Authors: Michael Maren
A representative from Hiatt Thompson handed out free samples of plastic handcuffs. They're cheap, they're secure, they're disposable. And they once appeared on the wrists of Bosnian Muslims photographed lying face down in the mud beneath the boots of some victorious Serbs.
The seminar speakers weren't selling arms directly. Most had something bigger to sell. Once war making and peacekeeping are removed from the realm of immediate national security, they become a very competitive business. With billions of dollars being poured into peacekeeping operations around the world, there are lots of armies willing to hire themselves out, and there, are plenty of alternatives to calling in the UN. That was the case being made by Robin Beard, NATO's assistant secretary general for defense support. Boasting that NATO was “the most successful alliance in the history of the world,” I Beard went on the offensive: The UN didn't win the peace. NATO won the peace and now NATO will keep the peace. “Are we going to become a subcontractor of the UN?” he asked the crowd without waiting for an answer. Unlike the rag-tag bunch of armies the UN puts together, NATO already had experience, standardized equipment, and leadership superior to that of the UN. “I don't personally feel comfortable with that relationship between the United Nations and NATO,” he concluded.
Other contenders for peacekeeping are regional organizations such as ECOMOG, a force of West African countries that had enjoyed limited success in Liberia until the whole thing came apart in 1996.
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Dennis Beissel, the UN's acting director for field operations, was speaking when a Ghanaian representative in the audience raised the issue of ECOMOG. Since Beissel handles multibillion-dollar logistical matters for the UN, he wasn't in the mood to have his operation compared to some rinky-dink African project. Beissel quickly dismissed the Africans, stating that the force was incapable of handling a real peacekeeping operation: “There's a lot to know about. There's food, there's uniforms, there's enormous complexity
in medical issues.” He was annoyed that anyone would ask such a question. The real reason for his annoyance was, as he himself had said earlier, “Our new growth will be in Africa.”
Beissel was more comfortable taking questions from military contractors in the room who were drooling over the money that was under his control. “In 1993 the UN system procured goods and services worth over $3.5 billion, making it one of the largest purchasing entities in the world,” said a pamphlet available at the show. According to the literature, $1.5 billion of that was used for peacekeeping.
This pamphlet was advertising a book entitled “How to Do Business with the United Nations.” The guide, which sells for $295, tells you how to get a piece of that action and helps you navigate the Byzantine UN bureaucracy and obstacle course of multiple procurement divisions. Sitting next to it was another pamphlet that sheds light on how some businesses sneak through the maze. It was for corporate membership in the United Nations Association of the United States of Americaâa kind of boot camp for executives looking for those multimillion-dollar contracts. Memberships range from $1,500 to $25,000 a year, and benefits accrue proportionately. Members get field trips to peacekeeping operations (“Business leaders who participate in these trips gain valuable knowledge about product requirements for peacekeeping”) and lunches wiih ambassadors, which are described as “an exclusive series of private conversations with leading public figures from around the world, senior United Nations officials, and other international decision-makers.”
Beissel was acting like one of those international decision makers, a man with $3.5 billion in his pocket. As questions were fired at him about future UN operations, he started answering them in the first person, talking about the money “
I
” am going to spend, how “I” will deal with procurement, and other decisions “
I
” will be making.
“T
here are no protesters here,” said Brigadier General Al Geddry, relieved and relaxing after the “gala” banquet on the first night of the show. Geddry, a retired Canadian military man turned New Brunswick rancher, sat down with me as the crowd filed out and the hotel staff stripped the banquet tables down to their raw plywood surfaces. Geddry now does public relations for Baxter and wanted to know what I'd thought so far. I agreed that they were doing a fairly good job reinventing the arms show: The dinner featured lots of ceremony, a bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace,” and a speech by Elliot Richardson, still floating on the moral capital he earned by standing up to Nixon back in 1973. (He was introduced as “one of the most honorable
men ever to have served his country in the cabinet of the United States of America.”) Richardson is now the head of the United Nations Association of the United States of America.
He spoke about “the king's peace” imposed by William the Conqueror and the subsequent Norman and Plantagenet kings on the unruly Celtic and Saxon barons (warlords?) in Britain. That was the role he saw for the UN in the New World Order. With the end of the Cold War, apparently, the big strategic issues have been settled and now the nations of the world can work to put an end to the “small wars,” the unimportant, senseless wars that others fight. I thought that Richardson missed the point that “the king's peace” had already been attempted in Africa. It was called colonialism and it wasn't so different from the feudalism the Normans used to pacify their British subjects.
The rest of the dinner went according to the organizers' schedule. It read:
The keynote speaker, Major General Roderick Cordy-Simpson, former chief of staff for the UN operation in Bosnia, spoke in a tight-jawed, upper-crusty Prince Charles sort of manner that seemed to suck all the air out of the room and make everyone sit up straight and take their elbows off the table. He described the Balkans conflict as “a thoroughly evil three-sided civil war,” and painted a nightmare scenario about what would happen if the world failed to keep the peace: “Kosovo will be next, and if Kosovo is next then Albania will be called in, and if Albania comes in Macedonia will, and if Macedonia comes in Greece will, and if Greece comes in Turkey will, and if Turkey comes in Bulgaria will. Oh no, it won't happen, we
all know it won't happen. Of course it won't. Our grandfathers said it wouldn't happen. And then ⦔ He went on to describe the start of the First World War. All of this was, of course, the domino theory again. The enemy this time wasn't communism, it was chaos. But the call to arms was just as clear.
