Time for an update on the peacekeeping shortage, which gets a lot of well-deserved attention in the current edition of The Economist. Oh that this could have been the last word on the matter – but things have got substantially worse since the magazine was being put to bed in the middle of last week. It looks worryingly like the UN is going to dragged deeper into all-out war in the eastern Congo, where it only narrowly avoided a breakdown earlier this year. Meanwhile, the EU may be about to flunk badly on Chad.
In theory, the Europeans are going to send 4,000 troops and 10 helicopters to Chad to operate alongside UN police. This would be the EU’s biggest mission in Africa to date – but I’ve found a lot of officials are pretty skeptical that it’ll work. The main problem is, by now grindingly familiar: nobody wants to risk any helicopters for the mission. And without helicopters, the troops will sit trapped in vulnerable bases, etc, etc.
After this shortage became clear at a pledging conference in Brussels last week, one EU diplomat was briefing that “cancelling the mission is an option.” The strain has started to show in public. Just before the meeting, Ireland’s defense minister Willie O’Dea was offering troops, but explaining that his helicopters can’t operate beyond the Emerald Isle. He did have ideas about who could, but they weren’t making him any friends:
Asked whether the Darfur spillover mission could proceed without these aircraft, O’Dea said: “In short – no.”
He specified Germany and Italy as two countries with “ample military resources, and so far they haven’t made any contribution to this particular mission.”
The German government declined to comment Tuesday. Last month, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said his country was willing to provide only “political support.”
The Foreign Ministry in Rome confirmed no troops would be sent to Chad and indicated no comment would be made in response to O’Dea. But the Italian Foreign Ministry pointed out Italy is the leading contributor to the U.N. force in Lebanon and has troops in Afghanistan and the Balkans.
And, the Ministry might have added, they are quite nervous enough about those deployments as it is. While O’Dea was calling for Rome to step forward, his Italian counterpart Arturo Parisi was trying to rank the problems on his agenda:
Arturo Parisi said potential change in Kosovo trumped short-term security concerns elsewhere, describing Afghanistan, for example, as “stable in its instability”.
“Kosovo is surely (the biggest concern). It is exposed to a change and therefore a possible stress,” Parisi told Reuters in an interview. “It is also the closest region (to Italy).”
And Lebanon? It’s “unsettled”. While “stable in its instability” is an interesting new category for peacekeeping academics to set about defining (it’s certainly a lot more revealing than “fragile states”) the overall message is crystal clear. Don’t expect the EU to play the peacekeeping (air) cavalry, especially in a second-order crisis like Chad.
So if the UN’s overstretched and the EU’s over-committed (or at least claims to be), who’s left? Optimists keep on pointing to China, which has gradually been increasing its UN commitments as part of its Africa strategy. UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno was in Beijing last week to press for more contributions. But this weekend, one Darfuri rebel leader welcomed the first Chinese troops to deploy there with a call to quit Sudan immediately, on the grounds that Beijing is complicit with Khartoum. “I am not saying I will attack them. I will not say I will not attack them,” quotes the BBC.
It’s hard not to feel a creeping sense of despair.
