The blue berets: sometimes the United Nations peacekeeping efforts prevent or resolve grisly conflicts; sometimes they don't.

There's no question that the United Nations has been hugely successful in solving some of the world's worst conflicts.

Success was achieved in El Salvador, where the United Nations brought about a peaceful agreement between the government and a rebel group in 1991. This ended a civil war that ravaged the country through the 1980s. The UN continued to provide humanitarian aid for the natural disasters that struck the country from 1998 to 2001.

In Cambodia, the UN arrived in 1991 with a force of more than 20,000 troops, police, and civilians. The multibillion dollar budget made the Cambodian mission one of the biggest peacekeeping operations in its history. UNTAC's (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia) job was enormous: it set out to keep order after the end of two decades of hostilities that killed one sixth of the Cambodian people. In addition, the UN had to clear landmines, and prepare for national elections, which took place in 1993. The Cambodian peace agreement gave UNTAC the power to create an interim coalition government, oversee key government ministries, remove Cambodian officials from office, manage the economy, and install its own media.

As UNTAC commander General John Sanderson explained: "Peacekeeping missions in the past just monitored ceasefires. In Cambodia we have a political objective--to create a democratic government through free and fair elections."

Another successful mission took place in Mozambique, where a UN-brokered peace ended 15 years of civil war and ushered in free elections in 1994. Mozambique became a model of peaceful reconciliation and economic stability, although it continued to suffer from natural disasters.

But, critics of the UN also point to its failures in East Timor, Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Rwanda was among the most horrific situations. Despite warnings and urgent pleas for help from the peace mission commander, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, the UN failed to stop a genocide in 1994 that claimed 800,000 lives. A subsequent inquiry determined that the massacres could have been slowed down, if not prevented, had General Dallaire's mission been allowed to act in the first hours of the killings. So, the blame was placed not on General Dallaire but on the international community for failing the people of Rwanda.

In 2003, a newspaper headline read: "UN peacekeeping: a death sentence." The article was about the Congo (formerly Zaire) where years of multinational war had claimed more than three million mostly-civilian lives. This death toll is the highest in any conflict since the Second World War. A UN peacekeeping operation was set up in 1999 but critics say it wasn't large enough to stop the war that left the country's weakest people to die of starvation and disease as they fled their homes to escape the conflict. The author points out that similar fates had befallen the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone where many died of disease and malnutrition while inadequate international peacekeeping efforts floundered.

While many agree that the UN needs to be reformed, the nature of peacekeeping has become more complex. As one expert put it, starting in the early 1990s, missions were set up in countries "where there's no peace to keep, where there is an unstable or even dangerous security environment." So, the strategy shifted from finding solutions that avoided conflict to sending in armies of "peacekeepers" who go into combat.

According to Paul Heinbecker, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations in 2001, UN peacekeeping used to involve small, lightly-armed forces. They would go to a location to provide a buffer between two fighting nations who wanted to resolve their differences. Now, he says, troops face far greater risks as they enter brutal civil conflicts with multiple warring factions.

More and more, the peacekeeping job is handed to developing countries such as Bangladesh or Nigeria whose troops may be ill-equipped and poorly trained. Even Canadian troops have been guilty of atrocities: in Somalia, for example, a bound 16-year-old Somali youth, Shidane Arone, was beaten to death by Canadian soldiers in March 1993.

The reputation of the United Nations peacekeeping missions further plummeted in March 2005. That's when an internal report revealed that some troops victimized the vulnerable populations they were sent to help. Instead of easing the plight of people in war-torn countries, they were accused of sexual abuse and rape. The misconduct of UN forces took place in such devastated areas as Haiti, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Cambodia, East Timor, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Congo, for example, the report says, "sexual exploitation and abuse mostly involves the exchange of sex for money (on average $1 to $3 per encounter), for food (for immediate consumption or to barter later) or for jobs."

The report (A Comprehensive Strategy To Eliminate Future Sexual Exploitation and Abuse In United Nations Peacekeeping Operations) notes that "sexual exploitation and abuse by military, civilian police, and civilian peacekeeping personnel is not a new phenomenon."