A representative from the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies stood to sum up the show. He spoke of the “inspiring and educational displays” that were in the exhibition hall. Then he presented Eskimo carvings to the general and to Elliot Richardson.
“It's really nice. A seal on the ice.” Richardson said when he accepted it. Then it was as if at the last minute he remembered that he must address the commercial aspects of Peacekeeping '94. He tossed in a little plug for the $295 book on UN procurement his organization had published, “which means, of course, procurement of the kinds of things that Peacekeeping '94 expo is all about.” Richardson went on: “People my age grew up with the familiarity with the phrase, âmerchants of death.' Merchants of death were, of course, the manufacturers and traffickers in weapons. You representâ this expo representsâa new and far more open generation of the merchants of peace.”
O
ne of the waiters working tables was Mohamed Aweis, a refugee from Mogadishu who had been in the United States for about two years. He paid little attention to the conference, didn't really care what it was about, and just wanted everyone to leave the room so he could clean up and get home to his family. His constant presence around the table reminded me that Somalia had hardly been mentioned.
Perhaps this was because Canada is now going through convulsions similar to what the United States went through after the My Lai massacre. In the town of Beledweyne in March 1993, several Canadian soldiers from their elite airborne unit found a Somali boy sneaking onto their compound. One of the soldiers beat the boy, Shidane Abukar Arone, to death while others watched and took pictures. It was later revealed that the soldiers were members of the neo-nazi Heritage Front. Some of those pictures were published in the
Washington Post
the day before Peacekeeping '94 began.
Although one incident shouldn't cripple an entire peacekeeping industry, it nonetheless should have raised questions about the assumed moral superiority with which the powerful nations now address the small wars of the world. No one asked where that moral superiority came from. There
was no banner honoring Shidane or the uncounted hundreds of Somalis who died at the hands of UN troops. No one raised a glass in their honor. Then again, the purpose of all of this was to sell hardware.
T
he marketplace of ideas is as important to this new industry as the market for hardware. For the NGOs, these ideas are reduced to buzzwords and clichés. The military, the NGOs, and quite a few journalists have now invested heavily in the idea that the world after the Cold War will be one of chaos and violence. In their forecasts, it is possible to sense a degree of excitement.
While the problems that NGOs once sought to address are arguably worse, they are seeking ever new tasks to tackle. Where they once spoke of basic human needs, women in development, and sustainable development, they are now addressing the issues of land mines, conflict avoidance, and, the latest and trendiest cause, “civil society.” The same aid workers and volunteers who once tried (and largely failed) to teach farmers to grow things are now fanning out and sowing the seeds of “civil society” across the world.
Generally speaking, a civil society is one that is held together by rule of law, not one of loyalties to clan. It is the essence of the cultural struggles taking place in Somalia, Bosnia, and even New York City. In many ways it is a constant struggle, and one that seems bizarrely juxtaposed with the traditional notion and capacities of an NGO. Yet it is a growth opportunity. Along with land-mine clearance and conflict avoidance/resolution, it's where the money is. Few NGOs have ever seen a contract they didn't like, or a problem they didn't believe they could solve.
The first priority of an NGO, like any bureaucracy, is its own survival. Nowhere is this more clear than with NATO, the ultimate relic of the Cold War. Yet with the new mood of doom and gloom in vogue, NATO has been able to advertise itself as more necessary than before. During the Cold War it seemed we rarely heard about NATO. Then, with the Cold War over, the organization seemed threatened by internal squabbles and a lack of focus. The decision in the summer of 1995 to ignore the United Nations and bomb the Bosnian Serbs into submission, and the apparent success of NATO's peace implementation force (IFOR), has led to the rebirth of the organization. Now, with their reason for existence gone, the headquarters in Brussels is busier than ever. Perhaps the organization was just ahead of its time.
In June of 1996, sixteen NATO member states announced a new strategy of “combined joint task forces” to be their instrument of intervention
outside NATO territory. This, they said, would give them the flexibility to deal with everything from peacekeeping to insurrection to wars. The new JTFs are modeled on the mission to Bosnia. Presumably if Somalia had been a “success,” the UN's model would be ascendant.
Apparently some see NATO as the instrument for bringing civil society to Eastern Europe. Clinton administration security adviser Anthony Lake sees it this way: “We are ⦠deepening security cooperation with all who share our values and our vision of peace. A key part of this process is NATO's enlargement. NATO can do for Europe's east what it did 50 years ago for Europe's west: prevent a return to local rivalries; strengthen democracy against future threats; and provide the conditions for fragile market economies to flourish.”
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If governments start putting their faith in and channeling their money through NATO, it is almost certain that NGOs will follow. Everyone involved in the global fixit industry is fond of raising the specter of the “new world disorder,” much the same way they once might have announced death rates they could not substantiate. For NGOs, it has been a rallying cry for more money and resources, whatever is really happening out there.
Most of the disorder seems to reside in the minds of policymakers and analysts, who have lost the lens through which they once viewed the world. The world may not have changed as much as they would have us think. The Cold War, with its clear and present threat to Western interests, only seemed simpler. With the Soviet Union gone, we have lost focus. The proliferation of media, particularly television, has also served to add to the sensory confusion. Chaos in Africa seems more threatening because we can see the refugee camps in Goma or the violence in Monrovia. But is this any more threatening than Biafra, the brutal war in Angola, or earlier massacres in Rwanda and Burundi? It is the intense media attention that makes it seem more dangerous and confusing. It is the perceived immediacy of the crisis that makes everyone cry out, “Do something.”