A Unique UN Scandal

By http://www.aei.org/scholars/filter.,scholarID.96/scholar.asp Vance Serchuk
August 26, 2005
http://www.aei.org/images/spacer.gif \* MERGEFORMATINETThe American Enterprise Institute
Original Source: http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.23087/pub_detail.asp
You cannot build democracy with troops from Zimbabwe, says the director of Kosovo's leading think tank, Lulzim Peci, offering what would seem to be reasonable, if exceedingly obvious, advice on the dos and don'ts of nation-building. Yet Peci lives in a territory administered by the United Nations, which, over the course of its six year trusteeship in Kosovo, has demonstrated its own perverse understanding of what it considers reasonable and obvious.
As it happens, Kosovo is in fact host to a contingent of Zimbabwean police officers, members in good standing of the United Nations's 54-nation-strong international constabulary force. Their mission? To conduct law enforcement in this collapsed corner of the former Yugoslavia, while simultaneously standing up an indigenous Kosovar police. 
That the United Nations has dispatched the foot soldiers of one of the world's most notorious dictatorships to establish a democratic, human rights-based police force in Kosovo is a mind-boggling irony lost on no one, not least the Kosovars themselves.
Indeed, even as Zimbabwean police have been entrusted by the United Nations with one of the most sensitive pieces of Kosovo's postwar reconstruction, their colleagues in Harare have been busy spearheading a coordinated campaign of violence and intimidation to shore up Robert Mugabe's regime. A recent wave of house-razing by Zimbabwean police left at least 700,000 Zimbabweans homeless--a man-made disaster carried out with indifference to human suffering, in the words of a report produced by none other than the United Nations itself.
Not surprisingly, Zimbabwean depredations in their own country have had spillover effects for Kosovo. In one particularly embarrassing incident in 2003, a Zimbabwean policeman swiftly departed the Balkans after accusations surfaced that he had tortured dissidents back home with electric shocks.
Given the steady flow of U.N. scandals over the past months--from the sexual depredations of peacekeepers in Africa to the still-un furling oil-for-food debacle--it is easy to grow jaded about the world body's myriad failures. Still, it's important to appreciate that the decision to send Zimbabweans to Kosovo isn't the result of illegal kickbacks or the venal machinations of a corrupt bureaucrat. This is the United Nations working by its own rules--and that, it turns out, is a scandal all its own.
Nor are the Zimbabweans alone. Pakistan, Nigeria, and other nations with police forces notorious for human rights abuses and internal politicization are also on hand in Kosovo, tasked with helping to establish rule of law. Their presence underscores the profoundly misbegotten approach the United Nations takes in assembling and deploying its peacekeeping forces.
In addition to failing to screen out chronic human rights abusers, the United Nations also blithely accepts police and soldiers from developing countries, who arrive comically unprepared for the operations they must undertake. In Kosovo, stories are rife about the U.N. peacekeepers who had never driven a car or fired a gun before arriving in the Balkans. There are so many stories you can die smiling, Peci said wearily.
Besides their lack of the most rudimentary skills and equipment, the diverse national contingents also receive little to no pre-mission training from the United Nations, without which they are incapable of working together as a single, coherent entity. Consequently, the international police dispatched to the Balkans are themselves Balkanized, following markedly different models for how to do their jobs and unable to coordinate their activities. This problem is compounded when, as in Kosovo, the international force is charged with mentoring an indigenous one, thus transmitting their schizophrenia to the local police.
These problems are useful to keep in mind as the United Nations prepares to celebrate its 60th anniversary next month, with op-ed pages and foreign policy journals already groaning under the weight of competing proposals about how to reform Turtle Bay.
Many of the United Nations's failures are systemic, the inevitable contradictions of a collective, voluntary entity that venerates sovereignty while simultaneously trying to supersede the nation-state. But there are also problems of political will and common sense--especially when it comes to peacekeeping. The Security Council may never be the final arbiter of war and peace, but there is no reason that third-world thugs need to be awarded the task of nurturing rule of law in the Balkans.
The policing challenge in Kosovo, simply put, shouldn't be that hard. There are no combatants who violently oppose an international presence, no pressing need for complex paramilitary operations. It is just a technical assistance mission--the kind of task that the United Nations should be able to perform well.
Is it really too much to ask that countries specifically singled out by the United Nations's own Human Rights Commission, dysfunctional though it is, should be banned from participating in nation-building operations? Or that U.N. police forces be trained and equipped as such before being deployed overseas?
These are the kinds of concrete, real-world policy questions that should guide the coming discussion of U.N. reform and, if pursued properly, could actually produce meaningful changes in the way the organization operates. If there's any doubt about where to start this debate, just ask the Kosovars. They have plenty of ideas.
Vance Serchuk is a research fellow at AEI.