France’s excuse -- the Bosnia debacle

WHEN FRENCH officials have been pressed to explain why they have agreed to provide only 200 troops to the 15,000-member international force intended to police the cease-fire agreement in Lebanon, they have fallen back on ancient peacekeeping history. We can’t get entangled in another Bosnia, they protest. A number of other European nations have expressed similar reservations about sending troops, which puts the entire operation in peril.

Well, yes, Bosnia was very bad. Starting in 1992, U.N. peacekeepers -- mostly European -- were given a humanitarian mandate and deployed into the middle of a monstrous civil war. Sworn to preserve their own supposedly sacred neutrality, the peacekeepers watched helplessly while Serbs butchered Bosnian civilians. The U.N. force was overmatched, outgunned and ultimately humiliated.

But that was 11 years ago. Thanks in part to that shameful episode, and to debacles in Somalia in 1992-93 and Rwanda in 1994, the United Nations has learned quite a bit about peacekeeping. It has grown accustomed to intervening between states and warlords, to wading into chaotic situations, to soberly assessing likely threats, and to bringing real force to bear in the face of menace.

There still have been dreadful failures of will and of tactics, but important successes as well. In Sierra Leone, peacekeepers protected a desperately beleaguered government, disarmed rebels and have now withdrawn in favor of a national army and police force. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indian and Pakistani troops along the eastern border use helicopter gunships against the militias that terrorize the region. They’ve scarcely pacified the area, but last month their forceful presence made it possible for Congo to hold its first election in 40 years.

In the pre-Bosnia era, peacekeeping was a rather genteel affair, and soldiers from Canada, Poland, Sweden, Ireland and other Western nations made up the “glue” of each mission. But in the aftermath of the nightmares of the 1990s, Western military officials lost their enthusiasm for U.N. missions. Peacekeeping became, with a few exceptions, a Third World affair. (An EU force that is currently working in support of U.N. troops in Congo is one of those exceptions.) Third World armies, but not Western ones, have assimilated the protocols of “robust peacekeeping” over the last five or six years.

Which is why it’s not surprising that it has mostly been European military officials, and not those in Muslim countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, who have balked at serving in Lebanon. The excuse has been that the mission’s rules of engagement aren’t clarified.

But the rules -- which the French took the lead in brokering -- have been leaked in recent days, and they aren’t all that murky. They bear little relation to the Balkan straitjacket, where soldiers were not permitted to shoot unless shot at, and even then they rarely raised their weapons.

Peacekeepers in Lebanon would have a mandate to use force to protect themselves or civilians, or to confront Hezbollah members or Israeli soldiers who refuse to disarm or to stand down. (They will not, however, be authorized to hunt for hidden weapons.)

In fact, if this new mission resembles the Bosnia fiasco, it’s not in regard to the governing principles but in the dismaying and sometimes farcical mechanics of compiling the peacekeeping force. In 1993, when the Security Council established “safe havens” in six Bosnian cities, the U.N. peacekeeping department recommended a commitment of 34,000 troops, but the Security Council authorized only 7,600. The head of peacekeeping -- then Kofi Annan -- strove desperately to raise even this transparently inadequate force from European armies. Finding troops to defend the volatile town of Srebrenica proved particularly difficult, which is why Serb paramilitary forces had only 600 lightly armed Dutch soldiers to contend with when they carried out their notorious pogrom in July 1995.

A mad scramble to come up with troops sufficiently numerous, well-equipped and professional to carry out Security Council mandates is the one real constant of peacekeeping over the years. It happened when the U.N. finally sent troops into Rwanda in the summer of 1994; it happened two years ago in Haiti; it will happen once again if a force is ever sent to Sudan to protect the villagers of Darfur. And one reason for this grim spectacle is that the world’s most competent armies have been missing in action just as demands on the U.N.’s peacekeeping burden have skyrocketed. (Should the Darfur and Lebanon forces be fully staffed, the U.N. will have 110,000 soldiers deployed in the field, far more than any other army save that of the United States.)

Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to worry about sending troops into southern Lebanon. Israel, deeply wounded by the failure to reach its objectives, is prepared to continue fighting. Hezbollah will hide its weapons; it will not yield them up. France, which over the last two years has joined the U.S. in forcing Syria to release its grip on Lebanon, has reason to worry about Syrian aggression.

But the conflict in Lebanon is a global, and not merely a regional, problem. That’s why France, along with the U.S., took the lead in crafting a solution in the first place. European foreign ministers will be meeting Friday in Brussels in the hopes of assembling at least a minimally adequate force. If they fail, no one will be able to blame the U.N. this time.