Getting Peacekeeping Right
at the G-8 summit

By Don Kraus
Global Beat Syndicate

WASHINGTON--Begin with the assumption the Bush administration will do the right thing...only after it has exhausted all the other options. The Sea Island, Georgia, G-8 Summit provides President Bush, after years of disdain, the opportunity to get peacekeeping right. Buried in the Sea Island agenda is an initiative to double the worldwide number of trained and equipped peacekeepers and international police over the next five years.

This could not come at a better time. With new peace operations in Haiti and Burundi and a likely new mission in southern Sudan, the UN is now managing 14 missions with about 60 thousand peacekeepers. These operations, combined with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have stretched countries who have contributed troops to their limits. Current missions are sparsely staffed, and the international community has little additional capacity to take on further responsibilities to protect civilians or enforce peace agreements.

In fact, more peacekeepers are desperately needed right now. Today, 10 years after Rwanda, innocents are again being slaughtered in the world's latest tragedy, in the Darfur region of Sudan. But the international community is no better equipped to respond to genocide than it was in 1994. Over the past 15 months, 30,000 people have died in Darfur. Government-sponsored militias accused of   "ethnic cleansing" are continuing their attacks and the rainy season will hamper relief efforts. Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, says that unless there is immediate action, one million people could die by the end of the year, matching the death toll of Rwanda. UN and regional security organizations must have the resources and political capacity to prevent or respond to situations where civilians are caught up wars and ethnic cleansing.

The Bush plan, called the Global Peace Operations Initiative, does not specifically call for training UN peacekeepers, but the UN, and regional organizations such as the African Union and NATO, will benefit from additional capacity. With two-thirds of the Bush initiatives resources slated for Africa, that war-torn continent will be better able to quell its own conflicts and provide peacekeepers for UN missions.

It is uncertain whether President Bush will be able to overcome his disregard for peacekeeping and "nation-building," which the Pentagon has renamed "stability operations." Nor is it clear that other G-8 leaders will embrace his proposal. Bush's plan calls for the United States to pay for about 45 percent of the effort. Rumblings of "unfunded mandate" can already be heard from across the Atlantic, even though the plan allows funders to determine which nations will participate in the program.

In addition to the mixed messages from Washington, the summit comes with the transatlantic alliance suffering its biggest rift in its 60-year history, and with Iraq exasperating already existing tensions. German, French, and Russian leaders will not be inclined to grant any favors to the President that enhance his chances of re-election in November.

The ongoing Security Council negotiations to renew a resolution giving all peacekeepers immunity from the International Criminal Court could also affect G-8 atmospherics. The immunity resolution was grudgingly accepted twice before only because of a U.S. threat to veto peacekeeping missions if Security Council members failed to approve it. A U.S. attempt to renew it earlier this month was dropped after the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, but it is expected to be taken up again before the end of June. Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Italy all support an empowered Court.

The global U.S. campaign to secure bilateral immunity agreements to insulate it from the ICC complicates the issue further. Current U.S. law sanctions countires that will not sign these agreement by withholding all military assistance. President Bush has invited six African leaders to meet with G-8 leaders on June 10, including South African President Mbeki. South Africa, along with Benin, Lesotho, Niger, Mali, Namibia and Tanzania have refused to sign immunity agreements and therefore are ineligible to receive U.S. military assistance, even if the Bush initiative moves ahead.

The Global Peace Operations Initiative will probably come too late for the people of Darfur. But G-8 members should not allow it to become a victim of bad politics. President Bush has taken the world on a torturous ride to get here, but his initiative is an extremely constructive step that would bring our world much closer the dream of "never again" really meaning never again.