CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

future security threats. What is needed, in the Security Council and elsewhere, is
better process to maximise the chances of reaching consensus as to when it is
right to fight. 63
Then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, too, acknowledged the problem:
……. on the security side, despite a heightened sense of threat among many we
lack even a basic consensus and implementation, where it occurs, is all too often
contested.
Unless we can agree on a shared assessment of these threats and a common
understanding of our obligations in addressing them, the United Nations will lag
in providing security to all of its members and all the world's people. Our ability
to assist those who seek freedom from fear will then be partial at best. 64
Consensus about when and how to use force has certainly dogged UN peace missions
(or prevented them being launched at all) since the Charter’s inception but it is not the
only cause of the international system’s inadequacy to protect. The difficulty of
reaching consensus has led all too often to such mandates that have been agreed being
too weak to allow the deployed forces to execute their missions effectively. Even when
mandates have been, in the interpretation of some, strong enough, inadequate
contribution to forces on the ground, undue concern for the safety of those forces
relative to those they should protect, or the complications of multi-national command
arrangements and national sensitivities, have rendered many vital UN operations almost
entirely ineffective. Despite earnest vows that the world would allow ‘no more
Rwandas’ 65 , at the time of writing (April 2006) more than 7000 UN peacekeeping
troops 66 were deployed in Sudan whilst press reports estimate that in the country’s
Darfur province there have been some 300,000 deaths and more than 2.2 million people
displaced, in three years 67 . The following short studies of UN operations in Cambodia
(UNAMIC * Oct 91 – Mar 92; UNTAC † Feb 92 – Sep 93) and Bosnia (UNPROFOR ‡
Feb 92- Mar 95), illustrate the point and highlight the principal failings of UN
peacekeeping as a model for intervention.
The UN’s involvement in Cambodia 68 was born out of the 1991 Paris Agreement (of
which Gareth Evans was the leading architect). Conceived at the height of the euphoria
* United Nations Assistance Mission in Cambodia.
† United Nations Transitional Authority Cambodia.
‡ United Nations Protection Force.
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