REVIEW OF “RESTREPO”: WHEN A PICTURE IS NOT WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

Restrepo, 2010, a film by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.

Reviewed for Peacehawks by Jamie Arbuckle

It is a characteristic of our very advanced communications media that the medium is often not the message, and sometimes contains almost no message at all. This film is one such non-message.

The intention of the film seems to be to accompany the book, War, by Sebastian Junger. Junger is a skilled writer with a strong sense of contemporary history and is well known for his narrative skills, both of which are amply displayed in his book.  War presents the operations of Battle Company, 2^nd Parachute Infantry Battalion  of the 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan from May 2007 to July 2008. (The other companies in the Battalion are called “Chosen” and “Destined” – the irony, as in so much of the terminology used here, is certainly unintentional.) In particular, the movie tells inter alia the story of the Second Platoon of Battle Company in combat outpost Restrepo, which was named for a very popular medic, Juan Restrepo, and which was established shortly after he was killed in action in Afghanistan.

Do-able Peace: A Handbook

The Mediator’s Handbook for Durable Peace, by Evan A. Hoffmann, the Canadian International Institute of Applied Negotiations, Ottawa, 2010.




Reviewed for Peacehawks by Jamie Arbuckle



At only 52 pages, this slim volume will scarcely displace the baton from anyone’s rucksack, but no one proceeding on a mission should leave home without it.



Evan Hoffman is the Executive Director of the Canadian International Institute of Applied Negotiations, a leader in their field of training on and researching into the techniques of mediation and negotiation, especially but not solely for peacekeepers of all brands and stripes. They have also been active in the non-violent management of conflicts and in promoting peace around the world. It detracts not at all from Evan’s own considerable accomplishments to say that he stands on the shoulders of a giant, which for us is a very good description of his father, Ben, whose work we have reviewed elsewhere in this blog.



Evan states his thesis early and clearly: “the balance of power between the parties at the time of mediation does not need to be equal, but a balanced agreement is necessary.” And there you have in a nutshell the major challenge of any mediation process: power is usually unevenly held, which is one of the more common causes of violent conflict. This asymmetry of power, usually accompanied by unequal access to resources, makes it difficult for the lesser to come to the table, while making it (seemingly) unnecessary for the greater to come at all. Only the prospect of a balanced agreement will attract the lesser to the table, and if the process does not iron out the differences, not least of power sharing, any semblance of peace will be an illusion quickly dispelled. It is the aim of Evan’s book to provide a model for durable peace.

INTERAGENCY COMMUNICATIONS AND CO-OPERATION IN COMPLEX EMERGENCIES:THE ROLE AND INFLUENCE OF CULTURES

- by Jamie Arbuckle, presented to the Workshops on Diversity and Global   Understanding, Vienna 2 June 2010


Introduction


A thoroughly modern complex humanitarian emergency typically is a multi-agency operation, involving a vasty array of organizations: international, regional, local; governmental, non-governmental; civilian and military. All have a contribution to make, and some will be vital, but none of them can work alone. Meshing their capabilities to avoid duplications and omissions, is a major challenge for what, begging your pardon and for lack of any better term, I will call the international community. Collectively, they pose a staggering range of diversity, and they present the most complex operating environment I have ever encountered. It is therefore on this, the humanitarian emergency, on which I will now focus. The challenges arising from the organizational and cultural diversity of international and local actors in this type of peace operation are poorly understood, but the problems are so well-known as to have become like Dr Johnson said of the weather: more productive of conversation than of knowledge.

Thomas Weiss has described one well-known example of this complexity in the following words:

Last week (1994), I was talking to a couple of colleagues just back from Kigali. I learned that there are at least 150 international NGOS in Kigali tripping over one another, vying for turf, looking for resources. I have described this effort as like trying to herd cats. (1)


Actually, Weiss’ information was not quite accurate: others subsequently estimated at least twice that number of NGOs in Kigali in 1994 – but no one was quite sure. Five years later, in Kosovo, which is a box about 100 kilometres on a side, some estimated there were about 500 NGOs in the province – but no one was quite sure. And this was in a mission area more or less dominated by the UN, leading the “four pillars” (if you can lead a pillar) of the United Nations Secretariat, the UN High Commission for Refugees, the OSCE, the EU and, as an adjunct, the NATO-led KFOR. The landscape was crowded – especially on that moral high ground - and the architecture was ad hoc and complex.


