by Richard Gowan | May 11, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
Exactly how bad has the first half of this month been for the UN? Where does one start? You could choose Burma, where the international organization’s ability to deliver aid in a hostile climate has been hurled into doubt. Or Sudan, where Darfuri rebels sallied forth to attack Khartoum, demonstrating exactly what they think of the security offered by the struggling UN forces on their patch. But the worst news of all (from an institutional rather than humanitarian point of view, given the Burmese horror) may yet prove to be that from Lebanon.
The spread of fighting between the government’s backers and Hezbollah, apparently delayed rather than halted by an attempted deal on Saturday, has highlighted a challenge for the UN that I’ve muttered about here before. The 12,000+ mainly European UN troops in South Lebanon are mandated to (i) support the army and (ii) prevent the flow of arms to Hezbollah. But it has been an open secret that the peacekeepers have a variety of understandings with Hezbollah to avoid trouble. As I pointed out in two magazine articles (here and here) it has never been clear how they would balance these ideals and deals in a full-on crisis.
One can cry wolf too often: I also predicted that such a crisis might emerge in December, along with simultaneous military set-backs for European forces in Kosovo and Chad. And I scored 0 out of 3. Or rather, all three trouble-spots stayed quiet-ish up to the start of 2008. But in the ensuing four months, it has all come to pass pretty much as predicted. In February, Chad blew up as the EU tried to deploy troops – in March, the UN and NATO had to fight it out with Serb rioters in Kosovo.
Two out of three, in this case, ain’t good. And Lebanon?
In April, there were signs that the modus vivendi between the UN and Hezbollah was starting to erode: the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that peacekeepers attempting to inspect a suspicious truck for arms were driven off by gun-toting militants. The UN denied this, but there have long been rumors that European UN units had backed off on meeting Hezbollah patrols, or refused to patrol at night.
And now Lebanon looks close to civil war, and if this starts to be felt in the UN’s operational zone in the south of the country (not yet the site of fighting) it’s hard to believe that the Lebanese government, the Israelis and the U.S. won’t demand that the peacekeepers get tough. As Global Dashboard’s Peacekeeping Cassandra, I’m also on record as saying that I fear they’ll run away instead. Let’s see.
by Charlie Edwards | May 6, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa
Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to researchers at Oregon State University that the evidence points to an altogether different scenario, where the world’s 263 trans-boundary rivers (whose basins cover nearly half the land surface of the world) generate more co-operation than conflict.
The Economist picks up the story:
Over the past half-century, 400 treaties had been concluded over the use of rivers. Of the 37 incidents that involved violence, 30 occurred in the dry and bitterly contested region formed by Israel and its neighbours, where the upper end of the Jordan river was hotly disputed, and skirmished over, before Israel took control in the 1967 war. And some inter-state water treaties are very robust. The Indus river pact between India and Pakistan survived two wars and the deep crisis of 2002.
Where the doom-mongers do have a point is this: drought, desertification and food shortage are among the factors that foment conflict within states by tipping some areas, at least, into social collapse. The drying up of old grazing lands, once shared by Arab herders and African farmers, is one of the things that pushed Sudan’s west into chaos and misery. But what about war between nations that more-or-less function? For anyone who takes a cynical view of the causes of war, water seems a less likely agent than say, oil or diamonds. For dictators or warlords (the sort who sponsored or prolonged ghastly wars in Congo and Angola), water is less enticing than minerals or gems. It is harder to steal and sell.
Water, it seems, is a source for cooperation. Mark Zeitoun, a Canadian scholar at the London School of Economics, says rivers provide a perfect case of “asymmetrical co-operation” between countries that are forced to work together on terms dictated by the strongest. Take the Nile, where the main riparian states, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia, or their colonial masters have been watching each other’s water use closely for a century at least—and Egypt usually gets its way.
And who is the usual suspect that could precipitate a conflict? China. Unconstrained by World Bank diplomacy it could possibly enrage Egypt if it ever helped the Ethiopians divert part of the Blue Nile to agriculture. Even as Egypt has softened its public stance and reached out to its riparian partners, its intelligence is active in the Horn of Africa.
Still, as the Economist notes, there are risks.
In Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt, the Nile basin has some of Africa’s most militaristic countries. The inability to manage the waters of Lake Victoria, which is increasing in turbidity, bodes ill for the management of the White Nile. Already, the annual death toll from battles over water and grazing in the badlands of south Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya is in the hundreds. Aid-workers say growing numbers of people and livestock, escalation from rifles to machineguns, erratic rainfall and especially the increased rates of evaporation expected in the future will put the toll into the tens of thousands. That still doesn’t add up to a real war between proper armies—but a thirsty planet is unlikely to be a stable and peaceful one.
by Richard Gowan | Mar 20, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security
For over a year, one of the biggest questions among officials in UN-land has been: will the Security Council make us go to Somalia? Back in November, I debuted on this blog by noting that Ban Ki-moon had announced that a mission was not “a realistic and viable option.” Well, the Council didn’t like that one bit, and told the Secretariat to get planning for that option right away. Sometimes an international organization can’t say no: this week, the Council gets to discuss a new report from the SG, which envisages an operation involving 27,000 troops plus police. That’d be a few thousand more than the UN is pushing (slowly) into Darfur.
