TIME EUROPE
January 8, 2000, Vol. 157 No. 1
The Limits of Peacekeeping
The U.S. quietly launches a program to train troops in West Africa
By DANIEL BENJAMIN
What's the worst, most agonizingly intractable issue to land on the international agenda in the last decade? From infectious diseases to weapons proliferation, there is no shortgage of candidates. Among foreign policy types, though, nothing elicits the same slack-jawed stupefaction as "African peacekeeping."
Consider the record: just 10 months after coming into office, the Clinton administration watched in shock as the ambitious U.N. mission the U.S. was leading in Somalia became a bloody melee. The event left a long scar on the minds of the Clintonians and forced a loud caesura in American — and most Western — peacekeeping on the continent.
Fast forward, and the story becomes hellishly worse. Weeks after the last U.S. ship departed Mogadishu in 1994, the Hutu government of Rwanda and its collaborators committed one of the 20th century's few undisputed genocides. The killers worked faster than Auschwitz; the U.N. dithered. In the years since, Burundi has trembled on the verge of all-out ethnic slaughter. Six armies have rampaged through the Congo. The toll in the Sudanese government's war against its own people — which began in 1983 — has risen to an estimated 2 million lives. In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front (ruf) conducted civil war by amputation, systematically hacking the limbs off those it didn't kill.
No sane person can contemplate Africa today without despair. And while President Clinton rightly apologized for America's inaction during the Rwanda crisis, this much is clear: the willingness of the U.S. or other Western nations to make peace where there is none has diminished to the vanishing point. Few countries want their soldiers confronting the civil wars and marauding gangs now laying Africa to waste. Yes, Britain's intervention to save the faltering U.N. mission in its former colony, Sierra Leone, is plainly heroic — but not likely to be a precedent. More reliable signs of the future were planted in the second U.S. presidential debate, when George W. Bush said that Washington "made the right decision not to send U.S. troops to Rwanda" and Al Gore agreed.
So amid this gloom, it comes as strange and oddly hopeful that in its dying days the Clinton administration has been trying something new in Africa. To little fanfare, the U.S. has sent Special Forces troops to Nigeria to train West African soldiers for "robust peacekeeping" — a.k.a. armed peacemaking — in Sierra Leone. The first unit is almost trained, and by next summer five Nigerian battalions, along with one each from Ghana and Senegal, should be putting pressure on the ruf. The $80 million program grows from ideas that have been gaining currency. First, local actors — regional communities or ad hoc coalitions — can be more effective than traditional U.N. peacekeepers for "complex contingencies" that aren't simply about two warring countries. Neighbors have a bigger stake in regional peace and are usually more willing to act than U.N. commanders with restrictive mandates and queasy troops — witness nato's intervention in Kosovo and the Australian-led mission in East Timor.
The second thought is that Nigeria's 1999 return to democracy after 15 years of military misrule provides an opportunity that must not be wasted. Nigeria is a sprawling mess, riddled with corruption, plundered of its oil wealth and saddled with broken institutions. Yet it is the only country except South Africa with the heft to become a major force for African stability. That will happen only if President Olusegun Obasanjo's democratic government gains strength. He says he wants a more secure West Africa. It is doubly sensible to help him achieve it.
There are as many reasons for skepticism as there are loose weapons in Africa: Nigeria's military swears it is reforming, but human rights organizations point to a history of brutality and question that commitment. Washington is ensuring that participating troops have clean records, and its aid package includes a program to enhance civilian control of the military. Some U.S. officials wonder if the battalions will be tough enough or motivated enough to fight, or whether the arms being supplied will disappear into the black market. Others ask if the U.N. will integrate the combat-ready troops into the existing force, fearing that if they do what they are trained to, the blue helmets will become targets for retaliation.
Yet for all the pitfalls, the logic of training the West Africans, of building partners with the ability to make peace, is compelling. Those who advocate it will be hard-pressed to find money to continue the effort and keep all eyes on the long-term goals. The determination to make a program like this work is a scarce commodity in the fat and happy West. To create resolve, no one should flinch from pointing out a decade's experience of appalling alternatives.
Daniel Benjamin, a former TIME correspondent, is a scholar at the United States Institute of Peace
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A campaign by white activists to apologize for apartheid sparks a fierce debate in South Africa
The Limits of Peacekeeping
The U.S. quietly launches a program to train troops in West Africa
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DEPARTMENTS
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