Peacekeeping is Dying. Long Live Peacekeeping?

Hi and welcome to the Horn, a podcast from the International Crisis Group. I'm Alan Boswell and today's episode is a partnership with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation or FES. Today, I'm welcoming two guests to the show for a discussion on the future of peacekeeping operations in Africa. Samira Guide is back with us today. Samira is a regional security expert. She's the founder and senior analyst at the Mogadishu based Think Tank Balkees Insights. Joining her is Fred Bauma, a human rights activist and executive secretary of A buteli, a research institute based in Kinshasa. Samira Fred, welcome to the show. Thank you, Alan. Thank you, Alan. Great to be back. So I wanted to start off today. First of all, taking advantage of the fact that both of you were in Berlin in May at what they called the big ministerial meeting on peacekeeping where many countries around the world send their delegates to discuss peacekeeping, the future of it, etc. Our president, Dr. Comfort Arrow, was also there and wrote her reflections. It sounds like there was much interest in keeping peacekeeping alive despite its many challenges there in Berlin. You know, Africa has long been the main home of peacekeeping missions and there has not been a new UN mission in Africa in over a decade. You are Congolese, Samira you are from Somalia. Both of these countries have their own long experiments with evolving peacekeeping missions and mandates, sometimes stacked on top of each other. So I wanted to ask you, what was your reflections about this broader global, often very technical conversation about the challenges of peacekeeping and the future of peacekeeping? Samira, I'd like to start with you first. Thanks, Alan. It's a great question. I think coming together with not just Fred but also other colleagues from across the world earlier in Dakar, discussed in the same topic before this peacekeeping summit was quite interesting because I think it sort of confirmed the view that I'm having that there is a fatigue around peacekeeping missions and peacekeeping operations in general and there is a new trend globally that you know bilateral relations or bilateral options are better in resolving conflicts. But just my reflections from the ground, yes, that fatigue has sipped into Somalia. Somalia has never transitioned to a UN peacekeeping operation with the AU mission that's currently in place and I don't think it will ever transition to that. The discussion has over the past 10 years at least been transitioning from the AU mission to a Somali force because the conditions have never been right. So our situation is a little bit different but still I think it does apply that there's also great fatigue around any foreign forces in Somalia particularly regional or UN peacekeeping forces. I mean I have the same feeling about the fatigue of the UN peacekeeping and I remember in Dakar for example before the Berlin meeting we were in a room with a lot of experts on peace operations and they were asked what the future would look like in terms of the type of operation and none of them mentioned peacekeeping operation as one of the way to go. So that was an indication of the awareness in the room at least of the limit of the way peacekeeping mission operated in the environment of co-flinked management and resolution. But in Berlin my feeling was that there were a sense of urgency on the need to reform, to restructure both the UN and the in the UN peacekeeping should look like in the future. But at the same time a lot of uncertainty on the funding and the possibility of troops to contribute on the effectiveness of those mission and the size of them on the support of some of the major power in Berlin almost at the same time the new US government was you know announcing a lot of cuts to the UN and at the same time the UN Secretary General was announcing severe cuts to the budget. It sounds like from both of your reflections that in some ways the closer you get to the ground perhaps the more acknowledgement there is that the days of these big UN peacekeeping might be over. Samira you talked about people focusing more on bilateral deployments which is something we'll get to later but first of all at a sort of global level since you were both there why exactly did you get the sense that so many countries are on the world still want to save these big UN peacekeeping missions what is the sense of urgency coming from? In my opinion I think there is the sense that you know peacekeeping should be done through a set of norms and rules that are best defined by this global organization such as the UN or the regional organizations such as the the AU that there is more balance when it's done through this organization rather than when it's done through bilateral means or ad hoc means that they are more sustainable and more effective when it's done through you know the global means and I think the other reason where there's urgency is also that there is increased conflict everywhere and and I don't think any one regional or countries can really support the countries that are in peril at the moment so it's much easier if it were to be escalated to the global organizations. I think that's the real reason why they tend to think that that's the best place to to resolve this conflict but the realities are they are also then also not as effective especially for countries that are going through conflict they're not as effective and so there is that pushback I think from the ground compared to you know the rhetoric at the top. Yeah I mean on the urgency I think it's also due to the conflict situation globally we see especially speaking from African perspective we see the surge of conflicts in Congo in Sudan in Ethiopia in West Africa so there is a need they still need at least to protect the median to intervene in some in some sense but again and I agree with Samir there is also the realization that these missions are not providing to people on the ground the security and the solutions that they need and they expect from them and I think we see we see it in the sense of of a lot of frustration that people are showing towards mission in different places in Congo in Mali before the close of the mission so at the same time there is that's usually that is graded by the situation on the ground the response usually does not meet the expectations of the population they intend to serve. Right that's a very important point that these missions look like