So the war in Georgia is over for now (or as Finnish FM Alex Stubb nicely puts it “traditionally, we will see a few skirmishes, but frontal attacks and positioning will end”). Stand by for laborious talks on peacekeeping options. In Moscow, Nicolas Sarkozy offered EU personnel, but with Russian “peacekeepers” and OSCE and UN observers already in Georgia, how will all the players fit together?
At some point in the negotiations, a weary diplomat may stop to wonder why there was ever such a complex peacekeeping structure in Georgia in the first place. Why, for example, did you have OSCE military observers in South Ossetia but UN guys in Abkhazia? I don’t know the full history, but there’s a curious tale behind the UN Observer Mission in Georgia, as my boss Bruce Jones explains in a recent book chapter on how the UN stumbled into its Rwandan debacle:
At the Security Council [in 1993] both the US and Russia initially objected to yet another peacekeeping operation, this time for a small country with a small civil war that barely registered on the radar screen. Of the actors involved in the Security Council deliberations, only France had any significant interests in Rwanda. France eventually brokered a compromise wherein the US and Russia would support the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda if France agreed to support missions in Haiti and Georgia for which the US and Russia were lobbying respectively.
This was not the most successful deal in the Council’s history.
