- Reaction score
- 1,009
- Points
- 1,010
Another MGen Mackenzie article. They are so amusing and interesting.
http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id=1260F606-AE84-4F94-AF08-4A6288341E35
Congo tragedy shows up the UN
Lewis MacKenzie
National Post
Monday, May 26, 2003
ADVERTISEMENT
If it weren‘t so tragic it would be tedious reflecting on the United Nations‘ abject failure to address significant issues of international peace and security in the absence of major support -- both moral and material -- from the United States. Study after study undertaken at the behest of the UN‘s Secretary-General, the most recent being the year 2000 Brahimi Report, have offered up academic solutions to a disastrous situation that cries out for practical solutions.
Lakhdar Brahimi (currently the UN Secretary-General‘s envoy to the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan), following a review of the UN‘s peacekeeping failures in Srebrenica, Somalia and Rwanda, recommended the UN should avoid sending peacekeepers to a conflict absent a precise and unambiguous mandate, adequate funding and sufficient military force to handle a worst-case scenario.
Fast forward to the current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A total of six foreign armies and up to 11 factions (at last estimate) are locked in a violent struggle for control of various parts of a resource-rich country the size of Ontario and Quebec combined. Into this morass the UN has inserted a few hundred officer observers -- unarmed --and a few thousand lightly armed soldiers. Their mandate is to help facilitate the implementation of various flawed peace initiatives that are not honoured by the majority of the participants to the conflict. À la Somalia in 1992, the UN troops are virtually blockaded in their barracks and are at the mercy of the drugged, undisciplined and ill-led belligerents who surround them and couldn‘t give a **** for the UN and the utterances from its headquarters in New York. If you are invited to a knife fight you should always take a gun. But yet again, the UN has taken nothing more than a rucksack of optimism and left a UN commander out to dry.
Like it or not, the UN is no longer capable of finding adequate resources, read countries, willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters in uniform for someone else‘s human rights, unless the conflict threatens world peace and security or is in America‘s self-interest to get involved.
Apply that criteria to the situation in the Congo and you get little interest and no action writ large. Africa, in general, and the complicated situation in the Congo don‘t register on the "must-do" list of the Security Council. Observers wax eloquent on how the Security Council would have acted to stop the potential genocide in Rwanda in 1993 if only they had known of Canadian General Roméo Dallaire‘s forecast of genocide and his plea for additional soldiers to try and thwart it. Balls! The Permanent Five veto-holding members of the Security Council knew a **** of a lot more about what was going on in Rwanda and what was being planned by the Hutus than General Dallaire, who had virtually zero intelligence-gathering capability in his tiny command. They chose to do nothing because they had no national self-interests in Rwanda.
Estimates put the death toll from the current conflict in the Congo at more than three million since 1998. That figure, along with two million plus slaughtered in Southern Sudan during the same period, should qualify Africa for the front pages of the world. Rape, machete blows indiscriminately removing thousands of children‘s limbs, child-soldiers forced into service as young as 12 have hardly caused a hint of Western interest. On the other hand, recent claims of cannibalism with the hearts and livers of enemy soldiers being eaten while still warm has caught the attention of the sensationalist-seeking Western press.
The Congo is a perfect example of a crisis the UN should be able to resolve without the leadership of the United States -- by deploying the force necessary to sort out the thugs and goons who currently control the streets and jungles. The fact that the UN is not capable of doing so should be the final piece of evidence to convince even the most optimistic among us that it is incapable of carrying out the role assigned it in 1945 as the primary instrument responsible for international peace and security.
Those numerous Canadian commentators who call for our immediate participation in the Congo as "peacekeepers" display a disturbing ignorance of the profound change that has taken place regarding conflict since the end of the Cold War. Peacekeeping was a key component of our foreign policy for almost 50 years. It was a good run, but the concept is pretty well dead and buried and it‘s time for its inventor -- us -- to admit it. Mercifully, countries rarely go to war these days, but factions within countries are fighting in more than 50 conflicts as you read this. If the UN is to take on stopping the slaughter it needs the participation of professional militaries trained for combat in sufficient numbers to defeat -- euphemism for kill in most cases -- the perpetrators of these war crimes. The concept of a neutral and impartial role for the UN in such conflicts is dangerous wishful thinking, and wrong. Like it or not, this fact, based on compelling evidence accumulated over the past decade, should be serious food for thought as the federal government undertakes the long-overdue foreign and defence policy review as promised by prime ministerial contenders Paul Martin and John Manley.
