The InterDependent

Michel Bonnardeaux, a public affairs officer in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, spoke in June with UNA-USA members nationwide on a teleconference moderated by Roger Nokes, membership coordinator for UNA-USA, which publishes The InterDependent.

In addition to his current post at the UN, Bonnardeaux worked as chief of public information in the peacekeeping missions in Chad and in the Central African Republic and was the special adviser to the special representative of the secretary-general. He also ran UN public information efforts in Haiti immediately after the January 2010 earthquake. He has served as spokesman for the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and as producer for Radio Okapi, the UN-supported station in the Congo; he was also public information manager for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Congo.

Bonnardeaux has a degree in international relations from McGill University; a law degree from the University of Quebec and an M.B.A. from Concordia University (in Montreal).

In the call, Bonnardeaux discussed how peacekeeping evolved at the UN to its current manifestation. Here are his comments, edited by The InterDependent, on how the peacekeeping operations work in post-conflict situations through stabilization missions.

MB: From a philosophical perspective, history has showed that a peacekeeping mission viewed as a military type of intervention does not prepare countries for sustainable or lasting peace.

That is why the Security Council expanded the mandates of peacekeeping operations, making them multidimensional and including components like rule of law, human rights and gender.

The gender component is crucial because during war, women often bear the weight of conflict: they lose their husbands and sons, but they are also targets of violence, particularly gender-based violence. In many of the countries where there are peacekeeping operations, rape, for instance, is used as a tool of war. So it’s very important to advocate for and with them, ensuring women play an active role in any kind of ongoing peace process.

Tim McKulka/UN Photo

A UN helicopter takes off last January in Sudan, kicking up dust and carrying voter materials to the payam, or district, of Tali in southern Sudan for the country's referendum on self-determination. The new nation of South Sudan celebrated its independence on July 9.

When we speak of rule of law, we are basically talking about security sector reform, which includes police. A peacekeeping mission that is probably well known in the U.S. is Haiti. As you may know, Haiti has no army. It was abolished on the insistence of President Clinton, who convinced the Haitian government to do so, as the armed forces were a source of problems in the country. But abolishing the army immediately put on the street about 5,000 men who were used to getting anything they wanted by using a gun. So rather quickly the criminality rates raised and gang-related issues started to rise. Haiti’s geographical position between South and North America also made it an ideal trading spot. All this led to serious security problems.

As a result, we deployed a mission called MINUSTAH (the “S” stands for “stabilization”). Our role in stabilization missions is to deploy in areas where the conflict is still somewhat latent and could re-erupt.

We’ve also noticed throughout the years that withdrawing our peacekeepers too early leads to the country’s relapsing into conflict a year or two after the mission has left. There are several examples of this; Timor-Leste is one. In East Timor, we withdrew our mission because the Security Council asked us to, but in a couple of years the country relapsed into conflict and the Security Council had to approve the deployment of a new operation. This happened in a few other cases, like Haiti and Angola.

Our approach now is to stay for a longer period of time, but we send more than troops. We now make sure that the missions also focus on early peace-building so that we help strengthen the countries’ institutions to make peace sustainable. The presence of UN police is for capacity building and mentoring purposes. They are meant to help local police in adopting and developing standards that are internationally recognized.

On the military side, it’s very difficult to get the whole international community to agree on training and mentoring a specific country’s army. That is generally done on a bilateral basis or through other types of organizations that are more politically aligned.

So, for example, it’s much easier for NATO or the European Union to do this than it is for the UN to do it. It’s much more difficult to get an agreement within the UN, because we represent 192 member states. And then, of course, there are very specific things that armies do, particularly when it comes to intelligence, for which there are no international standards as with policing.

Rule of law entails looking at the entire criminal justice system from beginning to end -- from the arrest to the judicial process and the corrections system.

When you have so many former fighters/militia, when the armed conflict comes to an end, you tend to see a spike in criminal rates, particularly if there are no mechanisms to adequately reintegrate the former fighters into society, and/or if the rule of law institutions are weak.

