2.7:  “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state … “

The consent issue has several forms; among these: the consent of the hosts and of the parties to a conflict; of the people living in the conflict area; that of the troop contributors to a peace force; and the consent of the major powers, especially the permanent members of the Security Council of the UN (the P5). The first two are often the most critical: we might refer to them as the consent of the parties and the people. We certainly cannot ignore the importance of the consent of the troop contributors – without them we have no force, or of the Security Council – without them we have no mandate. Nevertheless, I will generally focus on the issues of local consent: in which I include the host government, the sub-state parties, and the people. These, which I by no means take to be the same thing or even in some cases very much alike, are nevertheless in my view collectively the true conditio sine qua non of a successful intervention.

There has since late in the last century been a growing tendency to contemplate and to mandate peace operations founded under Chapter VII of the Charter, which is implicitly non-consensual in its tone and presumably, in its intent.  It might seem that peace operations are indeed beyond the age of consent.  That is in principle; however in practice peace operations  have continued to be very conservatively structured and even more cautiously  executed, and missions have continued to negotiate the terms and the extent of operations specifically intended to enforce peace. This is no less true of the current vogue for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), than it was of the rash of “enforcement operations” of the 1990s.

To see why this has been, and largely remains, the case, I want to review the origins of the issue of consent in peace operations, and  see what that has subsequently come to mean. To do this, we will review the first modern peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Emergency Force, as it formed up  in the autumn of 1956, where the issue first arose and was to be of fundamental importance. We will then fast-forward to Eastern Slavonia almost 40 years later, and we will visit there the birth-place of the practice – and only later the concept – of “induced  consent.” (Alex Morrisson, the founder and President of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Nova Scotia, once said, while a student at the Canadian Army Staff College, “It certainly seems to work in practice, but how will it stand up in theory?) It is a large part of the story of peacekeeping that practice often and necessarily precedes theory.

 Finally, having  established where we really  are, we will peek briefly through that R2P looking glass to see where we might be going  with 21^st Century peace operations. As written, that “policy” largely describes non-consensual military intervention to “protect”, but its authors have been back-pedalling on that almost since before their ink was dry – and no wonder. We know what they said, but it seems that may not have been what they meant, and we need to look critically at this “new norm.”  We can only hope this will allow us at least a glimpse of what John le Carre has called “the recent future”.

Sometimes, to get ahead, we need to go back.

In preparing this posting, I need to thank Russia, China and Syria, who in fanning the flames of tragedy have provided me with further  insight into the importance of consent at multiple levels. 

And that is what I want to share with you in this posting.

Light Candles or Curse the Darkness: East Timor Turns the Century

“Militaries that are doing something bad sometimes go into their shell. It’s them against the world.”


- Admiral Dennis Blair, CinC U.S. Pacific Command, on the Indonesian Armed Forces, in 1999.


“ … cutting off contact with Indonesian officers only makes the problem worse”


- Paul Wolfowitz


“Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”


- Confucius

- a book report by Jamie Arbuckle for Peacehawks:

If You Leave us Here, We Will Die – How Genocide was Stopped in East Timor, by Geoffrey Robinson, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2010, 317 pages, $35


INTRODUCTION

This book tells of the terrible and the wonderful events in East Timor, centred on but not limited to the years 1999- 2000, and of the candles that were lit then. For us the messages in this book are three, and they bear directly on our central belief that peace must be maintained at least as robustly as it is violated. These three messages concern:

1. The uses of humanitarian intervention, and the military role in such interventions;

2. The issue of consent, especially that of the Security Council, of the major powers and of the “host” government, to an intervention;

3. The relationship of peace to justice – can there be one without the other?



Geoffrey Robinson is that most valuable combination of practitioner and academic, and his book is given dramatic thrust by the fact that he was an eye-witness to much of the action of that critical year, as he was at that time a political affairs officer with the UN mission in East Timor. Reading between his lines with your accustomed skill, you will infer as did we that he and his colleagues were brave to a degree way beyond his spare descriptions of the hazards they faced. He is in “real life” a professor of history at UCLA, and he was six years with the headquarters of Amnesty International in London. He is thus well able to zoom in for the detail, and then back seamlessly out to the wider time-frame and perspective. He is a superb writer, and this book is both an invaluable reference, and a cracking good read.

National Sovereignty, Domestic Jurisdiction and Consent

Presentation to the Blue Helmet Forum Austria
4-6 June 2009

National Sovereignty, Domestic Jurisdiction and Consent:
The Last Refuges of Scoundrels[1]

By James V. Arbuckle, O.M.M., C.D.

Shall I say what I mean?
Mean what I say?
- Marianne Faithful



Introduction
This paper is NOT JUST about peace operations in Chad; rather it is about ALL peace operations throughout the history of peacekeeping:


The issue of consent to an operation is central to the mandating and the conduct of all interventions. The post-Cold War surge in intra-national conflicts has increased the importance of this issue, as interventions almost inevitably encounter issues of national sovereignty. In Sudan, especially in the West Darfur region of Sudan, we see today most clearly the ongoing struggle between, on the one hand, national sovereignty, domestic jurisdiction and “host” consent and, on the other hand, a clear case of a need – some would say a responsibility – for outsiders to intervene.