Understanding global security - Peter Hough

MILITARY THREATS TO SECURITY FROM STATES
Israeli troops from Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis, despite the fact that the UK
and France had prevented the Security Council authorizing any response to their
invasion. Hammarskjöld, as well as seeking to circumvent Security Council paralysis,
pioneered the idea of ‘preventive diplomacy’ based on a more proactive deployment
of UN peacekeeping forces than the manning of ceasefire lines. Preventive diplomacy
went beyond the ‘pacific settlement of disputes’ confines of Article 6 but was less
contentious, and hence less likely to invoke a veto, than the collective security of
Article 7. Hence Hammarskjöld referred to such measures as ‘Article six and a half’
of the Charter.
Preventive diplomacy was first clearly put into practice in 1960 when a brutal
civil war in the Congo, following its independence from Belgium, prompted a rare
display of solidarity between the Cold War protagonists on the Security Council.
A UN force, made up of troops from a number of impartial countries, was sent in to
the Congo not just to keep warring factions apart but to create the conditions for
peace, using force where necessary. Some temporary calm was achieved by the
UN intervention but optimism was punctured by the public decapitation of some
Irish soldiers and the USSR’s loss of appetite for such an extended UN role as the
conflict unfolded. Hammarskjöld died in an aeroplane crash over the Congo in 1961,
prompting numerous conspiracy theories, and the idea of preventive diplomacy
appeared to have died with him. The USA from the 1960s became far less enthusiastic
about finding ways to get around the problem of Security Council vetoes since it was
an option they increasingly wished to ulilize. Hence, UN forces that were dispatched
to trouble spots over the next 30 years confined themselves more to forming ‘thin blue
lines’ of largely inactive troops stationed between the protagonists.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali revived the spirit of Hammarskjöld in the 1990s
when it became clear that even the post-Cold War world would feature a frequently
immobilized Security Council. The increased number of civil wars was making both
Articles 6 and 7 insufficient for the job and prompting the threat of Chinese and
Russian vetoes, not now in support of ideological brothers in arms but for the principle
of sovereignty. Boutros-Ghali revamped preventive diplomacy in his ‘Agenda for
Peace’ initiative, paving the way for the Security Council sanctioning expansive
operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Somalia in the early 1990s. As with the Congo,
however, these operations were not major successes. The failure of UN troops to
protect Bosnian Moslem citizens from Serb nationalist violence forced them,
humiliatingly and symbolically, to hand over the mantle of peacekeeping to NATO.
In Somalia there were strong echoes of the Congo, when a US force sent in to bring
stability to a complex civil war pulled out amid accusations of having exacerbated the
conflict and with televised images of their dead troops being dragged through the
streets being beamed around the world.
Such images were still fresh in the minds of public and political opinion when
an even fiercer internal conflict in Rwanda erupted in 1994 and, this time, there was
no preventive diplomacy. When, five years later, violence erupted again in Yugoslavia
it appeared as though the Security Council was still operating in the ‘old world order’
when Russian and Chinese vetoes proscribed collective security in spite of the
obvious lesson from up the road in Bosnia that preventive diplomacy was not enough.
Again NATO stepped in to fill the global void but this time with a full-scale and
successful military operation. Although UN collective security was invoked for a third
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