Dividing missions by three won’t go

Date: 30/03/06

The international community is becoming appallingly similar to the uninterested emperor of fables, making unrealistic laws and proclaiming "Let it be written and let it be done!"

In this vein the UN Security Council (SC) has now passed a resolution asking the Secretary-General Kofi Annan to prepare a mission to replace the African Union mission in the plagued region of Darfur in Sudan. While an admirable aspiration, no doubt, it suggests the secretary-general has an abundance of men, materiel and money from which to organise such a mission - and, worse still, that the very same member states forming the SC who passed the resolution were actually willing to contribute to such a mission.

In reality, the UN is severely overstretched, with 18 peacekeeping operations already on the go, involving 70,000 personnel - a massive amount for a single organisation, especially with limited resources. Nonetheless, it is this organisation that the SC has asked to prepare another mission, to enter a region the size of France, in which renegades, possibly working as government proxies, have displaced over two million people, and murdered and raped many further thousands.

In order to facilitate this lofty aspiration, it seems possible that the UN will turn to NATO in search of assistance - an option no less unrealistic than the mission with which the UN has been landed. NATO is currently engaged in three missions, most crucially in Afghanistan, and has very little, if any, slack from which to offer solace. Moreover, the last time NATO poked its nose in the direction of Darfur it was largely as part of its ongoing vying for position with the EU, rather than any genuine intention of actually deploying in the region. There is little evidence to suggest this position has changed: epiphanies on African problems are not common in international organisations. This being the case, the UN can probably expect some assistance with planning from NATO - which has more than 1,000 military planners, as opposed to the UN's 157 - and very little else.

The UN knows there is no point turning to the EU with this problem, since officially the latter has now fully occupied itself with preparing to send its own mission in support of the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). And getting that together was difficult enough: it took many weeks and immense pressure for the EU to get its act together for the DRC and it was only after shameful and petty negotiations that Germany finally agreed to head up a small force, backed up by a number of member states.

Apart from reflecting, yet again, the deeply cynical attitude of most states and organisations to the plight of Africa, this short expos�lso highlights three basic points: first, there is a multiplicity of missions in the world at this point in time, run by three separate organisations; second, they are all created by more or less the same member states, and third; they are all dependent on precisely the same member states to make them possible - and they are failing to do so.

The reality of three organisations competing for the same resources, in the same line of business, is bad enough - and needs to be addressed. If creatively handled, there could be some advantages to it, but as evident, the issue is not being handled creatively. Nonetheless, it is less urgent than the other two problems: the repeated demands placed on the three organisations by the member states - and their own inability to live up even to the most minimal of these demands. For at the end of the day, the UN, NATO and the EU are not independent: they are merely frameworks controlled by the member states, to the benefit of the member states.

At present, the only benefit is rhetorical: let it be written and let it be done!

• Ilana Bet-El is an academic, author and policy adviser based in Brussels.

Commentary feature in which the author takes a look at the preparedness of United Nations, NATO and the European Union to take on peacekeeping missions, especially in Africa, and the interdependence between the three organisations in this respect.