MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Victoria Holt, senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, discusses the challenges that peacekeeping forces have faced in genocidal situations, and what that implies for the hybrid UN-AU force in Darfur and for the future.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention. This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic your host for this week’s program. With me today is Victoria Holt, the senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center where she co-directs the Future of Peace Operations program which addresses U.S. policy in international capacity for advancing security and stability in war time societies. Thank you for joining us.
VICTORIA HOLT: It’s a pleasure to be here, Bridget.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Can you begin today by giving us an overview of the various ways that armed forces have been used in response to situations where massive human rights abuses or genocidal violence is being committed?
VICTORIA HOLT: Well that’s an important question and I should probably start by suggesting that armed forces can certainly play many roles. They could provide broad presence and a deterrence to potential actors who may provide attacks on civilians. They can also be more active, providing active protection in physical areas such as camps, villages, et cetera. They can also interdict and help disarm belligerents and spoilers. And at times they can even go up to the edge of what has traditionally been considered war-fighting strategies to try and prevent physical violence against civilians. But I must point out that there are very few examples of the world’s militaries being organized and sent explicitly to halt mass atrocities and genocides. It’s not that they can’t do these kinds of missions, but usually forces find themselves on the ground whether such violence occurs rather than being sent in expressly to try and halt it.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And when missions have gone in and have had included in their mandate some sort of civilian protection capacity, well what kind of challenges do they face on the ground?
VICTORIA HOLT: Well it’s interesting because we’ve done a study of what the military understands protection strategies to be. And I should just maybe back up for a second and say that much of the debates about how to protect civilians come out of the 90s, and some of the failed efforts by peacekeeping forces to deal with what became genocidal situations, what’s probably best known as Rwanda in 1994 for example, where a small UN force became completely overwhelmed. Their mandate, of course, was to help a peace process move forward. But it turned that many of those who they were supposedly supporting in the peace process became genocidal themselves and turned themselves against the civilian population. But protection strategies also became challenged in the 90s from the humanitarian community that struggled to provide support to civilians that had been displaced by conflict, and found that even if they could feed and clothe and take care of people that they couldn’t themselves provide security if violence grew. And so it’s important to recognize that some of the protection strategies that we traditionally used in the 90s by either the humanitarian community or what has been traditionally peacekeeping don’t necessarily work when you have large-scale violence and mass atrocities.
The next step then is, okay, if you want to use military actors to provide protection against mass atrocities and genocide, what do we know about what they can do? And this is a relatively new field. Militaries traditionally, as prepared by their governments, are trained to protect their own countries or to fight other belligerents or even soldiers to provide support to the national interests. So when you send military in for humanitarian aims you have to be very clear about what you expect them to do. And that is not a field that is incredibly well-developed. And if you want I could get into more of the details of that. But maybe just simply to say that if you go and read what peacekeeping for example is meant to do, it was originally meant to go and help support a peace agreement or political process that was already underway. In other words that the local people had come to some sort of peace and the peacekeepers, military people, were sent in just to provide back-up and support. They’d oversee a cease-fire or give support to elections. And their roles have grown. Their roles have grown such that now when you read UN resolutions there’s an incredible amount of tasks peacekeepers, military peacekeepers, should do. And one of them is to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence. But our investigations, and as I mentioned we’ve written a book on this called The Impossible Mandate? Military Preparedness, the Responsibility to Protect and Modern Peace Operations, found that very few governments had actually provided guidance to their own militaries deployed in such peacekeeping missions as to how they were to provide physical protection to civilians as atrocities grew.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Are there some particular examples that you think illustrate some of the difficulties? For instance in MONUC, the UN force that’s now in Congo, which has been taking a stronger interpretation of its civilian protection mandate, what are some of the distinct problems that they have run into?
