The Foreign Service Journal, May 2019

50 MAY 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL demobilization of most of the former combatants, helping them reintegrate into civilian life, forming a new national army that was not loyal to only one faction, aiding refugees and displaced persons with returning to their homes, providing humanitarian aid and development assistance to restart the economy, and holding elections in a country with little-to-no democratic experience. Given the cost of such operations—thousands of peacekeepers are required—there has always been pressure to achieve all of the objectives on a tight schedule. If the elec- tions produced a government with a measure of legitimacy, the peacekeepers could declare success and depart. That outcome was achieved during my time in Mozambique in the early 1990s, thanks in no small part to the leadership of Aldo Ajello, the special representative of the U.N. Secretary-General. At the same time, in Angola the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi rejected the results of the voting and returned to war because he defined a free and fair election as one that he won. The conflict there continued for nearly another decade until Savimbi was killed in 2002. While the United Nations has had mixed results in its mul- tidimensional peacekeeping missions, they are, at least for the moment, largely a thing of the past. Of the current missions, only two are multidimensional. It would be more accurate to call them unidimensional now, because their objectives have been drastically reduced over the years. Today they are small opera- tions limited to attempting to professionalize the police in Haiti and Kosovo. The remaining six current operations are all in sub-Saharan Africa, and they represent the latest evolution of U.N. peacekeep- ing missions. They can be described as protection and stabiliza- tion missions, and they are the most dangerous and difficult ones with which peacekeepers have had to deal. Peacekeeping in the Face of Violent Extremism Traditionally, three principles have guided the conduct of peacekeepers: (1) They became involved only at the invitation of the parties to the conflict; (2) They were to be strictly neutral; and, (3) They were to use force only in self-defense. If these prin- ciples were not adhered to, a situation could prove disastrous. For instance, when peacekeepers took sides in the Congo in 1960 and Somalia in the early 1990s, hundreds of them died as they were drawn into the fighting. At the risk of being tautologi- cal, peacekeepers are bound to fail if there is no peace to keep. When a cease-fire is negotiated, peacekeepers can do their work. Without one, they are either ineffec- tive or the international community is faced with ordering them to try to impose an end to the fighting. That requires the international community to be willing to have the peacekeepers inflict and take casualties. The rise of terrorism is the reason the final stage in the evolution of peacekeeping has become so dangerous. Per- haps reflecting the lack of an agreed definition of terrorism, many in the United Nations and elsewhere prefer to use the term “vio- lent extremism.” Terrorists are indistinguishable from noncom- batants; they will use any type of weapon, and their objective is to kill innocent people to call attention to their cause. Whatever it is called, when extremist violence comes into play there is no role for peacekeeping. Yet peacekeepers are being asked not only to protect civilians but, often, to help the government stabilize the situation and extend its control over its own territory in countries threatened by extremists. This violates all three of the traditional principles of peace- keeping and makes the peacekeepers targets. The prospect of such attacks has accelerated the trend among rich countries to decline to provide troops for peacekeeping. As the operations changed from the classical variety to multidimensional missions and as the number of casualties grew and some of the missions, like the one in Angola, failed, the enthusiasm for participating waned. As peacekeeping evolved further into the protection and stabilization missions now underway in Africa, the interest of developed nations in putting their troops at risk virtually disap- peared. Further Complications To make matters much worse, the five countries where these protection and stabilization missions are taking place—Mali, Sudan, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—have governments that are among the most corrupt, repressive and incompetent in the world. One need only to look at their corruption rankings by Transparency International, their political liberty rankings by FreedomHouse or their governance scores on the Ibrahim Index to confirm that. In addition, these countries are not particularly interested