U.N. Panel Urges Major Peacekeeping Reforms

Peacekeeping operations of the United Nations are doomed to repeat the failures of the past decade unless the world body institutes major reforms, a special panel declared Wednesday.

In an unusually frank report, the 10-member U.N. commission proposed ways to create speedier, more aggressive forces for ensuring peace.

It urged that the world body set up an “on-call” group of military experts to pave the way for new missions at a week’s notice, place 5,000 multinational troops on standby and allow peacekeepers to drop their neutrality when an accord is broken or civilians are attacked.

While explicitly denying an attempt to create a U.N. “army,” the report emphasized that the world body needs teams ready to act quickly before fragile peace pacts fall apart.

“Prompt action is absolutely essential to make the United Nations truly credible as a force for peace,” the report said.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan commissioned the study in March after U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda failed to prevent genocide in 1994 and stood by a year later while Bosnian Serb forces massacred thousands of Muslim men and boys in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In May, more than 500 peacekeepers were detained by rebels in Sierra Leone, lending urgency to the issue.

The report said peacekeeping missions are undertrained, underequipped and underfunded. It cited member states’ reluctance to commit more troops and money and unrealistic estimates of needed resources. Operations can take months to put together. In most missions, peacekeepers are not allowed to use weapons, even to protect civilians, except in cases of self-defense.

The result has been a series of tragedies that were not prevented, and at times were worsened, by an impotent U.N. presence.

The U.S. member of the panel, Brian Atwood, said the U.N. Security Council must stop dispatching peacekeepers who are unable to defend themselves.

“We must have adequate forces to deal with any contingency,” he said. “We send a message [to aggressive groups] that the United Nations is nothing to be feared.”

The report also urged a shift away from the peacekeepers’ traditional neutrality when one side attacks civilians or breaks a peace accord. It recommended bolstering rules of engagement so that peacekeepers can more aggressively defend themselves. Neutrality in some situations, the report noted, “can in the best case result in ineffectiveness and in the worst may amount to complicity with evil.”

Annan endorsed the report as “frank yet fair.” The secretary-general is in a unique position: He headed the Department of Peacekeeping Operations during the massacres in Rwanda and the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and is the target of blunt criticism of his role. But that makes him the right person to oversee the changes, analysts said.

“He very deeply recognizes how responsible the U.N. was for those failures,” said David Malone, president of the International Peace Academy, an independent research institution in New York focusing on security issues. “He has already overcome the issue of responsibility. That was the first step toward corrective action.”

Now that the panel has come up with a serious vision of reform, Malone said, the difficulty lies in implementing the changes.

World leaders will consider the proposed reforms during the Millennium Summit planned for Sept. 6-8 at the U.N. and are expected to endorse them. But as the nature of conflict has changed from countries fighting each other to ethnic groups warring within one country, some nations object to the U.N.’s increasingly interventionist role.

Funding may prove to be another major obstacle. There are already 35,000 peacekeeping troops in 14 countries. Reforms may require up to $100 million more a year. U.N. members are already $2.4 billion behind in payments for peacekeeping operations.

But panel Chairman Lakhdar Brahimi of Algeria was optimistic. “Member states spend some $800 billion on their armies,” he said Wednesday. “I think they can find some little change for the organization.”

The U.S. owes $1.7 billion for past peacekeeping missions, according to the world body. Congress has objected to the idea of a standing U.N. army. But it might find the concept of a standby force acceptable and be able to reallocate U.N. funding from other areas, Jim Cunningham, the U.S. deputy permanent representative to the U.N., said Wednesday.

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Keeping the Peace

Key recommendations by a high-level panel that examined U.N. peacekeeping failures:

* Do not authorize U.N. peacekeeping missions without firm troop commitments from member states.

* Define “rapid and effective deployment” as getting troops on the ground within 30 days for traditional peacekeeping missions and within 90 days for more complex missions.

* Encourage member states to form several brigade-size forces of 5,000 troops each for deployment within 30 to 90 days.

* Establish revolving “on-call” lists of military and police officers to be available on seven days’ notice to help create new peacekeeping operations.

* Authorize the secretary-general to draw up to $50 million to start planning a peacekeeping operation.

* Assure that peacekeeping missions have enough funds for small “quick impact” projects aimed at improving the quality of life in targeted nations.

* Provide mandates that are impartial but not necessarily neutral, to respond if one party uses violence.

* Move civilian police out of military reporting chain.

Source: Times wire services

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.