Defence Forces Review 2008

UNMIL – A UN Success Story
UNMIL – A UN Success Story
The End Product of UN Reform
Comdt Damien Coakley
In t r o d u c t i o n
The United Nations was established in the aftermath of World War II, with the prime function
of maintaining international peace and security. The vision was to create a system through one
of the UN’s primary organs, the Security Council, to deal with conflicts or potential conflicts
between states.
The Security Council model is based on the power structure at the UN’s inception. Kofi Annan
in 1997 identified the structure as outdated and said ‘the Security Council’s composition
reflects the world of 1945 and not the economic and political realities of today’. 1 The past 10
years have seen a rise in transnational terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and shifting
global power structures.
The nature of conflict has changed since the foundation of the UN, while the principle organ
of the UN has remained relatively unchanged. In 1998 Kofi Annan published a report on the
‘Sources of Conflict in Africa’ in which he pointed out that the UN was increasingly being
asked to respond to intrastate conflicts. 2;3
…In which the main aim, to an alarming degree, is the destruction not
of armies but of civilians and entire ethnic groups. Preventing such
wars is no longer a question of defending states or protecting allies. It
is a question of defending humanity itself.
The traditional method of UN intervention was the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces.
Typically peacekeeping missions operating under UN mandates acted as armed buffers
between the conflict parties such as the UNIFIL mission in Lebanon or the UNPROFOR
mission in the Balkans. Cold War peacekeeping operations rested on three pillars, consent,
impartiality and nonuse of force 4 . Many of the peacekeeping operations during the cold War
were not well planned or resourced but hastily assembled and deployed in response to crisis
situations 5 . Some of the UN’s peacekeeping operations have resulted in public failures, such
as in Rwanda and in Bosnia. Issues that have negatively impacted on the UN’s peacekeeping
operations have included weak mandates, under funded missions, poor entry or exit strategies,
ad hoc force generation, and the absence or lack of a comprehensive deployment strategy to
encompass peace building.
The traditionally accepted model of peacekeeping in the 1990s suggests that the aim was
to deploy to the conflict zone, stabilize the state and promote rapid return to liberal market
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