Interventions (4 page)

I was a member of Ghana's “independence class” of 1957 at my boarding school, Mfantsipim, in the city of Cape Coast, and to me and my peers, politics and the fate of our country were never far from our minds. If the greatest legacy of Mfantsipim was to bring together boys from every tribe and region of Ghana and to make of us all young citizens of the nascent state, the life of the school, nevertheless, reflected the broader division then playing out in our society between the more fiery nationalists and the gradualists, then known as the “democrats.”

Ghana's oldest school for boys, Mfantsipim was founded by Methodists, and though it followed a standard British curriculum, the school was already run by Africans. We wore khaki uniforms, shorts, but no tie, except on Sundays, when we also wore a white suit. Every morning we gathered for prayer in a stark hall; on Sundays prayers went on longer. Everything was spartan: small wooden desks, stone floors, bare walls, corrugated iron roofs. Stoicism was prized, along with learning and character.

Much as our teachers tried to keep our focus on our studies, the struggle for independence seeped into every lesson, every discussion, every playground argument. A favorite pastime was role playing, mimicking the debates of our elders about the manner and timing of independence, with factions forming on each side of the argument. We even held mock parliamentary elections, and as “deputy leader of the opposition,” I argued the gradualist case in debates with fiery nationalists on the other side. I quickly earned the nickname “Annan-Domo” reflecting my allegiance with the democratic side, which, of course, was the position my father was very publicly identified with.

It was not always an easy place to be, among young men impatient to show their power and authority, and I certainly shared their admiration for Nkrumah's courage and persistence. During those years we saw huge changes taking place. Suddenly the British governor-general was gone. A Ghanaian soon became the president, and so we grew up believing change is possible, even monumental change.

As I left the challenging but intimate surroundings of Mfantsipim to attend the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, I took with me, above all, the passion for politics and debate at a time of dramatic—and to many of us unimaginable—change. At Kumasi, I joined the National Union of Ghanaian Students and soon after, as its vice president, received an invitation to a conference in Sierra Leone to represent the Ghanaian students' movement. Young men and women from the entire region were engaging in passionate discussions about the future of their nations, the struggle for independence, and what happens the day after.

In the audience was a representative from the Ford Foundation's foreign student leadership project. The program was designed to identify students in the developing world with leadership potential and offer them a chance to study in the United States before returning home to help develop independent states. For me, this led to an offer of a scholarship to attend Macalester College in Minnesota—a state whose climate, social environment, and racial makeup could not have been more different from my native Ghana's. My family imagined my returning with my U.S. education to do great things for my new nation. I had the same idea. Education was linked in my mind to service. I never dreamed, any more than my parents, that my departure from Ghana would be near-permanent or that America would challenge my thinking in so many ways.

Privileged as I had been to grow up in a stable and secure family and attend a school that opened my eyes to the power of knowledge and understanding, I was not immune from the poisonous legacy of colonialism and its hierarchy based on race. One experience came from my father's employer—and triggered our first significant disagreement as father and son. Early in my professional career, while working with the World Health Organization in Geneva, I was approached by Unilever—at my father's request, I suspect—and recruited to work for them in Africa. Rather than post me to Ghana, however, they suggested that I begin my work for them in Nigeria, which would not, in principle, have been an issue. The devil, though, was in the details.

Whereas other expats would have been provided special contracts with domestic and other arrangements handled by the company, I would be treated as a local employee, as I was, in their words, “from the region.” Neither my American education nor my Ghanaian upbringing or my international experience working with the WHO had prepared me to accept such unequal treatment. I was to be an expat, a Ghanaian in Nigeria. But to the company, I was a “local.” So I declined their offer of a position. This was not how I was going to start my career as an African professional. For my father, however, my rejection was a great disappointment. He said, “Accept the job and fight from within for equal treatment.” I replied that doing so would give them every reason to continue to treat me as second class.

By this point, I had already spent two years in Geneva, first at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, and then, with the WHO, starting as a P-1, Step 1 (the lowest professional rank within the United Nations system). In Geneva, I found a worldly and engaging environment, and as someone who by the age of twenty-four had lived in three different cultures—African, American, and European—I began to realize that community for me would mean something different from what it had meant to my father's generation.

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N
evertheless, the desire to make a contribution to my continent's future was a recurring theme of my life and career. In 1965, after three years with the WHO in Geneva, I joined the Economic Commission for Africa, a UN agency with the responsibility of promoting regional integration and economic cooperation. Addis in those days reminded me of the Ghanaian independence struggle of my adolescence—a place consumed with the cause of African unity, energized by convening a new generation of African leaders. This was the first era of African unity, one very much driven by the vision of Kwame Nkrumah.