they promise security to local populations then of course have been unable to deliver and when that unfolds over decades you can see why you'd have fatigue at the local level as well sometimes at the higher international level. In terms of the reasons for the decline of peacekeeping obviously the world is changing from the days when a lot of these big UN peacekeeping missions were founded and part of that is geopolitical you do have more divisions at the UN Security Council than before China and Russia have often been skeptical about new missions the Trump administration is probably not keen on new missions but as you also mentioned host governments themselves have often been quite skeptical both the DR Congo and Somalia are among those who had various times have pushed for outside missions to leave or promised to leave within a period of time although in Somalia's case that probably looked especially aspirational why specifically are these host countries often growing impatient with these missions even as you know in some ways they seem to need them. I think from Somalia's perspective what's important is that the peace operation that exists right now the AU mission is supported by a UN mission and I think the challenges that we have had in Somalia has been the coordination between the missions and the government that coordination has not always worked in such a way that you know they're all meeting the objectives and moving in the same direction but I think the major challenge has been that the political objectives are always left to the to the sideline and we focus on military objectives in Somalia the AU mission has been very effective between 2007 when it started to around 2016 between 2007 and 2011 they were securing the capital and then from securing the capital to going out to the periphery and capturing big cities but then after that what remained was a political work reconciling Somali clans, reconciling Somali communities the political elite and trying to move the political agenda forward and that has been moved and tanned them with the military objectives so I think it was always going to come to this and so for the Somali people the mission continues but not real progress has been seen especially military since 2016-2017 and Fred you already mentioned that obviously you know local populations are quite upset often by the lack of effectiveness of some of these peacekeeping missions. Why do the governments themselves start to push back against these missions? Why is that started happening within efforts? I think there are many reasons speaking at least from the Congolese perspective. One thing to recognize is that the UN Peacekeeping mission here I had a lot of positive effects over time, if you look at the last 25 years because it's been here for a very long time. It's a secure piece in terms of how I conflict at the beginning. It's the National Reconciliation at some point. It was involved in many electoral helping the government to organize elections, the first elections and other elections. But I think the situation in DRC is keep evolving and the conflicts are keep emerging. So there are two frustrations, right? The frustration from the government and the frustration from the population. From the population I think especially in Eastern DRC is because the conflict emerged despite the presence of the UN Peacekeeping missions. So there is a feeling that they are not keeping peace as the promise. But on the government I think it varies, varies from legitimate frustration around the effectiveness of missions. But it's also political tensions between the missions and the government over things that are demanded from the population. Or over human rights considerations. I remember many of the Monusco clashes with the Congolese government were around the involvement of military officers who are flagged as human rights abusers who were rejected by the Monusco and that became a source of tension between the Congolese government and the UN. So I feel like missions also fund themselves in a very difficult balance to maintain between what the people are expecting from them and what sort of governments are expecting them to provide. And what they are mandated is authorizing them to do. So one trend that we at Crisis Group have noted in terms of peace making is that there has been this move from big comprehensive, very ambitious peace deals to more and more less ambitious, more narrowly focused ceasefires. In the 90s and early 2000s you had these really big comprehensive peacekeeping missions under UN mandates. And increasingly you have smaller missions, more narrowly focused. Do you think in some ways that this whole discussion about peacekeeping would be better suited if instead of talking about it as a grand hold, these big comprehensive peacekeeping missions? Instead, you know, we stopped using this catch all term like peacekeeping, which is itself often a euphemism nowadays. And we focused on what that usually means, which is foreign forces deployed into a fragile country usually with a multilateral mandate for various purposes, be that counter insurgency protection of civilians, etc. Do you think in some ways that this conversation has gotten to stale and that there would be utility in having more focused discussions, you know, how to make these external deployments in countries that need them or want them to make those more effective and focus on that instead? Well, I think we will not have any choice than to do exactly that. And we've seen in the context of DRC, for example, that the tendency was to go towards regional missions, the African regional force or the Sadek mission with a more specific mandate, a more targeted one. Even if at the end, it wasn't effective. But I also think there is a lot of challenges in this new way of approaching when mission one of them is the accountability of this. I think as much as we can have a lot of crises on the UN mission, at least their structure, their mandates, their mission, and the possibility to seek accountability from them is clear, the communication of local population in the civil society is clear. In this new way of conceiving missions, it doesn't seem to so far, at least the examples that I've seen in DRC. It doesn't seem to integrate a lot of aspects around the interaction with the civilian population, the protecting. It's a peer more and more is support to local government and less protection. And also sometimes the mandate is itself not very clear in the context of Eastern