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During the early phase of this genicide the then Secretary-General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had in desperation at one point contacted a South African private military company called Executive Outcomes to possibly interceed. The company estimated the cost at circa $100 million per annum, for a force of 1,500 personnel. Due to concerns about the ethics in using private military companies, principly by US representatives, the contract was not signed. The company later estimated that they could have saved some 200,000 lives if it had been hired.
In 1995 EO demonstrated their potential when the government of Sierra Leone hired their services to quell an internal rebellion. The then government were facing an on-going rebel threat from the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone, more often simply known as the "RUF", who had a strangle hold upon the countries economy by occupying the rich diamond and oil producing Kono region. The government employed EO to take the area back and to restore law and order to the country at large. With a force of no more than 300 troops, EO successfully pacified the country at a cost estimated at $20 million per year (1995-7). However in 1997 the UN placed pressure upon the government of Sierra Leone, as the UN had taken the position that the use of a PMC, was considered at odds with the people's right to self-determination. Within six months of the termination of their contract, and the arrival of almost 18,000 conventional UN peacekeepers, at a cost of $604 million a year, the situation had reverted to its former state, with the additional loss of around 10,000 civilians lives. EO ceased trading on January 1st 1999.
Ironically in 1993 following the incident in Mogadishu, Somalia, the UN had already aproached a small private military company, called Executive Resources based in the UK, to evaluate a US proposal. This was for a UN controlled, trained and recruited military unit, drawn from non-governmental sources, to provide the UN Security Council with flexibility in its decision making. That same year, the United Nations Standby Arrangement Systems (UNSAS) was set up by Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali as a stop-gap, while in 1994, a permanent UN logistics base (UNLB) was established in Brindisi, Italy, supporting UN operations worldwide, plus operating as the UN's principle communications centre. By the middle of 1996 ER, was providing limited support for a specialised "big five" program called CONTACT, which by the middle of 1999, had been fully intergrated with the initial operational elements that form part of the United Nations Marine Corps Feasibility Study Program. Several "commands" were suggested (see below), but to date only the Star Gate Command element was ever established. Of the remainder only the Rapid Reaction Force, continues to be the prime candidate for serious consideration. For a fuller look at the UN's public thinking upon this topic see the article appended below the links.
| UNMCFSP |
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| Link | Description | Updated |
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Rapid Reaction Command
UNRRC | This Command is similar to the Dutch proposal of the mid 90's, serving as a "fire brigade" type of unit, capable of almost instant deployment anywhere in the world, for both military and non-military duties for up to thirty days. | 12/02/2004 |
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Disaster Relief Command
UNDRC | This Command is organised, trained and equipped specifically for humanitarian aid work. Search and rescue, medical, famine relief etc. The unit would be deployable within a maximum of 15 days. | 03/08/2003 |
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Peace Keeper Command
UNPKC | This Command fulfils the traditional peacekeeping role, and normally relieves the UNRRC within 15-30 days, providing cover for up to the first six months of such an operation, until the arrival of conventional UN forces from the member nations. | 07/01/2002 |
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Peace Maker Command
UNPMC | This is a specialised war fighting unit, trained for peace "making", it is intended to be deployable within 15 days in support of or to relieve the UNRRC, providing time for conventional UN forces to be assembled and deployed. | 12/10/2004 |
| United Nations Star Gate Command (UNSGC): This is currently the only operational Command of the UNMC, providing military, technical and analysis support as part of the UN's "CONTACT Program", concerned with the asessment and possible defeat of extraterrestrial threats, such as that posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO), that is asteroids, comets etc. Centralising and co-ordinating the efforts of the five principal nuclear nations and associated bodies, such as NASA, ESA, NEAT, Space Watch etc., for collective defense from "Extinction Level Events". The name comes from the inter-net portal concept and the idea of throwing up a barrier between Earth and the stars. Headquartered in New York, USA. | 04/02/2006 |
Looking to accelerate the UN's response to humanitarian emergencies and conflict, reformers have in recent years put forward a range of proposals. Although these vary greatly in the detail of their recommendations, two broad approaches can be identified. The first centres on the creation of a UN standing army, a permanent international force composed of individuals recruited, trained and deployed directly by the UN. The second - and at present more politically acceptable - group of options focuses instead upon strengthening standby arrangements, in which governments commit themselves to earmark ad hoc national military units for service in UN peace operations. These proposals are intended for a spectrum of scenarios, ranging from crisis management and humanitarian intervention to traditional and complex peacekeeping.
