ICISS report - International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect

The Responsibility to Protect 65
alongside peacekeepers, in order to assist in the resuscitation of national law enforcement
agencies, have not been equipped to address the issue of law enforcement in a “not
crime–not war” environment. The military has remained the only viable instrument
although this reality has been obscured by the notion of peace as the antithesis of war.
Five Protection Tasks
7.42 Five analytically distinct kinds of protection tasks that emerge from these postenforcement
experiences are worth highlighting here. The first is the protection of minorities.
This operational challenge is particularly important when civilians return to territories
where another ethnic group is in the majority. The Balkans have provided numerous
examples of the difficulties, and the relatively low number of refugees and IDPs who have
returned is telling.
7.43 The second major protection task is security sector reform. The focus of such tasks has
been to assist local authorities in their own process of security sector transformation.
Bilateral and multilateral donors alike have sought to influence the direction of change,
establish good practices, and transfer knowledge and insights to the new authorities. The
importance as well as the difficulty of such efforts to recruit and train local police and
reform the penal and judiciary systems have been evident in countries as diverse as Haiti,
Rwanda and East Timor. The problems are especially difficult in situations where trained
personnel have been killed or fled in large numbers to avoid violence.
7.44 In this respect, an interim challenge concerns the use of civilian police. In fact, civilian
police now number second only to soldiers in UN operations. In light of the post-war
conflicts and need for impartiality, the need for civilian police operations dealing with
intra-state conflict is likely to remain a high priority in helping war-torn societies restore
conditions for social, economic and political stability. The difficulty of recruiting international
police is a central and crucial constraint, particularly in light of the need to reform
and restructure local police forces in addition to advising, training, and monitoring
new recruits.
7.45 The third main task is disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. Although
reintegration is key to longer-term peace building, and ultimately the resumption of the
path to economic and social development, the focus here is on the security and protection
of civilians. As reflected in Security Council resolutions and mission mandates, the key to
stabilization has always been the demobilization of former combatants. The unstated
purpose of stabilization measures has been to wrest power and the means of violence from
local militias and warlords and to re-centralize it at a much higher level. In other words, the
success of the whole intervention process has hinged on the degree to which warring
factions can be effectively disarmed. However, disarmament has been one of the most
difficult tasks to implement. It has been extremely hard to collect all weapons, even at
the end of an armed struggle, when the remaining conditions of insecurity create high
incentives for the maintenance and acquisition of light weapons and small arms by the
community at large. Physical security and economic needs fuel a trade in small arms long
after the withdrawal of intervention forces.
7.46 All disarmament commitments in peace processes have tended, at least at the outset,
to be based on consent – regardless of whether the external forces deploy under a Chapter
VI or VII mandate. However, the idea of voluntary disarmament is soon challenged by issues
such as the security and economic livelihood of combatants thinking about turning in their
weapons, along with the normally insufficient number of peace support forces. Faced with