Today and delighted to introduce our speaker on the semester King's College.
Before completing college, he was the Director of Science at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He also worked for the Norwegian government on the inquiry, which was kind of like the one in Norway on inspection in Palestine.
And today he's going to speak about his work on the Republic of Congo and in particular on the
Force Intervention Brigade and led mission in Kabul and took part in the note for the Journal.
Thank you very much. Anthony Grey.
Okay. Okay.
All right. Well, thank you very much for the invitation. It's a real pleasure to be to be back in Oxford.
It's always nice to come here and see friends and colleagues.
Sorry, I forgot the most important part of your life. He's awesome.
Oh, okay. Yes, I suppose that's. Yeah, that makes sense.
Absolutely. Yeah, no worries. Before I.
I turn to the more precise focus of my talk, which is the period from late 2012,
the history of the Force Intervention Brigade, and specifically the use of force by peacekeepers.
I would like to start by setting out three more general reasons why I believe the
UN mission in the DRC from 1999 onwards deserves closer scrutiny and attention.
And in doing that, I'm also trying to contextualise, if you like, my more narrow focus.
Now the first of those reasons is that, of course,
the U.N. mission in the DRC renamed the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in 2010
started out in 1999 as a small monitoring mission of a few hundred blue helmets,
and is today, after 18 years, not only the longest running mission,
but also still the largest U.N. mission with some 22,000 peacekeepers, including civilians deployed in the field.
And yet, at the same time, in spite of all this effort, both in time and money and resources,
it is a mission that is deeply troubled and one, of course, that continues to be the site of enormous amount of human suffering.
In fact, you will have seen for those who looked at my introduction that I wrote something about this last year and it was published in 2016,
and it wasn't a particularly upbeat conclusion then.
And I take no particular pleasure at all in saying that, if anything, things have got a lot worse since then.
In fact, the last year has seen a dramatic deterioration in the DRC.
And I think sometimes, you know, we're concerned about Brexit and things closer to home,
but the sheer scale of the of the conflict in the DRC is worth being reminded about.
In 2016, some 920,000 were forced to flee in eastern Congo,
and that was the highest number of displacement and conflict and violence that year, higher than the higher in Syria.
And since then, since the beginning of this year, another million have been forced to flee.
So we're talking about 3.8 million internally displaced.
And according to the UN, 8.5 million people in need of assistance, urgent humanitarian assistance.
Now, this reflects the development over the last year, a dramatic upsurge in violent ethnic and local conflict,
a sharp deterioration in human rights at sea and in violations with now the national security forces,
the Congolese army, the major principal source of threat to the civilian population.
So this is the first reason why I think we need to think about and look again at the DRC,
the sheer scale of the crisis and the apparent inability of the UN after 18 years to arrest a downward spiral of insecurity.
But then the second reason, and this is perhaps what I'm going to get into more in detail in my talk itself is that the
operation of that period of 18 years reflects and epitomises three important changes or trends,
if you like, in the history of of U.N. field operations in U.N. peacekeeping.
The first is the which already started with the end of the Cold War, of course, is the deployment of U.N. troops in internal or civil war context.
I'll come back to that later.
The second trend, which is very clear and the subject of my talk, if you like, here in the DRC, is an increased emphasis on the robust use of force.
Now, as you all know, I'm sure when peacekeeping first emerged as the distinctive activity of the UN in the 1950s,
the chief and defining characteristics of the UN,
in the words of Hammer, sure was a prohibition against any initiative in the use of force and along with the principle of consent and impartiality.
This came to be seen as the the defining characteristic, if you like, of classical peacekeeping.
Ever since the horrors of of Angola, 92, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and of course, Rwanda in the first half of the 1990s,
we have a combination of normative, operational and political pressures that has prompted a shift evident in.
Policy debate and Security Council statements are in the DRC in favour of greater
robustness and a widening of the remit for the use of force by U.N. peacekeepers.
Now, the subject of my talk is that, if you like, this trend came to as a culminating point in the DRC in 2013,
when the Security Council decided to strengthen the existing force in the country,
MINUSCA With the creation of a force intervention brigade whose mandate and I wrote did I never use audiovisual?