ENSURING PROPER JUDICIAL SYSTEMS

So, we want to boost the police capacity so that they can capture criminals, but once they have been arrested, it’s important to have a criminal justice system that functions adequately, respects due process and recognizes their rights. It sounds straightforward, but it can actually be difficult to achieve. In many post-conflict countries, judges or state officials tend to flee conflict areas or they are not properly trained; or there is corruption or they don’t have the legislation necessary. It may sound hard to believe, but it’s not unusual to find judges that don’t even have copies of the laws in their countries, the Constitution. And they often need training not only on their local legislation but on the international standards. In addition, they usually don’t even have the infrastructure to work, so building courthouses, proper offices for them to work at, is also a basic need to fill.

Once the criminals have been tried in a court of law, the last step is to ensure an adequate corrections system. This means having prisons that meet basic standards, but also training local corrections officers and prison guards so that they adhere to international standards and respect human rights. It can be very simple things, like separating underage prisoners from adults or women from men. We see many cases where the whole population in a prison is mixed, which is not acceptable.

Tim McKulka/UN Photo

Residents of Tali, which is inaccessible by road, receiving the voting materials sent by the UN helicopter.

All of this work, of course, takes into account human rights monitoring. In a post-conflict situation, you still have human rights violations and we use human rights monitoring to find patterns or trends, more than individual cases. We also advise local authorities and national governments on how to address some of the issues that are highlighted by the human rights reporting -- finding solutions to minimize the human rights violations with a view to eventually eliminating them.

We also look on the civilian side, at issues like gender or HIV. Most of our missions are in Africa, in countries heavily affected by HIV. We also train our own peacekeepers on the issue, to make sure they don’t get infected or spread the disease.

So in a nutshell that is a general picture of what we do.

Roger Nokes: Can you touch on how civilian protection fits into a typical peacekeeping operation?

MB: We started getting involved in domestic conflicts in the early 90s. There were two really egregious events that shook the world and where the Security Council and the international community decided action needed to be taken. One was the genocide in Rwanda, where up to 800,000 people were killed in plain view under the watch of peacekeepers because they didn’t have the mandate to intervene. All they could do was observe and report. The other one was [Srebenica] in the Balkans. Both events led to a real rethinking within the international community about the role of peacekeeping operations on the ground. That’s when they decided to adopt mandates that include protection of civilians. So now we have protection of civilians mandate in eight operations, including Sudan, Congo, Ivory Coast and Liberia.

What it means is that the Security Council is asking us to assist national authorities in protecting civilians. Of course, the primary responsibility for the protection of civilians always rests with the states. If you are an American citizen, you expect your police force to protect you; if they are failing, you would expect your army to intervene and protect you.

There are cases where we have to assist in protecting civilians from their own state forces. That was the case, for example, in Ivory Coast, where the Security Council explicitly said in Resolution 1975 that they wanted the UN peacekeeping force on the ground to prevent the presidential incumbent, Laurent Gbagbo, from using heavy weapons against civilians, which is what he was doing in Abidjan. [Gbagbo lost the presidential election to Alassane Ouattara in November, but refused to cede office.] In this case, it worked out very well because we had the mandate from the Security Council, and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon phoned President Nicolas Sarkozy [of France] and asked him to authorize the French force in Ivory Coast to help the UN in implementing the protection of civilians mandate.

Once we had the Security Council’s instruction, we used our attack helicopters to destroy or render inoperative the heavy weapons that were being used against civilians. In many ways it’s also the same justification that was used for the intervention in Libya, through Resolution 1973.

ROLE IN THE CONGO

Our peacekeeping forces may seem rather large, but they are usually not enough to cover a vast territory, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a country that when compared with the U.S., would go from Maine to Chicago, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and out to Florida.

And in the Congo, we only have 18,000 peacekeepers for a population of 60 million people. As you can see, it just becomes impossible to protect everybody. What we do then is provide protection to large camps either of internally displaced persons or refugees. All this has to be done by helicopter or foot patrol sometimes, because the Congo has almost no infrastructure or roads. Our own peacekeepers go on 48-hour foot patrols through the mountains, through jungle. It’s central Africa, very dense jungle. And that’s how it’s done. We also engage at a policy and political level on protection of civilians, since we are aware it is just not possible to replace the state forces and provide a blanket protection to all the citizens.

To better implement our protection of civilian mandates, we are also looking at technological solutions to have an early warning system. Cellphone use, for instance, has exploded in Africa, and we are trying to find ways to leverage the presence of those antennas and the fact that a lot of the population has access to cheap handsets that they could use to send us SMS and alert us of marauding bands, militias or rebels.