Washington’s push to make UN peacekeeping more forceful won pledges of more than 30,000 soldiers and police at a summit chaired by President Obama on Monday. But it also drew a warning from China against the misuse of security council peacekeeping mandates by countries pursuing their own agenda.
A parade of national leaders stepped up to publicly announce their commitments, from the deployment of Mexican troops in Western Sahara to a promise by the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, of an all-women police unit after the US president singled out the need to address repeated cases of sexual abuse by peacekeepers.
Obama opened the summit by acknowledging what he described as the bitter lessons of peacekeeping in Bosnia and Rwanda’s genocide where UN forces abandoned civilians to be murdered. But he said the challenges faced by peacekeeping were greater than ever.
“I called for this summit because UN peacekeeping operations are experiencing unprecedented strains. Old challenges persist. Too few nations bear a disproportionate burden of providing troops, which is unsustainable. Atop this, we’ve seen new challenges. More armed conflicts, more instability driven by terrorism and violent extremism, and more refugees,” he said. “Put simply, the supply of well-trained, well-equipped peacekeepers can’t keep up with the growing demand.”
Obama later said bluntly: “More nations need to contribute more forces.”
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said that “the demand for peacekeeping has never been greater”, with more than 125,000 UN troops and police deployed around the world.
Ban said peacekeeping operations faced “extremist criminal groups”, were sheltering 200,000 civilians in South Sudan, monitoring a fragile peace agreement in Mali and working to prevent further violence in the Central African Republic.
More than 50 countries attended the summit but only those making a specific new contribution to peacekeeping were permitted to speak. The total commitments were more than three times the original White House target and represent a notable success for Washington’s push to make UN peacekeeping more assertive by drawing in countries more willing to send their forces into combat and by providing them with better equipment and support, including intelligence.
But it remains to be seen how many countries follow through on their promises. The largest commitment came from China, which said it would establish a standby peacekeeping force of 8,000 soldiers and a permanent peacekeeping police squad.
But, in announcing his country’s contribution president Xi Jinping voiced a widely held concern that peacekeeping should not be exploited for political ends. Some countries believe that is what happened in Libya when Nato used a security council mandate to back rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi.
“The basic principles of peacekeeping should be strictly followed,” he said. “Security council resolutions should be implemented in their entirety, allowing no country to act beyond its mandate.”
Xi said that the greatest need for peacekeeping was in Africa and pledged $100m to strengthen African Union forces. That may unsettle some in the UN defence establishment as China extends its already considerable economic and diplomatic influence in parts of sub-Saharan Africa to military ties.
“UN officials have been waiting for China to ramp up its role in peace operations for some time, and this is a breakthrough,” said Richard Gowan, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Hawks in the American defence community will worry that China is bidding to take over UN peacekeeping. I suspect that the president and his advisers will be more sanguine, and see this as a constructive multilateral gesture by Beijing.”
But Gowan also offered a word of caution. “Let us see if this becomes a reality before we get too excited. Will China really order 8,000 troops into a battle zone if South Sudan falls apart again or the UN calls for peacekeepers in Syria or Libya? The risks of casualties will be high.”
India, which has deployed more peacekeepers than any other country, has publicly criticised the use of UN forces as combat troops in operations in Mali and the Central African Republic. It has made clear that UN troops should be used as peace monitors not peace enforcers sent in to fight the likes of Islamist groups in central Africa.
The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, was also critical of the major powers for “ambitious mandates” with inadequate resources. “Mandates sometimes make peacekeepers a party to conflict putting at risk their lives and their missions,” he said.
Modi said that was in part because the security council mandates operations without adequate input from the countries contributing troops. Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, committed 70 soldiers to Somalia and up to 300 to UN operations in South Sudan. He described the move as in the UK’s national interest because “when countries break up, the problems of migration affect us all”.
Vietnam promised engineering units, a popular contribution along with medics and helicopters. France’s president François Hollande said that among other things his country would train peacekeepers to speak French. President Obama also set the tone of many leaders’ remarks with unequivocal condemnation of the repeated incidents of rape and sexual exploitation by peacekeeping soldiers.
“We have to insist on zero tolerance for abuse. Zero,” the president said. That was a sentiment repeated by Hollande after French soldiers were accused of raping boys in the Central African Republic. “We have to make sure the flag of the United Nations will never be soiled,” he said. Obama called for the increased deployment of female soldiers and police officers on peacekeeping missions, and a number of countries – including Japan and India – committed more units with women.
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