Maj-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, now retired, commanded UN troops during the Bosnian civil war of 1992.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id=1260F606-AE84-4F94-AF08-4A6288341E35
Congo tragedy shows up the UN
Lewis MacKenzie
National Post
Monday, May 26, 2003
ADVERTISEMENT
If it weren‘t so tragic it would be tedious reflecting on the United Nations‘ abject failure to address significant issues of international peace and security in the absence of major support -- both moral and material -- from the United States. Study after study undertaken at the behest of the UN‘s Secretary-General, the most recent being the year 2000 Brahimi Report, have offered up academic solutions to a disastrous situation that cries out for practical solutions.
Lakhdar Brahimi (currently the UN Secretary-General‘s envoy to the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan), following a review of the UN‘s peacekeeping failures in Srebrenica, Somalia and Rwanda, recommended the UN should avoid sending peacekeepers to a conflict absent a precise and unambiguous mandate, adequate funding and sufficient military force to handle a worst-case scenario.
Fast forward to the current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A total of six foreign armies and up to 11 factions (at last estimate) are locked in a violent struggle for control of various parts of a resource-rich country the size of Ontario and Quebec combined. Into this morass the UN has inserted a few hundred officer observers -- unarmed --and a few thousand lightly armed soldiers. Their mandate is to help facilitate the implementation of various flawed peace initiatives that are not honoured by the majority of the participants to the conflict. À la Somalia in 1992, the UN troops are virtually blockaded in their barracks and are at the mercy of the drugged, undisciplined and ill-led belligerents who surround them and couldn‘t give a **** for the UN and the utterances from its headquarters in New York. If you are invited to a knife fight you should always take a gun. But yet again, the UN has taken nothing more than a rucksack of optimism and left a UN commander out to dry.
Like it or not, the UN is no longer capable of finding adequate resources, read countries, willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters in uniform for someone else‘s human rights, unless the conflict threatens world peace and security or is in America‘s self-interest to get involved.
Apply that criteria to the situation in the Congo and you get little interest and no action writ large. Africa, in general, and the complicated situation in the Congo don‘t register on the "must-do" list of the Security Council. Observers wax eloquent on how the Security Council would have acted to stop the potential genocide in Rwanda in 1993 if only they had known of Canadian General Roméo Dallaire‘s forecast of genocide and his plea for additional soldiers to try and thwart it. Balls! The Permanent Five veto-holding members of the Security Council knew a **** of a lot more about what was going on in Rwanda and what was being planned by the Hutus than General Dallaire, who had virtually zero intelligence-gathering capability in his tiny command. They chose to do nothing because they had no national self-interests in Rwanda.
Estimates put the death toll from the current conflict in the Congo at more than three million since 1998. That figure, along with two million plus slaughtered in Southern Sudan during the same period, should qualify Africa for the front pages of the world. Rape, machete blows indiscriminately removing thousands of children‘s limbs, child-soldiers forced into service as young as 12 have hardly caused a hint of Western interest. On the other hand, recent claims of cannibalism with the hearts and livers of enemy soldiers being eaten while still warm has caught the attention of the sensationalist-seeking Western press.
The Congo is a perfect example of a crisis the UN should be able to resolve without the leadership of the United States -- by deploying the force necessary to sort out the thugs and goons who currently control the streets and jungles. The fact that the UN is not capable of doing so should be the final piece of evidence to convince even the most optimistic among us that it is incapable of carrying out the role assigned it in 1945 as the primary instrument responsible for international peace and security.
Those numerous Canadian commentators who call for our immediate participation in the Congo as "peacekeepers" display a disturbing ignorance of the profound change that has taken place regarding conflict since the end of the Cold War. Peacekeeping was a key component of our foreign policy for almost 50 years. It was a good run, but the concept is pretty well dead and buried and it‘s time for its inventor -- us -- to admit it. Mercifully, countries rarely go to war these days, but factions within countries are fighting in more than 50 conflicts as you read this. If the UN is to take on stopping the slaughter it needs the participation of professional militaries trained for combat in sufficient numbers to defeat -- euphemism for kill in most cases -- the perpetrators of these war crimes. The concept of a neutral and impartial role for the UN in such conflicts is dangerous wishful thinking, and wrong. Like it or not, this fact, based on compelling evidence accumulated over the past decade, should be serious food for thought as the federal government undertakes the long-overdue foreign and defence policy review as promised by prime ministerial contenders Paul Martin and John Manley.
Maj-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, now retired, commanded UN troops during the Bosnian civil war of 1992.
© Copyright 2003 National Post