African regional force. For example, there was a whole discussion of months on whether they were there to enforce peace or to create this sort of buffer zone. I think it would be the future to have a lot of forecast missions, a lot with probably regional leading missions. But they will need to do better in terms of defining their mandates and also in measuring their success over time. The funding also remains a very big issue, even if the African Union or regional organization has started taking the lead, it has been so difficult to find these regional small missions. Yeah, funding is clearly a problem moving ahead, which is also why you could understand why these missions might take narrow or in narrow mandates. Samir, related to the question I asked Fred, would Somalia benefit if there was less discussions about peacekeeping peace operations overall in this abstract sense and more focus on specifically the needs that Somalia has, the need for a sort of externally supported regional force to support counter insurgency operations? Yeah, absolutely. I do think that I think that has been the challenge with the AAU mission and the U-admission that's currently in Somalia, has been the definition of what the priorities for the Somali people and what are the priorities I guess for the international community. I think for the international community counter insurgency operations have been the priority and the buildup of the security forces that would take over from these regional forces has not seen as much focus. Even though there's been a lot of investment, I don't think it's comparable to what has been spent on the counter insurgency operations and continues to be spent. So I think tailored missions would be the way to go, but I still don't see that being tabled. We see that we still see that basket of options whenever you speak of missions, a civilian component that's offering all this services that sometimes don't really respond to the actual needs on the ground. When you're facing this, this insurgency, so this is something I think the government constantly battles with the AUN, the UN. And I think it's what pushes governments to really push for bilateral or ad hoc operations that can quickly come in and solve whatever problem that is currently I think existing. And Samir, you mentioned a lot of investment counter insurgency, less investment in building up Somalia's own security sector that could replace those troops. There's fatigue all around, I would say, on all of these issues, but including on what is often called security sector reform or SSR, why has it not worked in Somalia in your estimation? Is it simply a lack of focus? Why has it proven such a challenge? There are those that want to train the forces to secure their borders and not all the forces again just to set a set number. So all these conflicting priorities meet on the ground in Somalia and Somalis without the resources take what they can from each of those forces. I think we have quite a number of forces that have been trained since 2007, but they've already received short-term training to face the insurgents. We haven't really looked at the long-term needs of the Somali National Army, the officer call how to sustain the force, the logistics that required the sustenance for forces. That's why you also see that when we do go on to offensive operations, it's very easy for Somali forces to capture, but it's very difficult for them to hold because then the long-term needs and the sustenance and the logistics and that process has to come into play and we really don't have the capabilities at the scale that is required to hold territory. I think also on the Somali side there is a fear of a national army because of what happened with the army that existed prior to 1991. So there is no vision for the Somali National Army for today's federal state. So you find people coming into power and defining how they want to use the army, whether it's for their security, whether it's for the security, or for the security. whether it's for fighting other local opponents, not treat necessarily the insurgents. The definition of the Somali national army, I think, is still out there. The vision that is required is not on paper, neither for the Somalis. And I think the priority should be the Somalis to fast define what they need of a national army and how it should operate before then tasking the international community. Turning over to you, you know, Eastern Congo has in some ways been a grand experiment in the multiple overlapping of many different missions and deployments with different mandates at given times. If the future looks increasingly something like this, are there ways to do it better? I imagine it has been a challenge often to keep all of those missions coordinated. They often have different mandates, they have troops that have different levels of orders from their home countries about how to engage and when to engage. So is there a future where this could be done better if this is the way things are going? The future in the context of recent DRC and what people expect, at least it's something that can address the armed group issue directly. So probably something that looks like a peace enforcement mission that has a very limited mandate, also a mandate limited in time. But I think in general, and to join the conversation that Samira was talking about, at the end of the day the Congolese government is the only one that can really ensure security in the long term of its population and I think it goes by performing the army, by making sure the troops are trained, are equipped, living in good conditions and are able to operate. We've seen the challenge of having a professional army in DRC for the last 30 years maybe and that has justified on one hand the UN presence or other missions presence but also recently private military companies and all that. Long term solution is training the army, having a professional army. Funding as we discussed is obviously a big problem and is very much up in the air in both the context and countries you guys are coming to us from. It's been well discussed, much beyond this podcast, all the challenges and reasons why peacekeeping missions are falling short, peacekeeping, peace operations, peace enforcement, whatever you want to call them. But what would happen in each of your respective countries if there is a cliff scenario or if not even a cliff scenario, something in which there is a more gradual pull out, if we do continue to see a decline of