UN Peacekeeping Missions can provide hard currency for Africa’s cash starved central banks, can buttress military expenditures while at the same time ensuring that coup prone army units are otherwise occupied. In the early 1990’s, the bulk of UN peacekeeping battalions were comprised of US and European personnel. Cambodia, the Sinai Peninsular and the Balkans were the main theatres of operations. Of the 54 casualties suffered while serving under the ‘blue helmet’, 41 were American, Canadian and European soldiers.

The abortive Somali mission in 1993 changed all that. Sustaining its first multiple casualties in peace time operations, the US pulled back on its commitment to supply manpower and substituted this with cash. The vacuum was immediately filled by African countries supplying infantry units on extended contract to UN headquarters.

Developing nations now contribute more than 75% of the 30,000 troops involved in 15 missions world-wide while the US, Japan and the European countries - supplying scant numbers of ground troops - pay 85% of the UN’s $3bn peacekeeping budget.

As ever riskier operations result in increasing casualties, this arrangement is now coming under critical scrutiny. “You can’t have a situation where some nations contribute blood and others only money,” Algeria’s former Foreign Minister Mr. Laked Brahimi said while heading a UN panel that studied the world body’s peacekeeping operations, “That’s not the UN we want”

The moral question

As the number of UN peacekeeping missions surged in the last decade, the composition of active duty units serving under the UN flag took a profound turn - less professionally trained Third World soldiers increasingly being the troops of choice. This has raised the question: “What brought about the change and can the use of Third World troops alone be sustained on a moral basis, particularly as casualties in future operations mount?”

Almost as important is the question of whether deaths of African and Asian soldiers are less high-profile, resulting in fewer political recriminations in their home countries. “Western governments would certainly lose elections should there be a Somali or Rwanda repeat,” A US State Department official suggested to African Business, on condition of anonymity: “Certainly no US president could countenance risking such a possibility.”

So why is it deemed acceptable for US personnel to be involved in European conflicts like Kosovo or Bosnia, but not in Sierra Leone or on the Ethiopian-Eritrean front where the combatants are Africans?

“The Balkan countries have sizeable resident populations (in the US) and their voting power requires American military involvement,” the same official admitted. Furthermore, he pointed out, “such operations are under NATO auspices, and therefore more palatable than under UN mandates.”

Early UN peacekeeping efforts in the 1990’s saw the lead role being taken by the US, its military hierarchy anxious to erase the stigma of its Vietnam defeat.

Flaunting their technical superiority and the availability of highly trained personnel, the US military command assumed that its efficient organisation and massive firepower would limit risks. This analysis was held to be particularly valid in Third World trouble- spots. The thinking was that no opposition would dare challenge the military might of the world’s only super power.

Taking their cue from their senior NATO partner, Britain, Belgium and Canada followed suit and supplied fighting men to police the Sinai Peninsula following the March 1979 peace treaty signed between Israel and Egypt.

Turning point

The 1994 peacekeeping fiasco in Somalia proved the turning point in this doctrine. Forty four American marines killed in the streets of Mogadishu in a particularly brutal display of savagery, directly beamed into American living rooms through the wonders of modern communications - satellite TV - caused a cataclysmic change of mind set. For the first time US troops were under attack by loosely-allied militiamen holding no allegiance to a central authority that could be held responsible and punished.

In the wake of these changing circumstance, President Bill Clinton immediately signed a presidential directive that imposed strict limitations on US participation in any international peacekeeping operations. American troop deployment with the UN plunged from 3,300 to zero today.

This reduction in American support was quickly emulated by the Europeans when 10 Belgian soldiers were executed by Hutu extremists in Rwanda during the 1994 genocidal killing of more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. “The Belgians and Americans had a searing experience in Rwanda and Somalia,” Britain’s UN ambassador Jeremy Greenstock stated in explaining his country’s reluctance to military involvement on the African continent. “The French and the British haven’t had quite the same experiences in recent years, but could easily have the same difficulties.”

