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Peace It All Together: Should the UN peacekeepers intervene with
internal conflicts?
Hi everyone and welcome to the Disarmament Committee, I am Nicola Berthelsen and I will
be one of your chairs in the Disarmament Committee alongside James and Kristof. I will be
chairing the topic of “Peace It All Together: Should the UN intervene with internal
conflicts?”. This is my first time chairing at an MUN conference, however, I am very excited
to get started and I’m sure we will see some interesting debates throughout the conference!
For those of you who are also experiencing a conference for the first time I hope you’ll have
a good time, learn a lot and some key advice: research your topics thoroughly and you’ll
have no problem with the experienced people of MUN. Most importantly, just try to
participate as this is the best way to have fun!
What Do Peacekeepers Do?
A major goal of the UN is to resolve internal conflicts by deploying an allocated group of UN
peacekeepers to intervene. Since 1948 when the first UN Peacekeepers were deployed
there has been 68 UN peacekeeping operations across the whole world; including ten of
thousands UN police and other civilians from more than 120 countries. Currently there are
16 UN peacekeeping operations happening in four continents.
A UN peacekeepers role in internal conflict is to maintain peace and security, stabilise
governments, protect civilians, assist disarmament within the country and promote human
rights. When UN peacekeepers are asked to intervene, a country’s government may decide
that they would rather deal with the issue alone. In a civil war situation it is understood that
the government of a country feel that they are responsible for of the people within their
country – even if these citizens are the one causing the disruption. Due to this fact
governments feel it is their responsibility to deal with the conflict within their country, and
that international assistance such as the UN isn’t necessary, and in fact a breach in their
sovereignty. Many recent cases show that governments believe that UN peacekeepers would
only add to the initial problem or worse, assist the ‘rebel’element in the country to fulfil its
purpose.
How Successful Are These Interventions?
A current example of why the UN Peacekeepers aren’t always welcome is the situation in
Syria. Since 15th March 2011, Syrian people have been in subjected to constant fighting
through public protesting and demonstrations and harsh repression from their government.
The civil war continued to progress and worsened in April 2011 when opposition forces,
mainly composed of defected soldiers and civilian volunteers, resisted without central
leadership. Today however the Syrian civil war has become out of hand; the government
have minimal control over the situation and the UN Peacekeepers are being urged to step
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in. The question is when? Arguments within UN countries, especially UK and US have
indicated as of 4th May 2013 that they are examining how to approach the situation that
will affect the future of military interventions on humanitarian grounds. The US believe that
if the UN were to assist in this civil war it would damage the organisation’s “credibility” and
could lead to further issues within Syria. Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov “it is
unacceptable to use force in international relations, especially by the countries who consider
themselves leaders of civilisation” which means that Russia do not feel that UN intervention
would help the situation in Syria at the moment. There has been no final decision made yet
as to how the UN should intervene but there is a clear split of opinion on the matter.
Examples Of Failure
Although UN peacekeepers are sent to a country to stop internal conflict, there are
numerous occassions where they have been unable to resolve conflict. In 1994 the UN
peacekeepers had been sent to Rwanda but instead of helping to transform the conflict into
peace they stood by as Hutus slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsis. They simply couldn’t keep
control within Rwanda.
Another example of the lack of success of the UN Peacekeeping forces, occurred in Bosnia
in 1995. Indeed, they declared safe areas for Muslim people however this didn’t prevent
the Bosnians from coming into the land forcing these Muslims out of the country. Some 40,
000 women and children were ordered to leave the “safe” compound of Potocari; with
nowhere to go and no chance of survival. The Dutch peacekeepers who were meant to be
controlling the situation couldn’t do anything to help and were left to look upon the biggest
“ethnic cleansing” operation since World War Two.
When the UN peacekeepers first took their post in Congo during 2010, high expectations
were set by the government for the peacekeepers to do their job. Instead, the UN
peacekeepers failed to protect 500 women and children from being raped by rebel militia.
This proves that occasionally the government of the country instead would be able to handle
the situation better and control peace themselves.
What to do now?
UN peacekeeping intervention causes many discussions between the member countries,
and for the most recent example of Syria we see that sometimes the decision can be hard to
make. UN peacekeeping troops do take immediate action once entering a country so we see
that the government of a country could have issues with this if they are no longer in charge
of the situation. However if we flip that argument around, UN peacekeepers could actually
help to prevent further conflict within the country and should be allowed to intervene with
these disruptions.
As delegates you must identify whether sending UN peacekeeping troops into a country to
prevent internal conflict is necessary or not. From the examples given of the successful and
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unsuccessful UN peacekeeping operations you should determine whether it is right or not to
send these troops in.
Finally try to think why the UN peacekeepers are unable to do their job, for example many
people believe they lack resources as some More Economically Developed Countries
(MEDCs) do not contribute enough troops to the UN and there are also very specific rules of
engagement that the peacekeepers must abide by.
So it is now up to you to find out what your country’s position is on this issue. All delegates
must have submitted their position paper (about 50 words on their country’s opinion on the
topic) by 14 February 2014. Send them to [email protected]
You are also expected to write and bring at least two Resolutions with you when you come
to the Conference. You must bring six copies of each and an electronic copy on a flash drive
or equivalent, saved in Microsoft Word, Pages or RTF format.
I wish you all the best in your research and I am looking forward to seeing you in March!
To find out more about this issue
http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/
http://www.betterworldcampaign.org/un-peacekeeping/missions/all-missions.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/04/un-syria-duty-to-intervene
http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/unsmis/
For Country Profiles and lots of other useful information:
http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/country_profiles/default.stm
For issues of current international debate:
http://www.newint.org/
http://www.idebate.org/
http://www.amnesty.org/
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