CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

Boutros-Ghali recognised that any force thereby created was unlikely be large enough
or well enough equipped to tackle a major modern army. It might, nevertheless, be
sufficient to act as a deterrent or immediate response to a lesser threat, or to stabilise a
situation whilst a large contributory force was assembled. He also drew a firm
distinction between traditional peacekeeping, which was the business of the Department
of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), administering specially contributed forces, and
peacemaking/enforcement under Chapter VII, which would require Article 43 forces
and was the area to which the Military Staff Committee should confine its interest.
In practice little changed and the UN suffered bitter experience of difficult operations
particularly in the Balkans, Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic
of Congo, spanning the spectrum from peace keeping to peace enforcement. Secretary
General Kofi Annan convened a High-Level Panel, chaired by Algerian diplomat
Lakhdar Brahimi, to ‘undertake a thorough review of the United Nations peace and
security activities, and to present a clear set of specific, concrete and practical
recommendations to assist the United Nations in conducting such activities better in the
future.’ 65 Brahimi focussed not on forces for peace-enforcement but on the inadequacy
of the current provisions even for more traditional peace-keeping operations. The first
paragraph of his executive summary offers some damning conclusions:
Over the last decade, the United Nations had repeatedly failed to meet the
challenge, and it can do no better today. Without renewed commitment on the
part of Member States, significant institutional change and increased financial
support, the United Nations will not be capable of executing the critical
peacekeeping and peace building tasks that the Member States assign to it in
coming months and years. 66
Brahimi noted, in particular, that missions must have robust doctrine and realistic
mandates: although the principles of impartiality and of use of force only in self defence
were the ‘bedrock principles of peacekeeping’ 67 , impartiality had to be interpreted as
adherence to the principles of the Charter, not equality of treatment to all parties
regardless of behaviour. There should be no more ‘complicity with evil’ and rules of
engagement had to be robust enough that UN forces did not have to ‘cede the initiative
to their attackers.’ 68 Mandates had to be clear about the authority to use force. There
had to be better mechanisms for determining the size and scope of the mission – and for
tailoring it to the size of contingents actually committed by contributing nations. Better
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