Human outrage

Peacekeeping operations in African countries have proved problematic. Sierra Leone where a brutal civil war by the Revolutionary United Front of Foday Sanko has garnered international headlines - and the Congo where five nations are involved in fighting to control that vast county’s huge resources - have no legitimate authority which can justifiably be supported by the world body. Human outrage at the brutality of these conflicts has been the sole raison d’etre behind the Security Council’s authorisation of peacekeeping involvement.

The case of Angola also illustrates the futility of UN peacekeeping missions in ethnic, rather than territorial conflicts. That there is no winner or loser in a tribal struggle for power has become patently obvious.

The western powers are now universally opposed against involvement in Africa, only Britain supplying off-shore training support to the Sierra Leone government on a strictly limited basis. Nigerian, Kenyan, Ghanaian and Indian troops form the bulk of the 13,700 military personnel in the Sierra Leone operation and as casualties mount, these countries are already indicating their intention to withdraw should the conflict not be resolved hastily.

American officials acknowledge that their policy of ‘no active troops’ on the front line of the African continent could be viewed as discriminatory. Conceding that most of the 65,000 peacekeeping troops under NATO command in Kosovo and Bosnia are from the US and Europe, they deflect accusations of racism by pointing out that Washington provides the UN with 65 police in the Balkans, 36 military observers world-wide and has pledged to contribute six military observers to monitor the truce agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

“We are not responsible for the reluctance of other nations to be involved,” State Department officials conclude. “Europeans take their cue from the US. They won’t contribute troops if the Americans don’t.” Chester Crocker, former US Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs agrees, pointing out that European governments are bound by NATO commitments. “In any case,” he points out “some of the most effective peacekeepers in Africa come from neighbouring countries where their cultural affinity is an advantage.”

The West is no better

His viewpoint has merit, some agree. Soldiers from the world’s most technologically advanced militaries have proven no better at suppressing ethnic conflicts than their lesser equipped African counterparts, particularly where the violence is based on a country’s tribal divisions.

“Western soldiers are no more successful than the Nigerians or Indians in Somalia and Sierra Leone,” David Malone, president of the International Peace Academy in New York states. “But their very absence almost certainly preordains the peacekeeping mission’s failure.”

Many African governments are eager to contribute troops to the United Nations for more than monetary reasons alone. Not only do such missions provide valuable military training at the UN’s expense, they also highlight a country’s image while raising morale among troops paid higher salaries than those at home. Overseas operations also result in the upgrading of equipment, most supplied by the US as part of its contribution toward the military requirements of regional powers prepared to fill the gap.

Nigeria, with its major role in Sierra Leone, is one such example. New shipments of modern assault rifles and armoured personnel carriers worth many millions of dollars are being speedily approved by the US Congress. Uganda, another favoured African state, has also been supplied with such equipment, although their use in the Congo conflict is causing a major rethink.

Recent fatalities have also caused some African countries to rethink their commitments, most notably Kenya and Nigeria. The UN’s preparedness for actual combat operations has come into question with the deaths of 21 Kenyan, Nigerian, Guinean, Zambian and Indian troops ambushed by RUF rebels in Sierra Leone raising doubts as to the viability of UN operations.

Shortfall of troops

Lacking aerial support and a clear mandate to use maximum force, UN military commanders contend that such fatalities are almost certain to rise, resulting in increasingly strident outcries from citizens in the troop deploying nations. Such deaths will certainly result in more African governments having to decide whether the hard currency inflow from such commitments are worth the risk to their troops.

“We know that the UN’s most challenging operations face desperate shortfalls in terms of troops, equipment and training,” US deputy representative to the United Nations, James Cunningham told the Security Council on November 13. “Unless we move decisively,” he continued, “the core peacekeeping function of the United Nations will fail”

Africa has by far the most conflicts of any continent - Angola, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Somalia and the Congo stand out. Africa’s citizens, and future generations, can only hope that peace negotiations like that undertaken by Nelson Mandela in the Burundi conflict will become the rule rather than the exception.

While monetary inflows from UN peacekeeping duties provide relief to the Kenyan, Nigerian and Zambian exchequers, the cost of such conflicts far outweigh the receipts.

Blood money is no substitute for peace and economic progress, and subcontracting Third World soldiers, while rich Western nations bear the financial cost is no way to balance budgets.

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