The Urquhart Proposal Sir Brian Urquhart, former Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, is a prominent contemporary advocate of a UN standing force, writing that "from a purely practical point of view, a highly trained rapid reaction force, permanently at the disposal of the Security Council, would be the most efficient way of spearheading international efforts" to deal with emergencies in the future. In recognition of the growing complexity of conflict in the post-Cold War era, Sir Brian has proposed that the force operate under entirely new rules of engagement, according to which the use of military force would correspond with neither peacekeeping nor enforcement doctrines. Debunking the commonplace objections relating to the cost of developing and maintaining such a body, he points out that a rapid reaction force would in fact be financially pragmatic. Had the modestly sized contingent requested for the Rwandan crisis been deployed within two weeks of Security Council Resolution 918, the cost would have amounted to $US 115 million; the failure to do so gave rise to an expenditure of $US 2 billion in humanitarian aid.
Coinciding with these objections is a robust fear that furnishing the UN with its own military would transform the Organisation into a world government with an independent political agenda and a corresponding capacity for aggression. At the core of this scepticism is a reluctance to disrupt the traditional relationship between the sovereignty of the nation state on the one hand and the use of force on the other. It has even been suggested that a UN standing army might emerge as a potential military rival to national forces and that this competition might precipitate an unwillingness on the part of national governments to share military technology with the UN force, with obvious implications for the efficacy of the latter.
However, these concerns erroneously presuppose an end to the Security Council's jurisdiction over the deployment of peace operations. The Security Council is an explicitly international body in which nation states retain ultimate authority over the decision to undertake any proposed action. Subsequently, a standing force would be unequivocally incapable of executing an operation to which any of the permanent members was adverse. Indeed, far from constituting an unconstrained 'world army', the standing rapid reaction force would be hampered by a number of the same faultlines which often impair contemporary UN peace forces. While a standing rapid reaction force could increase the speed with which the UN could respond to crises, it could do so only after the political decision to send a mission had been made.
Despite the spurious basis of most of these objections, it is nonetheless apparent that the political will necessary to establish a standing force at the UN does not currently exist. This ambivalence, it should be noted, is not restricted to the national level and extends to key policy-makers at the UN. Former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for example, dismissed the standing force as "impractical and inappropriate", while more recently Kofi Annan stated the following: "I don't think we can have a standing United Nations army. The membership is not ready for that."
Some of the more prominent initiatives to which the Secretary-General refers are outlined below. It should be noted that the distinctions made among the various proposals are somewhat arbitrary and that they should be seen as overlapping mechanisms for quickening reaction times to crises, rather than independent, competing solutions to the same problem.
United Nations Logistics Base (UNLB) In the early 1990s, a number of reforms were enacted which aimed to improve the UN Secretariat's capacity to plan, conduct and manage peace operations. Foremost among these was the creation, in 1994, of a permanent UN peacekeeping logistics base (UNLB) in Brindisi, Italy. The base serves to store and make shipments of material to and from UN peace operations worldwide and to operate as the UN relay centre for telecommunications networks connecting all UN peacekeeping missions, as well as several UN agencies and headquarters. The UNLB also maintains non-military supplies and equipment in two 'start-up kits', each of which is able to provide basic support for up to 100 persons for a maximum period of three months in a 'bare-base' environment. The merits of these kits derive from the fact that they can be issued at very short notice and suffice to support the opening of a new mission anywhere in the world.
The Brigade's first test arose in June 2000 with the peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Under the terms of the accord, which was mediated by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), it was agreed that a UN force should secure and monitor the disputed border between the two countries and SHIRBRIG officers were invited to participate in the planning for what became the UN Mission in Eritrea and Ethiopia (UNMEE). Drawing on personnel from all its participating member states, 2 a SHIRBRIG headquarters was deployed in November 2000, as were a Dutch infantry battalion, a Canadian infantry company and a Danish headquarters company. Notwithstanding a few operational teething problems, SHIRBRIG's involvement in this instance is widely considered to have been a success, with Kofi Annan naming SHIRBRIG a model arrangement from which other groupings of states could draw valuable lessons.
Largely as a response to its inability to address the series of Balkan crises in the early 1990s, the EU has been developing its military capacity and has accordingly made a number of recommendations to promote rapid and effective deployment. At the EU Helsinki Summit in December 1999, European leaders formulated the Helsinki Headline Goal (HHG), which articulated military targets for the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) for the period 1999 to 2003. Critical to the HHG was the aim to develop an EU Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF), consisting of 60,000 troops available at 60 days' notice and sustainable for up to one year. The ERRF is designed to give assistance to civilians threatened by a crisis, to intervene to separate warring factions and to respond to UN calls for peacekeeping forces.
EU governments recently concluded negotiations on a new Headline Goal for the period 2004 to 2010 which entails the creation of so-called elite 'battle groups'. 3 Floated by Britain and France at a bilateral summit in Le Touquet in February 2003 and later supported by Germany, the proposal envisages the creation of highly trained battalion-sized formations of 1,500 troops. These formations would be available within 15 days' notice, sustainable for up to 30 days and deployable for up to four months. These groups would be equipped to undertake operations in distant crises and would be prepared to conduct missions in extremely hostile environments, including mountain, desert and jungle terrain.
