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News Analysis: U.N. Peace Efforts in Africa Threatened in Sierra Leone
The hostage crisis, which broke out last week in Sierra Leone, shocked the world and humiliated the United Nations which is promoting ambitious peace-keeping programs in other African countries, such as Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The crisis, characterized by the hostage-taking and even killing of U.N. peacekeepers by the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), took place as the U.N. peacekeeping troops was taking over the positions from the Nigerian-led West African intervention force, known as ECOMOG.
The tragedy is also tarnishing the image and affecting the credibility of the United Nations, which, under the U.N. Charter, has the primary responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security in the world at large.
At present, the success or failure of the United Nations in Sierra Leone is being closely watched in Africa and other parts of the world following the U.N. setbacks in peacekeeping operations in Somalia in 1993 and Rwanda in 1994.
Perhaps more than any other African country, Sierra Leone, suffering from the lengthy civil war, turned out to be a test for the commitment of the international community to peacekeeping efforts in Africa.
The U.N. Mission in Sierra Leone, called UNAMSIL, has so far proven to be an embarrassment for the Western governments, including the United States, which has been mounting its Africa programs to safeguard its interests on the continent.
The United Nations force made very slow progress as it saw its movements often blocked by the rebels in the West African country. Peacekeepers were disarmed by rebels in several instances. Against the repeated condemnation and appeals from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the U.N. Security Council here in New York, the number of U.N. staff held by rebels rose day by day. The United Nations, haunted by the memory of 18 American soldiers killed in Somalia on a United Nations mission and mindful of 14 Belgians slain in Rwanda as U.N. peacekeepers, feared that the incident in Sierra Leone would have a ripple effect on current and future U.N. missions in Africa.
"Already we know what happened after the tragedy in Somalia," Annan has said, referring to the 1993 deaths of 18 U.S. peacekeepers in Mogadishu. The debacle led to a U.S. withdrawal from Somalia and all but ended U.S. support for U.N. peacekeeping in Africa that only began to change last year with approval of the U.N. mission in Sierra Leone.
The United States, one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, has veto power on the 15-member body. The Clinton administration has made it clear to Congress that it would not send American soldiers to Africa again.
After the violence against U.N. peacekeepers in Sierra Leone, Annan said, "I think there's going to be very little encouragement for (Western countries) to get involved in operations in Africa." The 8,500-member U.N. force was dispatched in January to monitor a cease-fire and peace agreement signed in Lome, capital of Togo, last July by the Sierra Leonean Government and rebels to end a bloody eight-year civil war in the West African nation. The world body is trying to appeal for help to bring the peacekeeping force up to its full strength of 11,100, the largest U.N. peacekeeping operations yet in the world.
Ibrahim M'baba Kamara, Sierra Leone's ambassador to the United Nations, said that RUF leader Foday Sankoh was clearly trying to test the United Nations by challenging its authority. But he warned that the failure of the U.N. force to stand up to such a challenge would have a wider impact than in his country alone. "Sierra Leone is a test case here," Kamara told reporters. "If they fail in Sierra Leone, what chances are there that they will succeed" in DRC?
DRC poses one of the biggest challenges yet to the United Nations, which is taking great efforts to deploy a 5,500-strong U.N. observer force in the coming weeks to oversee a peace accord signed by six warring African countries and three rebel groups. Security Council ambassadors have refused to speculate about the implications that the Sierra Leone violence would have on sentiment for the DRC mission, which is still has not received troop commitments for the full 5,500 force.
Despite the intensified diplomatic efforts in West Africa and the United Nations to put an end to the crisis and secure the early, safe release of the U.N. personnel, there has been no sign so far that the crisis would come to an end in recent days without the forceful intervention by the international community.
"The behavior of Foday Sankoh and his troops risk complicating the situation and the deployment of troops for the Congo because the Member States will be discouraged from sending their troops to Africa," Annan said.
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