In 1963, when the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was founded, the initial membership comprised thirty-three countries. This number grew as more and more countries became independent and joined the organization. In 1960 alone, seventeen countries gained their independence, and the number continued to grow to the current fifty-four. During that period, I witnessed the comings and goings not only of new presidents and prime ministers, but also of leaders of liberation movements and freedom fighters. All these leaders came together, trying to map the future of Africa and to ensure that the entire continent was fully liberated. One could feel the electricity in the air, and for a young man these were heady days and made a lasting impression on me.

On the other side of town we in the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) were focusing on research and proposing ideas for economic development of the African continent, including regional and subregional integration or at least cooperation. I remember our conversations within the ECA focused on improving infrastructure, energy, building roads, and expanding the railway systems so that trains could flow across borders unimpeded. I had no doubt then that with the right leadership and management Africa could take off.

In a telling—if tragic—sign of Africa's many false starts on the path to development, it is widely recognized today that the two principal obstacles to African development are energy and infrastructure. To recall how clearly this was understood forty years ago is to realize the price that Africans have paid for bad governance ever since. It is one thing for young and idealistic professionals to identify the obstacles to progress and the ways they can be addressed; it is quite another for leaders to see beyond their own personal interests to marshal the resources of their society to the advancement of the common good.

After completing my master's degree in 1971 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Sloan fellow during a sabbatical leave, I returned to the United Nations in Geneva but continued to seek an opportunity go back to Africa. Soon after, I received an offer to manage the Ghana Tourist Development Company within the Ministry of Tourism, a post I took up in November 1974. The aim was to boost tourism to Ghana by encouraging investment, establishing hotels along the coast, and creating duty-free shops to attract tourists to visit and shop. What I found, instead, was a Ghana transformed by military coups. The country was now living under the heavy shadow of military rule—and defined by a debilitating combination of stultifying corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency.

If it had been just a matter of bureaucratic obstacles, I suspect I would have stayed in Ghana and sought to change the system from within. The biggest constraint in any bureaucracy is the one bureaucrats put on themselves—and Ghana was no different. I returned home with my first wife, Titi Alakija, and my two small children, Ama and Kojo, and enjoyed the embrace of family and friends in the endeavor to help build a prosperous economy. The military, however, began to impose itself on every aspect of life—in the public and private sectors, in the media, and in culture. As a consequence, the economy was grinding to a halt. The work ethic and the cumbersome decision making conspired to frustrate any attempt at entrepreneurial activity.

Between the forces of bureaucratic inertia, bad governance, and military rule, I saw little possibility of advancing the kind of change that was so necessary to Ghana's—and Africa's—progress. Today, forty years later, as a new generation is rebelling against this conspiracy of corrupt rule across the continent, I recognize that frustration and the power of such ideals in our own feelings from a generation ago.

In my own case, faced with forces I could not change, I reluctantly concluded that I would have to pursue my career outside my home country. My experience in Ghana reinforced my commitment to serving an international organization, which I knew my country—and others in the developing world—would rely on for support and advice. I realized that, for me, working for the UN was the best way to serve my country and my continent. The United Nations would from then on become my home.

II

PROMISES TO KEEP

Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Trials of Peacekeeping in a World of Civil War

T
hree decades after I joined the UN, I found myself squeezed between four U.S. soldiers, alert and poised with heavy machine guns. Now a UN under-secretary-general for peacekeeping, I was seated in the hot confines of a U.S. military helicopter flying over the Somali terrain. There had been a dramatic recent change in world affairs.

The year was 1993, and below lay a venture into the unknown, UNOSOM II, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Somalia—and things were not going well. The troops, deployed under the mantle of a UN peacekeeping operation, had no peace to keep and were being drawn into a complex and shifting civil war. The previous certainties of UN peacekeeping were now being pitilessly tested in the most hostile of environments. Not long before, on September 25, 1993, a U.S. helicopter had been shot down in Somalia. Attacks against UN troops in the country had ebbed and flowed in the previous months, and they were growing again, with intelligence reports of hundreds of additional fighters loyal to the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid now flooding into the capital city of Mogadishu.

Land mine explosions, small-arms fire, and rocket-propelled grenade attacks had become frequent against UN troops. It was one such rocket-propelled grenade that had clipped the U.S. helicopter and brought it down. We had been told that the aircraft had burned on the ground while Somalis cheered around it. Later that same day, reports emerged of Somalis parading through the main Bakara Market with an object in a white food-aid sack. They claimed it was the torso of one of the three U.S. soldiers killed in the crash. This was a single attack that foreshadowed a far bigger disaster that would hit the operation a few days later, in October.

