Congo and the UN: From peacekeeping to peace enforcement?

The United Nations is going to war. Or so The Economist declared this week. And it isn’t exactly conjecture: the UN is set to deploy some 3,000 troops, acting within the remit of an “Intervention Brigade”, into active combat operations against rebel militant groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is unchartered territory for the UN: its peacekeeping force in the DRC, the Stablization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO), has had boots in Congo since 1999 (as MONUC); but as with other UN peacekeeping deployments, MONUSCO has never been mandated to exercise an overtly offensive capability. So when the Intervention Brigade, consisting of South African, Tanzanian and Malawian troops, get their orders next month to “carry out targeted offensive operations… in a robust, highly mobile and versatile manner” with a view to “neutralizing armed groups”, this will have huge implications not only on the practicalities of conducting UN peace operations, but also on how the wider world historically sees the UN’s peacekeeping role: as an impartial, transparent authority exercising limited force in a self-defense capacity, and with the consent of all parties to the conflict.

In many ways, both the Intervention Brigade and its offensive mandate are experiments in the UN’s complex peacekeeping mechanism, and they are timely and welcome ones. The triggering event came in November 2012, when MONUSCO found itself unable, in place of the retreating DRC army, to resist a takeover of the eastern DRC city of Goma by rebel M23 forces. Goma’s fall precipitated sharp reactions by UN member states, both within the Permanent 5 and outside it. France (a P5 member) for instance questioned the MONUSCO commander’s decision to effectively surrender the city and its inhabitants to the advancing rebels, leading many to question the very purpose of the UN’s presence in the DRC.  In the media, parallels were inevitably drawn with the tragic massacre of ethnic Bosniaks in Srebenica that followed the UN commander’s decision not to oppose Respublika Srpska forces’ advance into the town. There have been mounting calls for the UN to reassess its stentorian peacekeeping practices, to better enable it to respond flexibly and effectively to multidimensional challenges in highly dynamic conflict situations.

To its credit, the UN listened, and action followed. On 26 February 2013, 11 central African states signed the Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework for the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Region, committing them to respecting the DRC’s territorial sovereignty and sovereign right to peace and security. Importantly, the Framework, which is backed by the UN and 3 African international and intergovernmental organizations (including the African Union), elicited the guarantees of DRC neighbors such as Rwanda and Uganda whose governments have been accused of materially aiding Congolese rebel groups. Then on 28 March, the Security Council adopted Resolution 2098, which created an Intervention Brigade to

“either unilaterally or jointly with the FARDC (DRC armed forces), in a robust, highly mobile and versatile manner and in strict compliance with international law, including international humanitarian law… to prevent the expansion of all armed groups, neutralize these groups, and to disarm them in order to contribute to the objective of reducing the threat posed by armed groups on state authority and civilian security in eastern DRC and to make space for stabilization activities.”

The Resolution signalled a clear shift in UN thinking on peacekeeping. For the first time in the organization’s history, a UN peacekeeping mission has been given nearly the same operational autonomy as a national force: the capacity for unilateral action and the freedom to act preemptively and with force where necessary. While the Intervention Brigade’s commanders are unlikely to avail themselves of the full gamut of Resolution 2098’s “freedoms”, the UN had in fact already exhibited a willingness to act in the spirit of 2098 well before its adoption. In July 2012, UN helicopter gunships joined DRC aircraft to attack M23 positions in a rare display of combat assertiveness. In November, UN helicopters unilaterally flew combat sorties in a bid to defend Goma’s strategically important airport from occupying M23 groups. While critics may argue that an enhanced UN peacekeeping role incorporating preemptive and unilateral objectives could counterproductively destabilize neighboring countries, exacerbate humanitarian crises and undermine the UN’s legitimacy, I believe the opposite to be true. Only through a flexible     supervised by a broad mandate to maintain international peace and security (and unconstrained by specific     ) will the UN be able to provide a decisive response that navigates the dynamism, uncertainty and irrationality of contemporary ethnic conflicts.