But I thought it might be useful here with a mandate to carry out targeted offensive operations in a robust, highly mobile and versatile manner.
The third trend and it's closely connected to this and why this is an important case study,
of course, is that at the heart of UNESCO's activities and mandate,
and that's a trend over the past 15 years has been growing emphasis on the need to protect civilian populations caught up in war.
The protection of civilian mandate. And indeed the head of the mission in 2014, then a German gentleman called Martin Kobler.
He stated before the Security Council that in fact protection of civilians is more than a mandated task.
It is of his own debt in the DRC and a moral imperative of the U.N.
That in itself is a very interesting issue.
We have this huge normative shift, if you like, in what underpins U.N. operations, which also has been tested in the DRC.
Now, by way of conclusion, these are the two reasons I will try,
but don't run out of time to say something about the wider lessons for the U.N. from the operation in the DRC.
Many of you will know, of course, that the U.N. was involved in Congo in the 1960s until 64.
That operation nearly broke the organisation.
And like that mission, I think the current one, the challenges of the DRC,
tells us something about the U.N. more generally and the challenges it faces, especially in the context of of civil wars.
And that might be of interest now that we have what is not quite new,
but is certainly a relatively new Secretary-General who's committed to revitalising the role of the U.N. in peace and security.
So that's the background that they're very brief than, say, hang on to structure the remainder of my talk and then get straight into it.
I'll start by saying it about the story of the U.N. operation, the evolution and pattern of the operation,
culminating in the deployment of the Force Intervention Brigade. And then a little bit about its performance.
Secondly, I will try to then explain why the record is so poor, so patchy.
This is the bit that I have called a study in failure. And in doing that, I want to focus on again more than just the fourth intervention brigade.
And I want to try to draw a distinction between reasons for failure that are
specific to the creation of the Fourth Intervention Brigade and to the Congo.
But also look at some of the broader reasons that I would argue are inherent in any attempt at third party
intervention in civil war like situations governed by very distinctive political economy of conflict.
And then finally, I'll say, if I have time a few about why the lessons regarding the use of force,
particularly in terms of the effort to protect civilians, it's a little bit about the about the story in the background.
The U.N., when it returned to Congo after 35 years, it was initially, of course,
a very small scale affair following the cease fire after the second Congo war,
the decisive cease fire, which it was hoped would bring that war to an end.
The U.N. deployed in 1999, a small monitoring mission to the country.
Now, the language accompanying that initial deployment reflected the normative aspirations and what I might call the
Michael the Never Again sentiment which infused discussions about peacekeeping following the disasters of the 1990s.
This was the time when the Srebrenica report had just been written and produced.
It was a time when Lakhdar Brahimi wrote his report and there was a strong sense of whatever we do,
we have to ensure that the same kind of mass atrocity crimes that were committed in the early nineties do not happen again on the U.N. watch.
Neither the council, of course, nor the Secretariat, in spite of this language,
envisaged a proactive role for the mission beyond just the monitoring and observation of a what was a hoped for cease fire tasks that would,
of course, prove challenging.
In any event, given the size of the country, the state of its infrastructure, and the very limited capabilities of the force that would be deployed.
Now, what began as a very modest observer force, of course, very quickly grew in size,
eventually becoming the UN's largest field operation with an overall strength.
As I as I mentioned initially of some 22,000, and also with an increasingly complex, ambitious and partly conflicting set of objectives.
The UN's deepening involvement after 99 was driven by the fact that, of course,
the war and the profound insecurity in the eastern part of the country continued to be the norm after 1999 at a horrific cost to civilians.
In July two. Led to a formal peace accord was reached in Pretoria between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda,
which envisaged the withdrawal of Rwandan troops from the DRC and also the simultaneous,
in theory, dismantling of fallen forces belonging to the genocidaires and the Interahamwe.
The zone. And this was meant to to placate and address the long term security concerns of Rwanda in particular.
Later that year, in 2002,
the main Congolese parties to the war also signed what was very ambitiously and grandly called a global and inclusive accord,
which also set out critically the modalities of a power sharing and integration of the armed forces in Congo
that would be in place until the elections that were going to be held for the first time in 40 years in 2006.
