Peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention: Criminality among peacekeepers

Earlier this year, the UN released a report which accused Pakistani peacekeepers serving with the UN's biggest current peacekeeping mission, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), of collaborating with local militias involved in the illegal trade in Gold. Reading this report reminded me of previous cases of criminality among peacekeepers in the Ivory Coast and Kosovo. In the extraordinary Ivory Coast case, French peacekeepers were eventually convicted by a French military court of stealing the equivalent of around $400,000 from a bank which they were supposed to be protecting. In Kosovo, peacekeepers and other members of the international administration that descended on Kosovo in the aftermath of NATO's 1999 operation against Serb forces in the province were accused of fuelling an explosion in the illegal trafficking of young women and girls to the areas where international personnel were based to work as prostitutes in bars, nightclubs and brothels.

In most cases, peacekeepers and other international personnel are not subject to the normal legal processes of the places in which they serve, and in some cases they escape prosecution in their home country for the crimes they commit. The UN's response to this problem has been to develop a Memorandum of Understanding that peacekeepers should be held accountable for their crimes by their home governments, along with repeated references by UN officials to the need for better training and improvements in management. Such efforts, however, are surely never going to be a substitute for a clear and consistent UN-wide and binding agreement on what should be done with those peacekeepers who choose to default from their responsibility to protect in such a horrific manner.

The problems with this idea are fairly clear; firstly, the UN does not have an active involvement in all of the world's peacekeeping operations. Regional organisations are increasingly launching their own operations (albeit, in some cases, with an element of UN involvement) and unilateral operations are sometimes launched by sovereign states in response to a request from an ally or a state with which their are significant cultural, historical and economic ties. Secondly, certain sovereign states (most notably the more powerful ones) would be extremely reluctant to submit their personnel to UN prosecution due to their actions whilst on a mission.

Whilst these problems exist, they do not negate the necessity of efforts to address this issue. The reputation of peacekeeping and state-building is damaged when these incidents take place, allowing those such as President Bashir of Sudan to make the infuriating claim that it is such problems that are preventing him from allowing the deployment of UN troops. The importance of ensuring this issue is resolved should spur on the world's diplomats to find solutions to the problems it presents.