While the UNMIK operation in Kosovo did eventually sort itself into a climate of reasonable cooperation among the various agencies and with the emerging local government, it will be no surprise that this is more usually a recipe for organizational nightmares.


In this paper, I will describe the problems of interagency communication and cooperation as I have experienced them, and as they have been related to me. Following this description of the problem I will present a short analysis of the origins of the problems, and I will provide a very brief prescription for alleviating these symptoms of disarray. Description, analysis, prescription, then: shut up, and leave time for me to hear from you.

I am constantly reminded that this is as much a learning experience for me as it is for you, and just before lunch I met one of your number who will in the course of this summer do exactly what I am recommending everyone of you should do – I'll tell you more about him as I get to the end of this presentation.

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.

NOT BY DOVES, BUT BY HAWKS – PEACE GETS A CHANCE IN SIERRA LEONE

As the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) comes to a close at the end of this year, it may serve as a model for successful peacekeeping, as well as a prototype for the UN’s new emphasis on peacebuilding.
- From UNAMSIL: A Success Story in Peacekeeping, from “End of Mission Press Kit”, December 2005, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/past/unamsil/Overview.pdf



A book review, by Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks:



Operation Barras: the SAS Rescue Mission, Sierra Leone 2000, by William Fowler, Cassell, London, 2004. 211 pp, $9.95 (pb)



Introduction



In the summer of 2000 things just couldn’t have been much worse for the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). Since February, 1998, nearly 650 persons – peacekeepers, relief workers, priests, nuns, diplomats, and normal people whose luck had run out – had been kidnapped, and 19 of them had been murdered. 575 of those taken were Blue Berets, the equivalent of a whole battalion. By late summer of 2000, about 600 persons had been released, including all of the UN peacekeepers. But about 50 were still captive and, when 11 British soldiers were seized on 25 August, things were getting pretty serious. Yet, less than two years later, the civil war had ended (and seems to have stayed that way), and in 2003 the Kimberly Process virtually ended traffic in the “blood diamonds”, which had been used to finance the rebels. In 2004 the disarmament of the rebel factions was completed and a war crimes tribunal was convened. At the end of 2005, just five years after that nadir of 2000, the peacekeeping mission was being phased out to a peacebuilding mission, and the close-out briefings in New York were presenting this as the poster child of a successful mission.


What happened to make such a difference so quickly to such a dismal situation? Well, a lot of things, but the main thing was that about 600 British soldiers happened, and they made most of that difference in a matter of a few short weeks. This book, Operation Barras: the SAS Rescue Mission: Sierra Leone 2000, by William Fowler, is about what and why and how they did all that. Fowler seems well equipped and prepared for this work: he has been writing on defense policy and technology issues since 1972, and his writings have appeared in international defense magazines. He is the author of a previous book on the Commando action at Dieppe in 1942. He has been a long-serving officer with the British Reserve Army, and served in the first Gulf War.

It must be said at the outset that we found it difficult to determe just what was the author’s central thesis – why was this book written? The author tells us only that “This book is about a post-Cold War African conflict.” We thought that Operation Palliser was about much more: we thought it was a striking example of how economical and decisive military action might be, and indeed should be – but commonly is not, and the contrasts between Operation Palliser and UNAMSIL needed more consideration than they have been given – in this book and generally. Throughout this review, then, we will be drawing lessons and conclusions which the author did not – which is just why we thought this review was necessary.