That particular record and I'll come back to what's important concluded in 2002 was signed by 11 parties,
six of which crucially had armed forces of their own.
And that fact is important because, of course, historically, local politicians in in the DRC,
Congo have tended to secure political leverage within their own party and vis a vis the capital,
Kinshasa, by resorting to violence and often mobilising the constituencies on ethnic grounds.
Now, this peace agreement in 2003 and I'm not going to dwell on the detail,
but this is why it is important shaped the dynamics and the underlying political economy of the conflict in important ways that did not however,
it did not amount to a broad based political settlement among social groups and in particular among the political military
elites that control and regulate access to power and resources in what was and what remains an acutely weak state,
and because it wasn't a broad based settlement among groups and elites.
The violence continued, and you had a recurring cycles of atrocities against civilians in the lives.
And if anything, in this period, insecurity deepened, fuelled by the complex interaction.
This is what I want to say a little bit about, about civil wars, the nature of the civil war,
the complex interaction between long term and proximate causes.
These included, first of all,
the malign effects of local and regional economic agendas developed around the control and exploitation of the areas natural resources,
the strategic minerals. Secondly, the persistence of deep socioeconomic and ethnic grievances linked to land and displacement.
Land and ethnicity have always been very closely linked, particularly in the DRC,
and given rise to conflicts over land tenure and not least part of this political
economy was a continuing proliferation and fragmentation of armed groups
resulting from the failure to have any meaningful what we call security sector reform and the militarisation of politics that took place after 2003.
And of particular significance in this context, and that brings me up to the present,
of course, was a failure to create a truly integrated and credible Congolese army.
What instead happened was that the Congolese army was put together after the former belligerents and continued,
in spite of a commitment to security reform, to be deeply fractured and based on patronage.
Next, those are mentioning this very briefly here, the political economy,
because it is very crucial to an understanding of the dynamics in conflict in the DRC.
But it's also a political economy that has been and is in constant flux and constant mutation over time.
So the political economy today looks different for what it did ten, 15 years ago.
But if you are intervening in that setting, understanding it is absolutely central now for UN peacekeepers deployed at the time.
The acute and persistent vulnerability of civilian populations of course meant also
that they were faced with a series of of protection crises in Kisangani in 2002.
In Ituri,
you remember the background to the interim crisis when the EU under the French led a deployment of of a force in Bukavu and ending Goma in in 2012.
Now, the consequences for the mission of the UN of this continued instability were twofold,
and I think it exposed very clearly the limitations of the protection mandate in the
absence of the wider political settlement among political elites and regional players.
The first consequence was that it ensured that the the monarch's protection responsibilities became ever more central to the mission,
a process that led the Council Security Council in December 2008 to state that protection of civilians was now the
priority or should have priorities and decisions about the use of available capacity and resources over any of the tasks.
Next. And linked to this, of course, it meant that there was a growing expansion of the nation,
but also a growing emphasis on the use of robust military force.
That shift was especially noticeable in 2004, 2005, when the U.N. peacekeepers, with the support of the new Congolese army,
engaged in the in the words of one in one document at the time, aggressive pursuit of negative forces in the east.
Now, this military use of military force to try to eliminate armed groups in the east, and that had a very decidedly mixed record before 2012.
And one reason for that, obviously, was that the the appalling performance and human rights record of the Congolese army itself,
with which Manute was allied and to which it was lending direct operational support.
And of course, the consequence of that was that it weakens the UN's and minsk's legitimacy and tarnished its image in the eyes of local.
In addition to this, and I haven't mentioned this, but this is a country two thirds, depending on how you count two thirds the size of Western Europe,
which is thought of perhaps as a sort of, as some put it, an inland archipelago in terms of its its infrastructure.
This meant that there were enormous logistical challenges, given the UN's highly uneven quality of of of troops.
The absence of this would be familiar to many of you.
But my point here, it is particularly critical in Congo. The absence of key enabling capabilities,
especially mobility assets and analytical capacity to understand the dynamics of conflict as sketched earlier.