Alarm about peacekeepers becoming involved in sex trafficking first became widespread during the 1990s. At that time, it was revealed that soldiers under the UN flag were customers in brothels run in Bosnia and Kosovo, where women were sold into forced prostitution. It's thought that as many as 2,000 women have been forced into sex slavery in Kosovo.

The report recommends that peacekeepers accused of sexual misconduct should be court-martialed in the country where the offence took place and the alleged victims could appear as witnesses. (Now, they are returned to their own countries where some say they may be dealt with more leniently if at all.) It was also recommended that peacekeepers submit to DNA tests to determine whether they have sexually abused women. This would also make it possible to force those who have fathered children while on missions to pay support. Another suggestion is that a trust fund be set up for women who have been victimized by UN personnel.

An earlier report, in 2000, critical of United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs) said they suffer from inadequate resources, and inexperienced personnel. While the report recommended that the UN should drop its neutrality and take action against one side of a conflict if necessary, it also noted that PKOs are sometimes initiated in areas the UN doesn't belong. Where it does intervene, the report suggested that UN peacekeepers witnessing violence against civilians be authorized to stop it, and provided with equipment and backing to respond effectively.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. In June 2005, columnist Gwynne Dyer wrote that, "... the UN has already survived three times longer than its ill-starred predecessor (the League of Nations); and the great war it was meant to prevent has not happened. In the various crises that might have ended with the superpowers sliding into a nuclear war--the Cuban crisis of 1962, the Middle East war of 1973, and so on--the United Nations Security Council was an essential forum for negotiations, and the charier provided a new hand of international law that the rivals could defer to without losing face when they wanted to back away from the crisis ... For all the fine words of the charier, the UN is still mainly about preventing another major war between the great powers, and as many other wars as possible." Find out more specifically what the UN did in the crises Mr. Dyer mentions.

2. In June 2005, the UN General Assembly passed a record-breaking $3.2 billion (U.S.) peacekeeping budget for the next 12 months that could rise to $5 billion. The budget was for 14 peacekeeping missions, with the largest operations in Africa. Discuss whether or not you think this money is well spent.

FACT FILE

The UN peacekeepers wear a distinctive bright blue-coloured helmet or beret, and are often referred to as the blue helmets.

FACT FILE

The United Nations is currently coordinating 18 peacekeeping operations around the world, involving about 70,000 personnel from scores of contributing nations.

FACT FILE

The International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers is on 29 May each year.

FACT FILE

By 2005, more than 16,000 peacekeepers from 100 countries, the world's largest peacekeeping deployment, were overseeing a transition toward peace in Congo, where a 1998-2002 war launched by foreign-backed rebels drew in armies from six countries.

Websites

United Nations Peacekeeping Operations--http://www.un. org/Depts/dpko/dpko/ index.asp

Canada and Peacekeeping--http://www.dfait-maeci.gc. ca/peacekeeping/menu-en. asp

RELATED ARTICLE: Canada falling behind.

The image of Canada as a great peacekeeping nation is no longer an accurate one. In a 2002 newspaper article, Douglas Bland, an armed forces veteran, and a professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario described that notion as "one of our national myths." He says politicians created the image but won't spend the money now to support it. "We have the rhetoric of peacekeeping but not the capability."

The facts support the critics as Canada's armed forces fell in the 1990s from 80,000 to 60,000. As defence budgets were slashed to fight the nation's deficit, equipment fell into a state of disrepair. Some analysts say soldiers were considered poorly trained for combat; others say there just aren't enough of them.

As of the end of November 2001, Canada's 314 UN peacekeepers were outnumbered by Bangladesh's 6,029, India's 2,843, Ghana's 2,575 and Portugal's 1,168. Even tiny Nepal had 1,111; Canadian troops represented less than one percent of the 47,778 UN personnel in the field, with 24 countries providing more soldiers for UN peacekeeping duties than Canada. (That figure of 314, however, didn't include the 1,619--of a total of 20,000 troops--men and women in Bosnia serving as part of a Stabilization Force of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Nor did it include other non-UN peacekeeping assignments, so our contribution wasn't quite as pathetic as it seemed.)

As recently as the early 1990s, Canada had more than 2,300 soldiers deployed in 16 missions and one in 10 UN peacekeepers was a Canadian.