This was a long way from my first field experience of UN peacekeeping in 1973. I had been sent to Egypt as chief administrative officer for civilian personnel serving in the peacekeeping operation that was under way. The UN Emergency Force in Egypt (known as UNEF II) was stationed to supervise the withdrawal of forces from the Sinai Peninsula after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The job of the force was to demarcate the cease-fire line between the Egyptians and Israelis, and reinforce both parties' confidence in the other's commitment to the “line in the sand.” The mission was beset with complications, as all peacekeeping operations were, which affected my work every single day: there were administrative and logistical challenges arising from a force made up of multiple troop-contributing nations, including Finland, Sweden, Peru, Ireland, Canada, Poland, Panama, and others. This meant multiple lines of command and logistics chains, numerous languages, clashes in military and administrative cultures, and irregular fluctuations in the size of the force, as different countries provided and withdrew troops at different times.

But UNEF II was a largely safe and peaceful mission for its participants, as almost all peacekeeping operations were before the end of the Cold War. Now, in 1993 on the ground in Somalia, we were encountering all the same old complications of UN peacekeeping that we had suffered from in Egypt in the 1970s—but in a totally different arena. This was one of violent instability, where troops were not keeping any peace. They were often
fighting
through the country. Whatever the politicians, UN officials, and media commentators called the operation in Somalia, this was a highly complicated form of war fighting the troops were now engaged in.

“The UN should move in there and take over the administration of the Mogadishu population, surely?” the reporter asked. “Don't you agree that's the only way this thing's going to get resolved?”

“That will take an enormous number of troops. And troops that can take the kinds of risks necessary. It would be a war,” I replied. It was several months earlier, in September 1992, when I was assistant secretary-general and deputy chief of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). The reporter's question reflected the bold and uncritical naïveté accompanying the international community's new interest in humanitarian action. Many wanted something done quickly in response to the terrible scenes they were witnessing in news reports in Somalia, but without fully accepting the implications—particularly the political will required to fulfill these ambitions. The result of this disconnect, between the international community's professed goals and the resources and risks it was willing to commit to achieve them, would be the prime driver of the peacekeeping trials to come.

It was at this time that peacekeeping was just beginning an explosion in the scale, number, and ambitions of operations worldwide, transforming its role in global security. Between 1987 and 1992, most operations (except for stark exceptions, such as the relatively large operation in Namibia) had involved one hundred observers or fewer in missions involving comparatively little risk to peacekeepers. By early 1994, there would be a total of eighty thousand peacekeeping forces deployed in seventeen operations worldwide, the vast majority of these begun after January 1992—and in operations that now saw many peacekeepers suddenly placed in harm's way. Furthermore, in a break with the past of almost all peacekeeping operations, excluding one or two historical exceptions, all these new missions were deployed to the turmoil of territories torn by civil war. These were huge quantitative and qualitative changes, and a complicated array of factors had come together to set the UN on course for some of its toughest-ever crises—and greatest of failures.

The first would be in the collapse of the UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia in 1993; the second, in 1994, in the descent of Rwanda into genocide, all under the gaze of a UN peacekeeping operation; and, finally, the third, in the massacre of eight thousand Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 in, of all places, a UN-designated “safe area.”

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T
he roots of the disasters in peacekeeping in the early 1990s, resulting from the misuse of this crucial instrument, extend to its origins. Peacekeeping emerged soon after the UN's founding as a set of practical responses to the global security environment. The rapid retreat from empire by the colonial powers after the Second World War saw fresh struggles emerge between newly formed, independent countries, such as between Israel and its neighbors or between India and Pakistan. But with the onset of the Cold War, such conflicts gained a new international salience. The hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union meant local wars between countries had the potential to draw in the rival interests of the superpowers—a dynamic that threatened escalation to a global confrontation.

With this concern explicitly in mind, and the heightened sense of global insecurity brought about by the invention of nuclear weapons, the second secretary-general of the UN, Dag Hammarskjöld, institutionalized a practice called “peacekeeping.” Hammarskjöld recognized the need to contain the threat posed by these local conflicts and to stabilize them as quickly as possible, to insulate the risk of escalation to a global crisis, or worse, nuclear war. International, neutral troops were to be used to supervise the cease-fire lines between former belligerents following cessations in hostilities, enhancing trust across the divide and so defusing tensions between previously warring parties. It was a form of “preventive diplomacy,” as he called it, to keep “newly arising conflicts outside the sphere of bloc differences.”

Building on the experience of the very first UN field missions in the late 1940s—during which observers were sent to supervise the truce in Palestine and to oversee the cease-fire between Pakistan and India in Kashmir—the concept of peacekeeping operations was created and its basic principles and rules laid down by Hammarskjöld in the late 1950s. This use of international troops to act as a buffer zone to reinforce confidence in and stabilize cease-fire lines became recognized as a distinct contribution by the UN to international peace and security. It was a remarkable innovation in the service of world peace and international order within the tight constraints of the Cold War politics at the United Nations.