The lack of of unity, of command. All of this combined to weaken further the UN's ability to provide effective protection.
And the inevitable result was a seemingly endless cycle of protection crises.
The most humiliating of this, of course, was the crisis in November 2012, when the Rwandan backed rebel movement, the M23,
and then also many of them I don't need to go into the details, but they overran the city of Goma, which was then, in theory,
under U.N. protection with 1500 peacekeepers and the ease with which that capital, provincial capital, was overrun,
and a capital which had swollen to nearly 1 million with an influx of refugees internally displaced,
seemed to sort of lay bare the failure of Minnesota's efforts to bring stability to the east.
And it also exposed, I think, crucially,
the fact that the UN's large scale operation by this time had become almost entirely divorced from a meaningful political process.
So at this point, the effect of the fall of Goma, because it had echoes and many indeed the the head of DPKO later wrote about this.
It had echoes of what happened when Srebrenica had fallen.
In the end, mercifully, there were no large scale massacres once had been captured.
But it seemed to put the U.N. in the same kind of situation, and it galvanised the U.N. into trying to shoring up the mission.
And two steps were taken. The first was to try to revitalise the diplomatic effort, which was clearly the right thing to do.
But without going into much detail, that political process quickly ran into sand or wasn't aggressively pursued partly by the external actors.
And there was agreement on a peace and security and cooperation framework, and the idea was that this would be a political track.
But the other main consequence of Goma, of course, was to create what I mentioned earlier,
the Force Intervention Brigade and to give the UN really for the first time in such explicit terms,
a war fighting role and to confront in Syria all armed groups in eastern Congo.
Now, these were at this time estimated to include nearly 50 different groups, ranging from neatly structured militias to bandit gangs.
In the words of one resolution that the UN gave this force intervention brigade the mandate to take
offensive come back to this action and a force consisting of 3000 troops drawn from South Africa,
Tanzania and Malawi. Malawi was set up to under Chapter seven to to take the fighting to these groups.
Now, the Force Intervention Brigade is is interesting in part because it follows it
reflects this trend towards greater use of force on the part of peacekeepers.
It was also welcomed by many at the time, as you know, finding the.
The U.N. is putting its act together.
And indeed, the secretary general at the time described it as a milestone in the evolution of of the use of force by the UN.
And initially, of course, the force intervention brigade turned out to, you know, to to do what it was and to do in particular it appeared.
And I say it appeared because the evidence on the ground is more complex than that.
It appeared to evict and defeat the M23.
And that was the initial and first objective of the group once it started operations.
And that was a swift removal of it.
But as soon as it has done that, of course, it stopped taking much further action, including against the other armed groups.
And already by the middle of 23, the Secretary-General acknowledged some progress,
but noted that the fundamental problem of the recurring cycles of violence in eastern Congo had not been addressed.
And a strategic review in 2015 noted that the passivity which had marked the U.N. earlier,
now seemed to in the Air Force Intervention Brigade as well.
And that has been the picture pretty much since the situation today is that we have 70 and estimated 70 armed groups operating in eastern Congo.
This so this particular slide gives you an idea you don't have to try obviously into local coffee on this.
But this is gives you an a sense of the number of different armed groups in North and South Kivu,
and that is up from 20 armed groups estimated in ten years ago and indeed in the last six months alone.
The UN recently is reported to have identified six new groups.
So in short, the step change in the use of force,
the actions represented by the Force Intervention Brigade have done very little to halt both the proliferation and fragmentation of the group,
let alone to address the issue of of protection.
The pattern has been the same as before, which was essentially one of ban a protection,
usually responding to the symptoms of violence rather than addressing some of the deeper political economy drivers of the conflict.
So the question is then an interesting bit, I suppose if you talk what explains this very patchy record?
As I said initially, I wanted to distinguish briefly between I want to try to distinguish what specific to the the way the FBI sort of FBI was set up,
but also some more generic and broader reasons because they are of relevance to the U.S. role in these kinds of operations.
Looking specifically at the reasons for the creation of the FBI be the first reason
I think it is worth to bear in mind is has to do with the politics of participating
in peacekeeping operations and particularly the willingness of troop contributing
countries to take risk and their attitudes to the use such of the use of force.
