By Todd Howland
The governments of South Korea, Canada and the United Kingdom will be hosting a conference on U.N. peacekeeping here in Seoul on June 23-24.
It is a welcome initiative, as creativity and experimentation in the peacekeeping area are sorely needed for these missions to respond effectively to today's complex challenges.
Hopefully the conference participants will agree that it is time for the U.N. and its member states to take their human rights obligations seriously when conceptualizing and fielding peacekeeping operations.
At the very least we should expect to see a measurable improvement in the level of respect for human rights during the life of a peacekeeping operation.
Adherence to human rights obligations can effectively organize mission resources, establish priorities and hold accountable those involved in international interventions.
As odd as it may sound, political and bureaucratic concerns currently trump human rights obligations within the U.N., especially in the way peacekeeping operations are organized.
The problem is derived from two sources: the change in the nature of conflict and how money flows to peacekeeping operations.
Peacekeeping traditionally has been about U.N. troops monitoring and more rarely enforcing a ceasefire between two or more armies. When the U.N. was created in 1945 most war was between sovereign states.
Today peacekeepers can be sent by the U.N. Security Council to deal with monitoring of a ceasefire of an international conflict (e.g., Lebanon and Israel), more frequently to countries enmeshed in dehabilitating civil war (e.g., the Democratic Republic of Congo) and more and more frequently to countries where there was no war at all, but a breakdown of order combined with widespread human rights violations (e.g., Haiti).
While the Security Council rightly sees global peace and security being threatened by widespread human rights violations and decides there is a need for the U.N. to intervene, the tool the U.N. chooses to use ― a peacekeeping mission ― remains basically the same as it was for its first peacekeeping operation in 1948.
Thus, no matter the reality it will confront, whether monitoring an international ceasefire or addressing widespread human rights violations, the main tool employed are ``blue helmets" (U.N. soldiers).
It is the right idea to intervene, but the tool needs to be seriously reconfigured for the new challenges. The problem comes down to money.
Major contributors to peacekeeping, like the U.S. and Japan, have taken an unfortunate penny wise and pound foolish approach to increasing peacekeeping costs.
Afraid of mission creep and even higher costs, the United States policy limits U.N. peacekeeping missions to putting blue helmets on the ground.
Considering traditional peacekeepers normally spend over 99 percent of their money on themselves, the result is situations like Haiti, where the peacekeeping mission's annual budget for its personnel's health care is greater than the annual budget of the Haitian Ministry of Health.
This fact helps explain why it is difficult for U.N. peacekeeping operations to effectively respond to the new challenges to global peace and security.
Amazingly, the U.N. peacekeeping budget dwarfs the regular U.N. budget. The U.N. peacekeeping budget is about 4.5 times as large as the accessed contributions flowing to the U.N.'s regular budget.
Ironically, the amount of policy work and academic attention received by peacekeeping compared to that of the U.N. as whole is relatively small compared to its expenditures and potential for improved impact.
The U.N. employs about 130,000 military and civilian personnel in 20 peacekeeping operations. And 119 U.N. member states have contributed troops to these operations.
As of Jan. 1, the top 10 providers of assessed financial contributions to United Nations peacekeeping operations were the United States (paying approximately 27 percent), Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, China, Canada, Spain and South Korea.
Thus, South Korea, Canada and the U.K. are well placed to push for pragmatic reforms. Hopefully the participants will call for a reform that prioritizes the root cause of the situation, which in turn would inform the conceptualization, staffing, budgeting and operationalization of peacekeeping operations.
The goal of the reform is to employ the tools that are most likely to succeed ― bring about sustainable peace, not the tools which are available given some confused notion of how to save money.
The challenges are immense. If the conference can at least produce sufficient space to experiment with new methods and tools, it should be considered a success.
Todd Howland is a professor of human rights law at the dual degree program of the U.N.-mandated University for Peace and the Graduate School of International Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. He can be reached at toddhowland@yahoo.com.