The African Union (AU) has likewise been exploring means of enhancing its role in the maintenance of peace and security in its sphere. Central to this process is a plan to create, by 2010, an African Standby Force (ASF) to keep or enforce the peace. This initiative involves the establishment of regionally-based standby brigades, numbering between 3,500 and 5,000 troops. At a meeting in Addis Ababa in May 2003, the African Chiefs of Defence Staff (ACDS) adopted a policy framework outlining the various conflict scenarios for the ASF. These included monitoring missions and peacekeeping operations under the auspices of the UN, the AU or regional peace support operations and envisaged possible peace enforcement or intervention missions in the future. The ACDS fixed long-term targets which coincide with the Brahimi timelines, but also made recommendations for the establishment of a rapid reaction military force which would be deployable within 14 days to avert genocide and other humanitarian disasters.
In June 1999, the UK government made a pledge to this effect by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the UN designating capabilities from the JRRF to multinational efforts to enhance international peace and security. Additionally, the UK's contribution of military personnel to UN peacekeeping operations has remained consistently over 400 since June 2001. That said, however, this is a notably low proportion of the total contribution of troops to UN peacekeeping operations, which in June 2004 stood at 48,988. Moreover, the UK Defence White Paper of September 2003 made no specific reference at all to the government's intention to allocate troops to UN operations, instead describing the UN simply as a forum for international debate and placing an emphasis on its limitations. By focusing on its commitments to NATO, the EU and even coalitions of willing states, serious concerns must be raised in respect of the UK government's support for and participation in UN operations.
Though Chapter VIII of the UN Charter encourages the participation of regional organisations in the promotion of international peace and security, regional rapid reaction forces suffer from the same setbacks which tarnish the legitimacy and viability of regional peacekeeping organisations more broadly. Although regional organisations are often thought to possess a comparative advantage in peace operations - by virtue of an assumed familiarity with the terrain, language and history of the crisis zone - it is debatable whether regional bodies are best placed to serve as honest brokers to a conflict. On the one hand, states contiguous to a dispute are likely to have a genuine interest in preventing or quelling conflict, as crises often engender refugee flows and environmental problems not easily contained by political borders. On the other hand, however, neighbours to a crisis often develop an interest in its perpetuation, and are able to exploit conditions of disorder under the pretext of a regional intervention. 4
For these reasons, an absence of UN oversight during regional peace operations could have dangerous implications for both the efficacy and legitimacy of these missions more generally. The EU has indicated its preference for securing UN authorisation for ERRF operations, but it has also reserved the right to take action without such explicit support. Similarly, accounts of the ASF have predicated AU-led missions upon the endorsement of the Security Council. However, the African Union's Constitutive Act is somewhat ambiguous on this point: Article 4, which cites the principles of the Union and proclaims its right of intervention in cases of genocide and war crimes, does not mention the United Nations. The AU's commitment to the UN is articulated by a fleeting reference in Article 3, in which the AU pledges to take "due account of the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights".
Serious legal limitations must also be considered when assessing the merits of the above initiatives. The scope of SHIRBRIG, for example, is restricted to peacekeeping under Chapter VI. It cannot, therefore, be used for fast-breaking crises that necessitate humanitarian intervention or preventive deployments with Chapter VII Security Council mandates. Its ability even to enter a theatre is traditionally dependent on the consent of the parties to the conflict - a serious consideration given the marked proliferation of intricate, internal conflicts in which belligerents themselves are often difficult to identify, let alone contact.
With the advent of multiple organisations having similar spheres of responsibility, the prospect of duplication has become a cause for concern. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), by way of illustration, is itself currently developing a rapid reaction force similar to the ERRF. It is imperative that existing organisations fulfilling useful roles are not made redundant and that overlapping domains of activity be avoided in order to discourage waste, confusion and harmful contradiction of purpose.
Projects such as those outlined above inevitably favour those countries with the material capacity to participate. This works to crystallise an international system which is already skewed to the detriment of the countries of the impoverished South. SHIRBRIG, for instance, is meant to reflect a universal composition. Yet, of the 16 member states currently contributing to SHIRBRIG, most are wealthy and from the North - far from the broad participation anticipated.
Researched, written and edited by Tim Pippard & Veronica Lie
July 2004
ASF African Standby Force
AU African Union
DPKO Department of Peacekeeping Operations
ERRF European Rapid Reaction Force
ESDP European Security and Defence Policy
EU European Union
HHG Helsinki Headline Goal
JRDF Joint Rapid Deployment Force
JRRF Joint Rapid Reaction Forces
MOU Memorandum of Understanding
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
OAU Organisation of African Unity
SHIRBRIG Standby High Readiness Brigade
UNAMIR United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda
UNLB United Nations Logistics Base
UNMEE United Nations Mission in Eritrea and Ethiopia
UNRDSF United Nations Rapid Deployment Police and Security Force
UNSAS United Nations Standby Arrangements
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