The point I want to make here is that the Force Intervention Brigade will set up in theory to deal with the
whole range of armed groups or priority groups in eastern Congo that once they had dealt with the M23,
and that seemed to be to be it simplifying slightly, but a very noticeable change in patterns of operations.
Now, the reasons for that are partly to do with the way the figure was put together.
And I think the reasons for that are important to flag because they they underline the degree, which I think is often forgotten,
to which politics and interest based calculations by troop contributing countries both shape the decisions to take part in an operation,
but also, crucially, has the character and nature of those contributions once they are deployed.
With regard to the Force Intervention Brigade, there were two things that are worth stressing about the the setting up and the politics of it.
The first is that the principal contributors to the force, South Africa and Tanzania,
were prepared to go on the offensive against the M23 because they saw the movement as an instrument of Rwandan policy in the region.
As such, the initial and very robust operation had a crucial regional dimension to it, with South Africa in particular anxious to rein in Paul Kagame,
which was perceived to enjoy and have hegemonic aspirations following the apparent defeat of the M23,
which Kaigama was happy to see if it also, as it turns out, defeated and the withdrawal of its troops into London,
Uganda, it proved far less prepared to target other groups.
So in short, the origins and the activities of this force are, at least in part,
better explained in terms of regional politics and the political agendas held by key contributors than they are by
any principle the willingness of traditional troop contributing countries to engage in more robust peacekeeping.
The other political aspect I just very mentioned very briefly is that the initial enthusiasm within the UN Secretariat in the Council for a
more aggressive concept was partly a function of the mounting unhappiness with it with a static and passive performance of the UN in the past.
But by late 2013, it turned out that even the Force Intervention Brigade needed to be re-energized to take the lead in planning,
combat and joint role.
Again, if it is the reality that many of those countries contributing troops to operations, including these once the M23 was dealt with,
were not prepared to take the risks and expose their troops to the kinds of danger that operations would have required.
And that is a persistent problem in these kinds of operations. Leaving aside the politics,
the second major sort of issue I think arising out of the experience is the difficulty of managing expectations
to engage in civilian protection in ongoing civil wars and to rely and work alongside security partners.
What I mean by this is that.
The UN given the size of its force,
although 22,000 is considerable by UN standards in the context of limited enabling capabilities and also the challenges facing on the ground,
it had to depend on working closely with security partners.
The security partners, of course, being the legitimate authorities in line and that being the Congolese government and the Congolese army.
The the ability to deploy rapidly in response to emerging crises meant that the UN,
in effect, engaged in an urban aid action to address civilian protection crises.
And that meant that you could have local victories and local achievements, like in 2003, when Bosnia was prevented from being overrun.
But the effect elsewhere of deploying it to one place was to shift predation, shift atrocities, and to shift the targeting of civilians elsewhere.
And that led to a consequent surge of internally displaced populations.
And that the point here is that MINUSCA experience, including with IFAD,
points to a fundamental dilemma that has frequently been faced by ill equipped and overstretched
peacekeepers mandated to act robustly in conditions where there is no peace to keep.
On the one hand, the expectation among populations that physical protection is about to be extended by peacekeepers to a civilian
population threatened by an armed group would prompt civilians to flock to a UN facility and concentrate.
On the other hand, that would provide a ready target and an attractive target for armed groups.
A calculation, of course, whose sinister logic has been played out repeatedly in Congo and indeed elsewhere.
So given the reality that U.N. troops are thinly spread out,
logistically hamstrung and devoid of reserves and critical force multipliers, such locations,
whether they are in Congo and South Sudan, monitor the Central African Republic at the moment have provided attractive targets for attack.
Now, faced with this kind of challenge, which are inescapable given the size of the force and the nature of the terrain,
the U.N. has been forced to work with a legal constituted host government and has had to rely on, in this case, working with the Congolese army.
The problem with this, of course, is that the Congolese army, as I said,
initially, never went through a meaningful process of security directive reform.
And indeed, that today the Congolese army is arguably not only the largest armed group,
but also the one whose predatory activities are the most serious threat to the civilian population.