Now, this isn’t a complete volte face: the report makes it clear that there’ll need to be a progress on a peace deal before any such force is possible. It also moots a smaller mission of 8,000. But now the numbers are out there, the media are naturally jumping on the 27,000 figure, and I fear the Council will follow…
All of which moves me to pick up something I really should have written about last week, had I not been sunning myself in Chile. That is, of course, the publication of the new Annual Review of Global Peace Operations by my colleagues at the Center on International Cooperation. The FT picked up the story under the reasonably accurate title “UN Attacked For Overloading Peacekeepers.” Here’s the gist:
The United Nations Security Council is criticised on Wednesday for authorising big peacekeeping missions around the world in spite of warnings that demands on troop contributors are overtaking their ability to deliver. “Repeated warnings of overstretch did not forestall the authorisation of ambitious new mandates by the Security Council and regional organisations,” says the New York-based Center on International Co-operation in its annual report on global peace operations.
The criticism was made as the Security Council met to consider the latest report from Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, on Darfur, where deployment of a combined UN and African Union peace force, Unamid, is badly behind schedule as the result of lack of vital resources and delaying tactics by the Sudanese government. “The mission was a compromise from the start,” Sarjoh Bah, editor of the CIC report, told the Financial Times, “because Sudan resisted a UN-only force”.
The CIC report said some of the problems of international peacekeeping by both the UN and regional organisations stemmed from decisions to deploy forces in spite of the absence of peace agreements on the ground. “By year-end, peacekeeping was becoming a victim of its own success,” the report said. “The complexity of operations began to outstrip the ability of international organisations to keep peace.”
But I’m sure Somalia will be fine, just fine.
by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Africa, East Asia and Pacific
Interesting to read the argument made today that China’s overseas diplomacy has in some cases – like Sudan – been “hijacked” by state-owned companies like PetroChina, that are alleged to have become “very powerful interest groups” in their own right.
Very interesting to see who’s making it: scholars at “leading Chinese think-tanks and universities in Beijing“, speaking in multiple interviews. As Richard McGregor comments, “China’s foreign ministry has not been critical of CNPC but the comments by senior academics in Beijing suggest substantial disquiet in official circles about overseas investments.”
by Richard Gowan | Mar 5, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
Just after making light of incidents on Kosovo’s periphery below, I’ve been alerted to much nastier events on the Chad/Darfur border. An French EU soldier has been killed and another wounded, having strayed into Sudan (I’m sure there are already conspiracy theories out there about how this happened, but let’s not pursue them). As if this wasn’t bad enough, the EU Force in Chad has apologized for entering Sudanese territory – that may have been necessary to defuse tensions and get the body back, but it leaves a sour taste. I don’t recall Sudan grovelling after its forces apparently backed the rebellion in Chad at the start of February, or after any number of other recent cross-border clashes.
This is not the first time an EU mission has lost personnel to a hostile act (that happened in the Balkans in the 1990s) but none of it previous military missions to Africa had suffered a fatality. I’ve addressed the potential impact of something like this on EU security policy before: there are obviously far worse scenarios involving greater losses, but it feels like a grim turning-point all the same. By unhappy chance, I have a new article* out on the meaning of last month’s fighting in Chad, calling it a “predictable crisis”. Here’s the core of the argument:
Three things are already clear. One is that, for the first time, an EU military deployment is not only encountering significant violence (that has happened elsewhere, as in earlier operations in the Congo) but is fuelling violence in its own right. The second is that the consensus underpinning EU security cooperation is being severely strained by the experience. The third is that this combination of events was all too predictable.
This doesn’t just mean there were concrete warnings that Chad could turn ugly, although doubts were raised about the mission from very early on. The UN Secretariat – now responsible for over 55,000 peacekeepers in Africa, many of them in highly volatile situations – had resisted getting involved in Chad as there was “no peace to keep”. In private, European officials complained the mission’s proposed deployment (one year) was too short and its personnel far too few (analysts called for 10,000 troops or more).
But, whatever the specifics of this crisis, the generic threat that an operation in Africa turning bad could harm European security cooperation has been present for far longer. That is because there has never been a real consensus on the need for such operations.
Today’s events probably won’t show up this lack of consensus too badly, as the dead man is French – had he been from one of the other contributors to the mission (Ireland, say, or Austria) there would probably have been an uproar. But this is a sad day for the EU.
* Eagle-eyed Europhile readers may note an error in the article: I claim that the 2003 European Security Strategy doesn’t refer to Africa. It does, and I knew that – sorry!
