On the 20th of June, 2000, 5 days before his 54th birthday, Lt-Gen. Romeo Dallaire was found collapsed on a park bench in Quebec, having been forced into a coma by a cocktail of anti-depressants and alcohol. The incident was the lowest point in the life of a man whose distinguished military career had ended 2 months earlier with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dallaire had become the world's most high-profile casualty of UN peacekeeping.
As a student of peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention, Dallaire's name has been familiar to me for a long time, if only as a reminder of just how bad things became for the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO) in the early and mid-1990s. It was with a certain academic and professional excitement, then, that I followed a link to an open letter from Dallaire that had been published in the Guardian newspaper (UK) and addressed to the commander of the AU-UN forces in Darfur, the Nigerian General Agwai (http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/romeo_dallaire/2007/09/a_daunting_mandate.html).
The contents of the letter were, in all honesty, very satisfying to me in the sense that much of what Dallaire had to say concurred with the concerns that myself and my colleagues have been expressing for many months about the proposed AU-UN hybrid force. Self-congratulation, however, is not the focus of this post! What was really interesting, and somewhat chilling, was the final sentence of the last paragraph of the letter. "Bear in mind that whoever fails you will, in the end, be the most active in blaming you for whatever goes wrong." It seems that the world has got to the stage, through the optimism following the collapse of the Communist Bloc, through the disastrous miscalculation of Somalia, past the failure to protect civilians in Rwanda and Bosnia, and to a situation where the major military powers will only operate peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention through the EU or NATO and anyone who accepts a command role in a major UN operation is widely and immediately considered a poor fool by his contemporaries and other interested individuals.
There are those who would say that UN peacekeeping was a fatally flawed project from the outset, that the UN is inherently incapable of being the world's policeman in cases of conflict and major human rights abuses. There are others who would say that the UN should know its limits and concentrate on the easier and less risky end of the spectrum of peace support operations and interventions. My personal opinion is that the ideal of the UNDPKO promoted at the end of the Cold War was never given a fair chance of being realised, and that it could of worked, although now it is most likely beyond repair. As an individual who believes passionately in the responsibility to protect, this presents the question........Bearing in mind the realities of the modern international system, what system is it possible to create which would ensure the proper and appropriate protection of civilians, whilst paying due attention to sovereignty and the rule of law?
It is this question which I now intend to focus my posts on for the foreseeable future. If there is in fact anyone out there who reads this blog, please use the 'comment' facility to make your opinions heard on this subject. Furthermore, as I will be focusing solely on the issue of the next generation of peace support operations and humanitarian interventions, there will no-doubt be major issues of ethics in defence and security policy that will no longer be covered. As a result, I intend to invite others to post on this blog with regards such issues. A friend and colleague will shortly begin posting on environmental issues and energy security, but others will be required to cover areas such as arms control, the war on terror, migration, etc. If you feel you have something to offer in one of these areas and have the time to produce between 500 and 1500 words a week, please contact me at weatherhead.jamie@googlemail.com.
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