Trackless Diplomacy - At Play in the Fields of the Lord's Resistance Army

… the peacemaker must ‘wage’ peace.
- Ben Hoffmann

- by Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks



Peace Guerilla – unarmed and in harm’s way, my obsession with ending violence
By Ben Hoffmann, Ph.D.
The Canadian International Institute of Applied Negotiation, Ottawa, 2009
206 pp., $12.96 (Cdn)



This book is the story of Ben Hoffman’s efforts to end a nineteen-year old war between Sudan and Uganda. His chief instrument in this was the Nairobi Agreement, which had been mediated by former President Jimmy Carter in December, 1999. Ben, working on behalf of the Carter Center (http://www.cartercenter.org/homepage.html), was to oversee the implementation of the Agreement. To do so, he would have to end the guerilla war being waged by Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army against the Government of Uganda, from safe areas within and with the support of Sudan. Kony’s LRA was an especially vile band, kidnapping children for “warriors” and “wives”. Kony himself, as Ben makes graphically clear, was mad, bad and dangerous to know. And get to know him Ben did, with all that entailed. If you take nothing else from this reading, you will empathize with the courage and the self-reliance required for this sort of intervention.

Ben Hoffmann is one whom we unhesitatingly call brilliant. We have worked and learned with him on occasions precious to us, and regard him as one of the best leaders we have ever followed. We had long respected his intellectual courage, and this book makes clear as well his physical courage. The story is told with cinematic sweep and a sense of excitement and adventure, and indeed Ben’s negotiations with Kony to free the kidnapped children are to be encapsulated in a movie, “Girl Soldier”, which is based on another book, Stolen Angels, by Kathy Cook (Penguin Global, 2009).

The United Nations Today - As Good as it Gets?

The United Nations Today: As Good as it Gets?




- by Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks



What’s Wrong With the United Nations, and How to Fix It
By Thomas Weiss,
Polity Press, 292 pp., $19.45, 2009



The UN … is essentially the collective agent of its member states. Many of the UN’s organizational incapacities could be corrected by additional resources from its member states, who devote but a tiny fraction of the resources they spend on national security to collective action under the umbrella of the United Nations.
- Peacemaking and Peacekeeping for the New Century, Ottunnu and Doyle, Rowan and Littlefield, New York, 1996







This is an interesting book about the United Nations, and an impressive effort to get beyond the usual procedural and structural tinkering which has characterized and limited most efforts to “improve” the U.N. Thomas Weiss is certainly well qualified to write this book. He combines the skills and the background of a practitioner and a scholar: he served with the U.N. Secretariat for a decade, but has also distinguished himself as an academic for over 25 years, during which he has been a profound student of and a prolific writer, researcher and teacher about, the U.N.

Sir Brian Urqhuhart, in his foreword, tells us that Weiss has come to the “bold and original conclusion” “that world government is the necessary conceptual basis for adequate future management of the major problems of our planet.” Weiss’ solution is actually much more cautious and nuanced – and realistic - than that.

Weiss makes it clear that he considers a preoccupation with sovereignty as a major problem in taking concerted action to confront global challenges: “… treating traditional sovereignty as a cornerstone for the United Nations is a fundamental structural weakness in urgent need of replacement.” He goes on: “The shortcomings of sovereignty and the ill-health of the UN system for the human rights arena can be illustrated with several examples …”. “Westphalian sovereignty impinges directly on more robust action by the United Nations in protecting the human environment.” Weiss concludes that “Westphalian sovereignty is … a chronic ailment for the United Nations, and perhaps a lethal one for the planet …”

But Weiss leaves us under no illusions that sovereignty is any less likely to be the basis for whatever international order may obtain, now or in the near future: “… the state remains essential for national, regional and global problem-solving, and nothing in this book gainsays this stark reality.” And then Weiss turns the corner, and tells us what he really means:

Yet put simply, states and their creations in the form of the current generation of intergovernmental bureaucracies cannot address the transnational problems confronting the world. As a result, and ironically, we have embraced global governance.

Weiss thus distances himself from the chimera* of global government and advocates instead global governance; governance being a more qualitative term, which Weiss defines as

… the totality of institutions, policies, rules, practices, norms, procedures, and initiatives by which states and their citizens try to bring order and predictability to their responses to such universal problems as warfare, poverty, and environmental degradation.