The problem of peacekeeping in a country where there's no peace

The United Nations currently maintains a force of nearly 20,000 peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, comprising nearly 17,000 soldiers, 700 military observers and more than 1,000 police officers, as well as several thousand civilian personnel. The mission, known by its French acronym as MONUC, was deployed following a U.N. Security Council resolution in February 2000 to monitor the implementation and investigate violations of a ceasefire among the armies of Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, as well as about 25 armed groups.

Since the deployment of an initial force numbering just over 5,000 soldiers, MONUC's mission has expanded to include support for the conduct of elections, protection of civilians and humanitarian aid workers, and disarmament and demobilization of armed groups operating within the D.R.C. And in the 19 years MONUC has been operating, 94 soldiers, 10 military observers, six policemen and 39 civilian staff members have been killed. During that same time, over five million civilians have died as a direct and indirect (disease and starvation) result of conflict in the Congo.

There are obvious problems with sending peacekeeping missions into countries that are not at peace. Although it is the U.N.'s largest peacekeeping operation, MONUC is pitifully undermanned in the context of the size of the D.R.C., the inaccessibility of much of its territory, and the continuing levels of military activity by both rebels and foreign governments.

Most critically, most U.N. peacekeepers, though fabulously paid by Congolese standards, would probably not consider themselves well paid enough to die for a country that is not theirs. And that, to my mind, is the problem with soldiering for hire, which is what U.N. peacekeepers do.

U.N. member states are paid for contributing peacekeepers, at a rate of around $1,000 a day per soldier. More for specialists, plus allowances for gears and weaponry. A nation, e.g. Fiji, Guatemala (the soldiers in the photos above are part of a Guatemalan special forces unit) contributing 1,000 peacekeepers to MONUC receives $1 million a day in compensation. Not an insignificant sum for a small nation that isn't Monaco or Luxembourg.

Most nations add a bump to the soldiers' pay, but it's nowhere near the $1,000 a day being received from the U.N. So imagine you're getting an extra $200 a month to be a peacekeeper in the Congo. If you're a Pakistani enlisted man, that's not a small amount on top of your regular pay, but is it worth getting killed over? Definitely not, and as a result, how well you do your job depends on how seriously you take your responsibilities as a soldier and a United Nations peacekeeper.

Late last year, during a handover from Indian to Uruguayan forces in the North Kivu town of Kiwanja, near Rutshuru where I was not long ago, rebel forces attacked Kiwanja and Rutshuru, killing civilians and taking control of both towns while MONUC peacekeepers (who had armored vehicles) bunkered down in their base, at one point even coming under fire from Congolese army soldiers whom MONUC theoretically supports. The Indians defended their (in)actions by saying they were unaware of the attacks on civilians occurring just down the road from their base, but not helpfully from an intelligence gathering perspective, the English-speaking Indian forces had no translators on duty in French-speaking Congo.

This is not to cast aspersions on the abilities of Indian peacekeepers alone. There are plenty of other examples (Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti) of catastrophic U.N. peacekeeping failures, reinforcing the fundamental problem: that few people, even professional soldiers, are motivated by a few (and it really is just a few) extra dollars to die for someone else's country.