Following Hammarskjöld's lead, the principles of peacekeeping were later formally codified in 1973:

• Peacekeeping troops could be deployed only with the consent of the parties to the dispute.
  
• Peacekeepers had to be strictly impartial in their deployment and activities.
  
• Peacekeepers could use force only in self-defense.
  
• Peacekeepers should be mandated and supported by the Security Council in their activities.
  
• Peacekeeping operations had to rely on the voluntary contributions of member states for military personnel, equipment, and logistics.
  

A custom also emerged that the permanent five members of the Security Council would not contribute troops to these missions, given the potential for this to escalate rather than reduce Cold War rivalries.

On December 7, 1988, however, Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Soviet Union, gave a speech to the UN General Assembly announcing a dramatic reduction in size of the Soviet military, particularly in its presence in Eastern Europe. This signaled the end of the Cold War, with profound implications for the UN's role in the world. The Security Council, envisaged by the UN's founders as the prime body for international peace and security, had been in a state of near-constant deadlock for forty years due to the superpower rivalry of its two most powerful members, the United States and the Soviet Union. But Gorbachev's speech heralded an end to this confrontation and the paralysis it had caused within the Security Council.

For the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, at first, the consequences of this change were significant, but manageable. Before 1988, only a dozen peacekeeping operations were launched in all of the UN's forty-three years. But in the brief period between 1988 and 1992, the Council created another ten. The Council was now able to agree, in a way that they had not been able to before, on its response to crises suitable for the intervention of peacekeepers. UN peacekeepers were now deployed, for example, to monitor cease-fires between Iraq and Iran, to supervise the political transition in Nicaragua and the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, as well as other operations elsewhere.

What then followed from 1992 was an explosion in operations. This was driven not by a peacekeeping mission but by Operation Desert Storm. In response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the Council, in complete unity, passed a resolution mandating the full use of military force as provided for under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. This led to the deployment of 956,600 men and women from 34 countries, resulting in the successful liberation of Kuwait in 1991. It was a UN-authorized, U.S.-led coalition that reversed an overt act of war and conquest by one member state against another—precisely the task for which the UN had been founded.

The full potency of this new and active Security Council was now exposed, stirring a desire among the Council's members to sustain the Council's central importance in world affairs. As a result, in January 1992, the first-ever meeting of the Security Council at the level of heads of state and government was held to consider how to take forward this ambition. They commissioned Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to report on how the UN might be utilized in the transformed geopolitical climate. In the resulting document,
An Agenda for Peace,
Boutros-Ghali focused on the civil wars gripping different parts of the world. He noted that these conflicts were now receiving an unprecedented level of international attention and stressed the need for the Council to take the lead in responding to them.

But
An Agenda for Peace
, crucially, also encouraged the Council to consider peacekeeping—with its long-standing history—as a well-tested instrument for carrying this agenda forward. It suggested moving away from a previous crucial condition for almost all peacekeeping operations: specifically, that henceforth peacekeepers might not necessarily be deployed with the full consent of all the parties to the conflict. This was a small change on the page of peacekeeping principles, but one with potentially huge implications regarding what peacekeepers might be tasked to do.

Even as
An Agenda for Peace
was released, a new range of major operations in response to civil wars—in the former Yugoslavia, in Somalia, and in Cambodia—had already been launched by the Security Council under the rubric of UN peacekeeping. Managing this task was in the hands of the new United Nations Department of Peackeeping Operations, founded that year to take over the responsibilities of the office of Special Political Affairs led over many years by Sir Brian Urquhart. Yet the department—then led by Under-Secretary-General Marrack Goulding—had barely increased in staff size while managing a gargantuan increase in operations and the numbers of peacekeepers deployed on them worldwide, as well as an acute escalation in the operations' complexity. It was at this time that I was transferred to the UN peacekeeping office at the UN's New York headquarters. I came from my previous post as controller of the UN, in the Department of Management, before which I had served as head of UN Human Resources and director of the Budget. I was to support Marrack Goulding from the newly created post of deputy head of the department.

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T
he possibility of deploying field missions without the full consent of all belligerent parties meant there was a need to be prepared, if necessary, to use force. This simple fact meant that peacekeeping troops would be in need of a very different range of capabilities than usual if they faced armed factions opposed to the aims of the mission's mandate. This also meant troop-contributing countries might need to accept very different levels of risk, as well as to provide much higher levels of political commitment, attention, and responsiveness alongside the Security Council. This, however, was poorly recognized. The gulf between ends and means began to widen fatefully.