VICTORIA HOLT: Ah, that’s a perfect question. Well MONUC, as you mention was supported actually first over seven years ago into eastern Congo which the end of the Clinton administration it was called the third world war by then Secretary of State Madeline Albright. Multiple actors from around the region, multiple rebel groups within the country had wrecked havoc on this nation. And particularly in the east there was a difficult border area with Uganda and Rwanda, and fights over natural resources. An international rescue committee has documented that more than four million people have died there since 1998. So into all of this the UN first sent some observers and then a larger peacekeeping force and today it’s one of the larger peacekeeping forces in the world. And initially it was sent in to help support a peace process. But beginning in 2003 there was a huge escalation of violence. Peacekeepers themselves were killed unexpectedly when they were attacked by rebels. Many of the peacekeepers who were sent in had been trained as guards not as military who were expecting to use force. Civilians even came and showed up on UN compounds and didn’t know what to do with them. So some of the challenges have included, for one, what does a peacekeeper do when civilians are attacked? Do they use force to protect the civilians where they flee? Do they go after bad guys? And there’s been some creative work.
The French led a mission there in the summer of 2003 for a few months and provided security to one particular area within the Ituri region. And that gave a little breathing room to the UN to put in a more forceful use of peacekeepers primarily from Asia. And these folks have used every strategy from using helicopters to try and track and go after some of the rebels who had threatened the civilian population, to handing out pots and pans to villagers and telling those villagers to bang on them loudly if they felt under threat because they didn’t have enough radios to hand out. But that they would then respond and tried to provide security. But the chronic problems include a lack of capacity. Frequently peacekeeping missions don’t have enough mobility. They frequently don’t have the well-trained troops and sufficient capacity that they need. And they frequently don’t have clear mandates. They have that from the UN, but they’re not always easily translatable. What does it mean to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence? I could give you more examples, but those are a few.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: The emerging principle of an international responsibility to protect civilians, particularly in extreme cases of genocide or ethnic cleansing, has laid out some criteria for when military intervention would be considered reasonable. But there are also a lot of hopes pinned on the potential for military forces. Is there a gap between the expectations for what military can achieve? Are some of these larger goals of protection achievable? And if so what would have to change to make them realizable in terms of really protecting civilians who are facing intentional targeting?
VICTORIA HOLT: That’s very interesting, and I think you’re referring to an emerging concept in the norm called the responsibility to protect. And as you may well know and your listeners may know, this is a concept that came out of a report in 2001 that looked at how to balance both the sovereignty of nation states with the necessity of protecting civilians who come under the threat of mass atrocities or genocide. And that principle was recognized at the UN World Summit in 2005 and broadly endorsed, but without necessarily the criteria that you refer to being laid out for what actual reaction. So in short the world said, okay, we’re going to hold countries responsible for protecting their own people from mass atrocities and genocide. But if they don’t, and we know that they’re not, then the world has a responsibility themselves to respond.
And I lay out this framework because military response is only one of many ways that the world can first hold accountable countries that don’t protect their own people and second, potentially respond. And there’s many efforts underway to try and analyze better everything from how you do early warning, how you understand when violence is growing, what kind of diplomatic efforts can be made, what kind of civilian humanitarian-based strategies exist to provide protection to civilians, and I would even say that up to and including military roles. And military roles can range from as I said earlier, not necessarily even using force. But if they deploy in the right place and they help provide presence they can help provide a level of security or maybe reduce early violence.
Just let me give you an example. If for example in Rwanda in January of ’94, before the genocide really started later that spring around April and May, if a reinforcement of the UN mission had gone in would that have been able to provide enough security to have the genocidaires there challenged and stand down? Some have argued taking down hate radio, for example, would have made a difference. So we’re trying to discuss how do you make “responsibility to protect,” a new norm, operational.
There is a larger military role. I think there also are some gaps. There are gaps in basic knowledge. We need to learn the lessons from the field on how militaries have successfully at either the tactical level or in the large strategic level played a role in protecting civilians either from deterrence from actual providing physical protection to an area like a village, from strategies such as breaking up checkpoints, providing security along roads and borders, all the way up to and engaging belligerents and spoilers who themselves are the major threats and who either are disorganized, well- run or are organized and require a higher level of interaction. And as I said earlier most militaries aren’t designed specifically to look at those challenges. It’s somewhat of a new field. And it’s one that we need to encourage countries to take a look at so that when they provide forces to missions with the ambition to halt atrocities that they have some sense of what the potential challenges are and their own potential strategies are to succeed.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: But you think it is possible?