And the U.N. has constantly face the challenge of when to support, if support,
and whether by lending in support, it's tarnishing its own image and credibility as a force.
Now, the nature of the Congolese army and I don't want to go into the detail, but this is a a dilemma, I think, which was always going to be there.
And I think a recent report, which I think I will I will quote.
On on the Congolese army written recently suggests that, you know,
any understanding of the conflict dynamics in eastern Congo must take into account the differentiated roles of of the Congolese army.
In theory, the Congolese army, together with the UN, is committed to eliminate armed groups.
In reality, some of the elements are directly contributing to conditions that drive further recruitment,
the fragmentation of armed groups and indeed, some are often allied.
But is the Congolese army allied with many of these militias on the ground?
So the Congolese army is really better seen, in the words of this report, as an interrelated patronage network,
feeding off the largesse of the political elite back in the capital,
and also developing links with armed groups in the in the east, which it is deeply connected.
And in many cases, members of the of the Congolese army actively undermine the efforts to combat these groups.
So I think I'll say a few words by way of conclusion on this.
But this is one of the fundamental challenges of intervening in the context of a of an ongoing civil war.
You cannot stay above the political fray however much you want.
And the longer you stay, the more deeply enmeshed you become in the political economy of that conflict.
The third major reason for the failure, I would suggest of the fourth intervention.
The third is perhaps ironically not to do with the force itself,
but it is to do with the larger failure to connect and properly align the activities of this force and indeed those of the U.N.
as a whole with a long term strategy geared towards reaching a political settlement among elites in Congo and across the region.
Remember, this is my sort of initial point about what was lacking.
Now reaching that kind of settlement. I'm not going to say that straightforward, an easy step in a difficult.
And the longer this goes, it's a famous joke about, you know, I wouldn't start from here,
but trying to reach that kind of political settlement would certainly have required a better understanding of the interdependence of local,
national and regional drivers of conflict.
It would have understood the critical importance of substantive as opposed to largely symbolic security sector reform.
And it would have emphasised the need for outside external actors to focus on the politics of the DLC.
In other words, trying to find, if you like, political pathways out of the conflict.
India, the union has become and did become entirely focussed for understandable reasons on the protection of
civilian mandate and became divorced from a critical political aspect of the mission and the mission itself.
And as soon as a challenge today has not leveraged its presence to push the political process forward,
that is reflected to some extent in the way the mission is set up and run.
You have things going on in the East Congo in trying to organise a firefight,
armed groups and you have the presence in in Kinshasa where the headquarters is face and reality.
Of course, politically those are closely connected in terms of the dynamics of the conflict.
So to quote Jean-Marie Guehenno, you many of you know,
as a former head of the DPKO and who finished that job in 2008 but has followed the conflict since
and is now head of the International Crisis Group and wrote a very good book on his experiences.
He certainly and is interesting. I mentioned him partly because he was very much part of this process that I've looked at at least how
force could be made more relevant to support the political process and encourage that robustness.
But he, if not came around,
then certainly realised in his own words that the absolutely critical bit was strategic engagement in the politics of Congo,
including from the Security Council. And without that taking place,
there was always a real danger that if the Force Intervention Brigade was not formally linked to any wider political strategy,
that including security sector reform and demobilisation,
it would end up aggravating the conflict by being drawn in to the political economy in the east.
Now we can ask why that hasn't happened.
I think one reason why I made the point initially, you know, I didn't have time to talk about the scale of the crisis was also, of course,
an indirect reference to how comparative and there's an interest there has been from the
international community in putting diplomatic pressure and trying to get the process move forward.
Comparatively little compared to other conflicts. There might be many reasons for that fatigue and so on and so forth.
But it's clear, as John Holmes, former head of OHCHR, put it in his book on the politics of humanity,
that in many ways it has been treated as an orphan conflict and with relatively little attention given to the dynamics on the ground.
Let me make a final point, and I'm sort of cutting slightly here because of the time, and I'm leaving a bit of time for questions and discussions,
and we can go on to the use of force generally, whether it has a place and what sort of place it has.