Calls for greater UN willingness to use force, in an offensive capacity if necessary, to defend civilian lives in war-torn environments are wholly legitimate. That UN peacekeepers are consistently called upon by the global public to intervene in order to protect vulnerable populations in conflict areas – very often in place of existing local militaries and law enforcement authorities – illustrates the cross-national trust placed in the UN system and the organization’s enduring legitimacy as a neutral peace broker, peace keeper and peace maker. However, with the post-Cold War localization and de-ideologization of conflict, animosities have become increasingly embedded in extra-national and socio-anthropological root causes that the UN’s decidedly Westphalian architecture was not optimally designed to address, let alone resolve. The world watched as unilateral military actors such as the United States (fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), France (engaged in Mali) and Russia (fighting in the North Caucasus) struggled to accommodate pathologic    – despite the operational autonomy, logistical independence and unity of interest and purpose that unilateral action supposedly allowed them. For a multilateral organization such the UN, whose military, political and financial capacities are beholden to the competing interests of its diverse membership, responding to    can easily entail a nightmare.

The UN’s limitations on the ground are shaped by these realities. During the Cold War, UN peace operations were governed by the 4 so-called “rules of peacekeeping”: impartiality (in the sense that they could not be seen to favor or prejudice any party to the conflict), neutrality (in the sense that they had to treat all parties to the conflict equally), non-use of force except in clear instances of self-defense, and the consent of all parties to the conflict to the UN’s continued presence. Legally, these requirements were extrapolated from Article 40 of the UN Charter, which required that UN peacekeeping measures “be without prejudice to the rights, claims or position of the parties concerned”. This in turn was derived from Article 7(2) of the Charter which proscribed the UN from intervening in matters “essentially within the jurisdiction” of member states. While both Articles were applied relatively painlessly during the Cold War, whose inter-state conflicts rooted in ideological competition allowed the UN to maintain a strictly disinterested posture in clear East-vs-West conflagrations, the post-Cold War advent of intra-state ethnic conflict altered this dynamic. The UN’s inability to prevent genocides in Rwanda (1994), Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999) created a universal sense that new modalities of UN intervention were needed.

It was against these calls that in 2000, the former UN Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, recommended in his report on UN peacekeeping that UN peacekeepers be morally compelled to use force to “oppose obvious evil” – a metaphorization of ‘spoilers’ or belligerents in whose interest it is to prolong and escalate conflict and its pernicious effects. The Brahimi Report was a watershed: it was the first time that a UN instrument had recommended that the world body deploy in civil wars with the express aim of supporting “ally” transitional and embattled governments against “enemy” spoiler forces. Momentum had already been building in the direction of a more discriminatory UN approach to peacekeeping: in 1992-3, Security Council Resolutions 794 and 837 deployed UN peacekeepers to Somalia with the exclusive aim of preventing grave human rights atrocities, effectively pitting them against the forces of the Somali National Alliance. The heavy losses incurred by the UN in Somalia however quickly eroded support among the UN membership for humanitarian deployments in the spirit of Resolution 794, and the Security Council returned to a traditional peacekeeping model conspicuously out of sync with post-Cold War localization and universalization of conflicts.

What therefore made the Brahimi Report’s recommendations particularly remarkable was the fact that they were based on a shift in institutional thinking within the UN, led by the Secretary General himself. In 1999, Kofi Annan wrote in the UK’s The Independent that though the UN was an impartial actor, it was by no means neutral – on the contrary, he argued that the UN was not morally-blind and that it had a duty to identify and support clear victims against equally clear aggressors in conflict situations. The international opprobrium surrounding the the atrocities in Kosovo in 1999 galvanized many UN member states into supporting military action against the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia, despite a NATO force, rather than a robust UN peacekeeping force exercising a 794-style mandate, being ultimately tasked with repelling Yugoslav forces. In 2005, the UN took a normative leap when it effectively committed to responding coercively to protect populations against crimes against humanity where their governments were “manifestly incapable or unwilling” to do so. As in 1992 and largely in response to criticisms of UN military forbearance in Kosovo, the UN membership sought to demonstrate that it was prepared to train peacekeepers’ armaments on errant regimes in the defense of suppressed minorities. The ‘responsibility to protect’, as it became known, was etched into Security Council Resolution 1706 (2006) on Darfur, which      . However, the politics of    the    of the UN Charter’s non-intervention clause proved   , and all subsequent references to the responsibility to protect were weeded out of resolutions addressing the conflicts in Libya and Syria.

It is from this conceptual debris that the Intervention Brigade and its Resolution 2098 legal foundation now emerge. There are 2 ways of looking at 2098.

The first is as a continuation of   . When it thus seemed that     the institutional UN    . In 2008, the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations issued

Second is as a peace enforcement mission executed by UN . Previous   peace enforcement is a  Security Council “contracts” or delegates the operational   to an international organization or regional grouping with a security focus (such as NATO or ECOWAS) or loose “coalitions of the willing” (such as Gulf War   . This is the first time under the aegis of the UN