Former United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned the American Society of Newspaper Editors in his “Chance for Peace” address delivered in April 1953: “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. … This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Is there no other way the world may live?”
More than fifty years later, in the face of nuclear weapons, the question remains, and international investment in peacekeeping remains elusive.
War is expensive. The World Bank indicates that two decades of war and conflict in Afghanistan cost $240 billion. Recovery costs are estimated to exceed $27.5 billion. That amount over the next seven years would take Afghanistan from its current dire levels of poverty, hunger and want to an annual per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of about $500. On the other hand, absent the twenty-year conflict, in all probability the average annual income of an Afghan would have approximated $500 per person.
Funding war, rather than keeping peace, yields devastating results. According to The New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges, at a lecture in March of this year, war has a force and power of its own. “War waged for empire or wealth in an age where those arrayed against us can also get apocalyptic weapons means we dance with our own destruction. We thrill in our own annihilation. In war, we suffer as much destruction as we wreak. When we unleash war’s awful power, we become its pawn, its tool.”
The more the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) works to enhance the positive developments of ending old wars and preventing new ones, the more Member States will need to invest, financially and personnel wise. Fortunately, many Member States have come forward meeting monetary obligations and deploying civilian police, military observers and troops. Countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ghana and Nepal have significantly contributed to bolstering troops. For example, there were 4,110 troops in November 2003 among the ranks of the United Nations “blue helmets” from Bangladesh (with a 2002 GDP of 47.6 billion), 4,565 in December 2003 and 6,362 as April 2004 drew to a close. During that same timeframe, Ghana (with a 2002 GDP of $6.2 billion) provided 2,077 troops the first month, 2,174 the following month and 2,627 in April 2004.
Yet, countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Germany have not been as resourceful when it comes to troops. Germany, with a 2002 GDP of $2.0 trillion, sent 16 people to serve with the rest of the peacekeeping troops in November 2003, and 14 in December 2003 and April 2004. The United States, which weighed in with a $10.4 trillion GDP in 2002, sent two people to join the peacekeeping troops in November 2003, as well as in December 2003, providing five individuals in April 2004. Not surprisingly, countries with the higher GDP also have the greater military resources, specialized military support services and strategic force reserves.
“Peacekeeping is a universal responsibility”, UN Political Affairs Officer David Wimhurst told the UN Chronicle. “We appreciate the forthcoming support of developing countries and look to them for more. At the same time, we are currently handling fifteen missions, including new ones in Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Haiti. We need more than 1,600 French-speaking police today. These missions also need the specialized military support services that developed countries can easily provide. This multitude of projects requires more sophisticated resources and more technologically advanced equipment to keep the peace and prevent the escalation of war in the international community.”
World Bank facts and figures demonstrate the consequences of an escalated war. In its report entitled “Kosovo War Devastates Trade for Balkan Neighbors”, it explains how the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) bombing of vital transportation routes in Yugoslavia had created a major economic problem for the entire Balkan Peninsula; costs for recovery of the area will exceed $50 billion. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development says that in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, GDP could decrease by as much as 5 per cent as a result of decreased foreign investment and tourism, as well as staggering disruption of trade and infrastructure links. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund estimate that for restructuring those five countries and for Romania, more than $2.2 billion is required in foreign funding. Refugee camps had to be financed by NATO countries, bombed bridges across the Danube had to be rebuilt to re-connect countries, electrical and communications systems had to be re-established for economic development, all of which is interrelated with each affected country’s economy.
It is not just the geographical site of war and conflict that drains the international community’s financial and other resources, but also the adverse impact on its neighbouring countries. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of dollars expended in waging war only to have to reconstruct countries and rebuild or develop economies, incremental conflict management investments pay the greater dividend. According to the Global Policy Forum, peacekeeping costs in Bosnia and Kosovo approximate the costs of just one $2-billion B-2 Bomber for armed battle.
In addition to the costs of an escalated war there are concomitant effects: loss of human lives, human sufferings, creation of refugees, disrupted political stability, delayed economic development, and a degraded natural environment. These are precisely the types of setbacks that the Cagayan de Oro government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) sought to prevent in the Philippines by forging a peace agreement. A World Bank study presented to the Mindanao Business Conference in 2003 demonstrated that a war between the Government and the MILF would cost more that $2 billion and obliterate the economy. It determined that foreign investment dropped 79 per cent, local investments plunged 62 per cent, and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), where the conflict was waged, showed negative growth all during the 1999 to 2000 all-out war policy period. More than 800,000 refugees were created. The limited and contested natural resources of energy, water, land and timber exacerbate the problem.
Mr. Wimhurst indicates that there is at least a $3-billion investment in peacekeeping collectively required of Member States to keep conflicts under control. Even a $4-billion global peacekeeping budget is a tiny portion of the annual defence budgets of many States. War, it seems, more quickly and fully expends funds and wounds human beings and the natural environment than a much more modest investment in peace.
Even where developed Western nations have deployed troops for UN peacekeeping operations, there is a “manifest imbalance between the 30,000 peacekeepers from NATO to tiny Kosovo and the 10,000 UN peacekeepers deployed in the heavily populated Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)”, says UN Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette. Kosovo has a population of about 2.4 million people, while the DRC has approximately 57 million people where, since 1998, some 3.5 million have died as a consequence of war. Over 1.5 million inhabitants died during wartime Angola.
In view of the existing 16 peacekeeping missions, five of which are in Africa, UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Marie Guehenno pleads for Member States to contribute more troops. “It’s going to be crunch time. This is the time for nations to really look at how they want to use their forces in 2004 because the demands are going to be high. If they are not prepared to meet these demands, the United Nations will not be in a position to deliver.”
Assisting the United Nations in delivering its mission does not compromise a nation’s sovereignty. The act of contributing troops has no bearing on a nation’s independent formulation and implementation of foreign policy. The United Nations does not have an army to deploy; instead, it relies on Member States to fund and staff peacekeeping missions to help prevent and resolve conflicts rather than watch warfare ignite. The ability or inability of the United Nations to pay personnel is consistent with the monetary obligations met and not met by Member States. Of the 191 Member States, only 96 are contributing to peacekeeping operations and those contributions are insufficient to meet the current strain on UN resources. Clearly, against the backdrop of war, the global investment in peacekeeping required of developed and developing nations is not just comparatively miniscule. Rather, it seems a more humane use of the sweat of a nation’s labourers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children. —Fayth A. Ruffin |
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