VICTORIA HOLT: Yes. Yes, imminently. And I think it’s sort of an exciting time. We watch the United Nations for example on one hand balance an incredible agenda. They’re handling more peacekeeping missions than ever in the history of the UN. However, they are beginning, hopefully successfully to develop, for example, doctrine. Their training is improving. They’re looking at how to improve the leadership of these missions. These are all basic tools that nations themselves usually use when they’re preparing missions. One of the existing gaps, however, is a reaction capacity. I don’t think any country would send in its military to do a mission and not back it up, yet the UN mission that’s going with the African Union into Darfur basically has no back-up. They will be sent in. They have a mandate to protect civilians under imminent threat, yet if violence grows in that environment if they are even able to deploy, I don’t know that there’s any promise of back-up to them beyond their troops on the ground. And that’s an enduring gap that we still face.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Can you talk a little bit more about the hybrid UN AU force for Darfur. It was agreed on last summer and I don’t believe there are yet any troops on the ground. But if you know more or you can tell us, what are some of the delays that are keeping them from fully deploying?
VICTORIA HOLT: Oh yes, well, as you know there’s the current African Union mission in Darfur AMIS, and that’s got a little over I think seven to eight thousand troops. Many of them will stay and will be what is called “re-hatted” and join the UN AU force that’s supposed to deploy at the beginning of the year. There has been huge problems though. There isn’t really a clear peace agreement in Darfur. Negotiations going on now with rebels have not gone well. Violence continues on the ground. But also the UN has had a very difficult time, not just recruiting for a peacekeeping force to go in, but to getting even basic equipment. They have been asking for weeks now for 24 helicopters, just 24 helicopters. And they haven’t been able to get countries to volunteer these helicopters. They even need trucks. And they need broad support across all sectors because Darfur is a very difficult region to operate in. It’s got little infrastructure so they’re going to need more support than most peacekeeping missions. But the basic problem is that there’s no peace to keep. The UN has a very hard time operating. And the government of Sudan has rejected numerous countries such as from Scandinavia, Nepal, and Thailand who offered up personnel to take part in the peacekeeping mission. And they said, “No, we don’t want these countries to participate.” So in a sense that too weakens the mission from the beginning. I think at this point the head of the expected mission says that no one anticipates the full force to be there even within the first six months if even within the first year. And that is very troubling for those on the ground who need their support.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I know the original agreement was that the force would be predominantly African. Is there the capacity on the continent to man this force?
VICTORIA HOLT: I think there’s the capacity on the continent to send personnel, but depending on what you want them to do there’s a wide range of capacity from Africa, some very skilled, some less so. And I think that it hinders the operation to not enable countries outside of Africa to participate in it.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And just one final question. In your view what is the future of the use of military means or armed peacekeepers for civilian protection, what kind of changes do we see coming in the next five to ten years?
VICTORIA HOLT: Well I will be optimistic and say that the world will recognize the peacekeepers will have to be better trained, resourced, supported, and their leadership will have to grapple with how do all the actors in the peace operation including the military, in real time help protect civilians from physical violence. And it’s an important thing to do. And they’ll need to take the tools, doctrine, training, leadership, and exercises to work through what this looks like and feed that back into the support for these missions, and be honest with countries that are sending their troops. Most peacekeeping missions will never face this challenge, but some of them as you mentioned in eastern Congo and certainly in Sudan and future missions down the road, need to be prepared if people come to attack villages that they can protect them.
I think we also need to be clear that this is not a traditional UN role and if the world has ambitions to protect civilians from mass atrocities and genocide we need to get much smarter at preventing it in the first place. Engaging in the diplomatic efforts too often is what falls short for halting these problems. But then if all else fails we need to have better trained forces who are specifically smart about how to take on strategies to halt atrocities. And that should include countries outside the UN framework that can actually respond in real time to such humanitarian crises.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Thank you very much for sitting with me today.
VICTORIA HOLT: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