But I wanted to say that one of the perhaps key lessons from this one and other operations has to do with the difficulties of third party
dimension and peacekeeping and the use of force in the context of an ongoing civil war and the absence of any of the peace settlement.
Now, there are obvious logistical issues and problems raised by all of that and need to go on that.
But there are also structural impediments to effectiveness in civil war situations, particularly,
and I think this is important to stress when these extend over time and where partly as a
result of that the UN still presence becomes decoupled from a meaningful political process.
Now. There is a journal once once peacekeeping took off as a growth industry in the early 1990s.
A new journal was a new journal start to this journal of International Peacekeeping.
And I remember that because I looked at that journal and one of the first in fact it might well
have been the very first essay in that journal 1994 it was was written by Alan James now UN.
And James, as you know, would have written a lot about peacekeeping during the Cold War.
But this particular article was about the Congo operation in the early 1960s.
And I'm interested because it is in many ways not only prophetic, but it points to what I think are sort of enduring insights.
So who would like to think of this continuity of activities and what essentially Allan James was saying on the basis of that operation in the 1960s,
that a U.N. force that deploys within the jurisdiction of a sovereign state, whether or not calling it a state, is a more of a scripted courtesy,
if, nonetheless, a legal entity in which the host government is faced with internal challenges to its authority for the U.N. to deploy
in that kind of country will find it impossible over the long run to remain above the domestic political fray,
however much it may aspire to do so. And the reasons for that, he noted, was that on an internal scene, a government is one of many actors.
And in one degree or another,
the political balance is likely to be in constant movement and the way in which the unforced
response may well have some impact on the balance or which in effect comes to the same thing,
be seen as shifting that particular balance. Now, the robust use of force in particular cannot not have an impact on the political balance and thus
pose a threat to the threat of the UN's chief asset as an interlocutor in internal conflict,
which I think I still think is it's perceived, at least initially down to that impartiality in relation to disputes.
And as I said, and again, Germany, you know, makes this point,
the UN's presence in the field is very much a not a wasting business in waiting asset over
time as it becomes increasingly enmeshed in the political economy of of the conflict.
And I will I will stop there. Simply say that.
There is or certainly was initially when he took office.
The new secretary general, by all accounts, is quite not-I but sceptical of the value of these large U.N. peacekeeping operations,
and he has emphasised the importance of of preventive action.
Obviously we all do that, and it's always more difficult in practice,
but also use of political good offices and the the need to get engaged in the politics of the conflict,
and particularly to identify those elites who, by virtue of the position within the political economy,
able to drive the conflict and that the size of the U.N. mission might not be critical to doing that.
I think of the process. And so I think the news, I'm afraid, from the DRC at the moment is it's very bad.
I haven't gone into the immediate challenge with the want of a political impulse resulting from
the failure to hold election or indeed evidence that Joseph Kabila wants to hold on to power.
And how this political impasse is leading to further jostling for positions in Kinshasa,
which then has a knock on effect in the creation and emergence of armed groups in Kasai,
most recently, which has always been sort of a cocktail of conflict and tension.
But I think there is a need and a time for thinking very, very hard about about the record and the longer term lessons from this operation.
I leave it to that culture of having left out a couple of things which might be of
interest in terms of whether there is any place at all for more robust peacekeeping.
And I'm certainly not one of those who say that there is no place for it,
and also that we should aspire to an age which is clearly no longer there in terms of the operational challenges faced by the U.N.
And indeed, there are examples we can think of.
I'm sure you will come up with some of them where the limited use of force has had a a short term,
if you like, tactical and important impact, whether that is in Congo, M23 three in Bosnia,
whether it's the interesting role of the British armed forces in Sierra Leone,
or whether it's the very forceful actions of the Haitian authority of the Brazilian forces in Haiti.
In all these cases, you had what you might call tactical military victories.
The problem was always having to translate that into a long term strategic again.
And to put that within a strategic framework you can then be built upon.
And that seems to be for a variety of reasons, very difficult for the U.N. to do, partly on account of its inter-governmental character.
It's neither politically nor structurally equipped sometimes to take that process forward.