UN council aims to limit costs, duration of peacekeeping missions

UN aims to limits costs, span of UN peacekeeping

UNITED NATIONS — With more U.N. peacekeepers posted to the world’s hotspots than ever before, at a cost of billions of dollars a year, the Security Council agreed Friday to try to avoid creating more costly missions that go on interminably, as some do now.

“Rarely, if ever, do we plan an exit at the outset,” said Alan Doss, the U.N. special envoy to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “We tend to get bogged down in the mandate implementation — we fail to see the broader strategic picture.”

Doss spoke at the outset of a daylong debate called by French Ambassador Gerard Araud, who is president of the U.N.’s most powerful body this month.

Reflecting growing concerns with the rising costs and duration of seemingly open-ended United Nations peacekeeping operations, the Security Council spent the better part of the day crafting better exit strategies.

At the end of the session, the 15-nation council issued a statement read aloud by Araud saying it will regularly assess peacekeeping operations “with a view to making the necessary adjustments where appropriate, according to progress achieved or changing circumstances on the ground.”

The council’s aim is to focus on ensuring whether there are “conditions for sustainable peace on the ground, thereby allowing for reconfiguration or withdrawal of the United Nations peacekeeping mission,” he said.

Araud said the council also wants the U.N. to “plan military, police and other peacebuilding tasks in phases with clear objectives.” These, it said, should take into account local conditions that allow the transition from a peacekeeping to peacebuilding operation.

In a “concept paper” preceding the debate, the French U.N. mission cited concerns that U.N. peacekeeping forces have grown to almost 100,000 — about 20,000 more than the previous peak in 1993 — while the budget has risen to $7.8 billion a year, amid a global financial crisis. Most recent U.N. peacekeeping chiefs have come from France.

Some U.N. peace missions reach back more than a half-century, such as the Truce Supervision Organization in the Middle East, set up in 1948, and the Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan, begun in 1949. Next oldest are the missions in Cyprus, launched in 1964, and in Syria, started in 1974; the “interim” force in Lebanon has been there since 1978.

Some missions have come to an end before the U.N. wanted to pull out.

In July 2008, for example, the Security Council ceased its 8-year-long, $113 million-a-year peacekeeping mission between Eritrea and Ethiopia, despite continuing tensions and the U.N. chief’s warnings the move could lead to a new war.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said “exits must be equally well considered from the very outset of a mission.” Otherwise, said Ellen Margrethe Loj, who heads the U.N. mission in Liberia, “the mission will act like a ship without a clear destination.”

But Ban and others also cited the perils of pulling up stakes too soon. “We have also seen what has happened when we are too swift to terminate a mission, as in Timor Leste,” said U.S. deputy ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo.

East Timor, also known as Timor Leste, broke from decades of brutal Indonesian rule in 1999 and, with help from the United Nations, declared independence in 2002 with a fanfare of fireworks and traditional dancing.

But the tiny country’s euphoria was shattered in 2006, just as the U.N. was leaving, when the police and army disintegrated into warring factions and the government collapsed. Widespread looting, arson and gang warfare left 37 dead and drove 155,000 from their homes.

Thousands of foreign police and soldiers rushed back to restore calm, prompting accusations that the international community had packed its bags before its job was over.