international and national support for these missions, does that world look like in both Somalia and Congo? Samira on Somalia first. Somalia has seen a period where there was no foreign forces and there was some sort of isolation from the international community and what that meant is communities who are armed or started armying, began to protect themselves. I do see that that situation has sort of improved. We do have federal member states, we do have most table entities more in the north but in the south I do see communities and clans beginning to form units that would protect themselves against whatever the challenge will be. It doesn't necessarily mean Al Shabaab will be the only challenge. There could be a resurgence of armed groups such as the warlords that existed in the 90s. There is conflicts between communities that still exist and have been pacified just by the existence of both the AU mission and Shabaab. We do see an uncertain future right now just because the financing question hasn't been clarified and the solution that's on offer, I think that the government is looking at, I think, is bilateral relations. It has had discussions, I believe, with some countries such as Uganda. There are countries that are investing heavily in the security such as Turkey that has already offered some sort of security for the infrastructure that it's laying in the ground that is quite costly. And so would that be the future? That I think is also something that's up for debate and that should be looked at keenly. If we did see the broader AU mission start to wind down or get much smaller due to funding but those bilateral deployments continued, what would be lost in that transition? I would say the fast losers would be the Somali public and the communities. There would be that loss of security for Somali communities, especially in the periphery, that has sort of been guaranteed by the AU forces, not by any federal or regional forces. In places that have truly flung out in by, by call, in places in Ghetto, in Iran, these places have really been secured by AU forces. All the presence of AU forces has hindered any expansion of either armed groups or al-Shabab. And so that would be the fast challenge and it would bring back whatever clan conflicts existed or that dominance that the clan dominance that plays out whenever there is no larger force. So that would be the first challenge. Second challenge would be the Somali state building agenda, which I think has faced quite a number of stumbles over the past few years. But still we have sort of seen the Somali government strengthening the federal member states strengthening. We are now at the current challenge around elections. But we do see that every four years there has been a transition in a movement forward of the Somali state building process. And that would, I think, completely halt that process and we would be back to, you know, sort of, you know, clan enclaves of federal member states enclaves protecting themselves and halting that state building agenda. So I think that would be on the strategic view that the main challenge. But I really see the challenge being more about security for communities as a more immediate challenge. Thanks, Samira. And Fred, over to you, if we did see Manusco lose a lot of its funding, for instance, and have to really wind down. And you did see even less of these perhaps regional deployments as well due to similar fatigue or funding. What would happen in Eastern Congo, do you think, as a result? I mean, it's difficult to imagine what the situation would look like in the current context, because in the middle of the drawdown, the mission, a conflict, a violent conflict erupt. In this context of them, the different conflict and others, I think it would be just catastrophic. But before these conflicts, you know, Manusco was in the process of living, and there was an aggrade plan with the Congolese government. And when they were drawing in Talanika province, for example, or in South Kivu, there is no indication that the situation got worse, especially if that's retreats is planned, and the security forces are prepared to take over. Now we are in a different situation, of course, where there is an active conflict. But at the same time, we've seen two regional mission deployments and withdraw without any consequences. So I don't know, it's for me just difficult to imagine what the Westcas would look like. If we did see peace negotiations either now or later make some headway, and for instance, you did have an actual deal involving M23 or more progress on Congo-Rawanda talks. And there was an actual peace deal to implement on the ground. Do you think you would need an outside force in a place like Eastern Congo, no matter who it comes from or where, is it difficult to imagine such a peace deal being implemented without there being some third party force? Or do you think we could be entering a world where that's just the reality? And I think it depends on what that external force will be asked to do, and for how long it will stay. And I think that's all the question. You may need, temporarily, a force to monitor the implementation of the agreement, to monitor the ceasefire, probably to protect the civilian. But I think that if that force is needed, it should be for a very short period of time and to allow the governments to take over. And I can imagine also, in a situation where the data agreement is implemented without a large force. So at the end of the day, I think it's a matter of how do we capacity national governments to provide security to their people rather than looking for external force. And without those capacity, there will be decisions, but also they can be administrative forces or local armed groups as we see a lot of them in the years. I think we will wrap it up there just thanks to you both because it's very hard to have conversations on this topic without it dwelling almost entirely in technical discussions and evading the political and this one didn't fall into that so thanks to you both for this discussion. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having us Alan. Thanks for listening. This episode was produced in partnership with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation or FES. You can learn more about Crisis Group or read our reports at crisisgroup.org. We will be on a quick break for the rest of August and the show will be back in September. Once again, I'm Alan Boswell and our producers are Mae Francis and Ida Holly Numpy. you