Greening Peacekeeping and Peace-enforcement Operations
blurb:isstoday:180808greenpeace
18 August 2008: Greening Peacekeeping and Peace-enforcement Operations
Peacekeeping and peace-enforcement are synonymous with trying to end conflict and striving to minimise the negative impact of war on society. In the struggle to restore peace to war-torn communities and in trying to get warring factions to stop fighting, however, one victim of war is often ignored: the environment. In Africa the link between conflicts and the environment is indisputable: a degraded environment, when combined with social ills such as poverty, inequality, poor governance and mass migration, can lead to conflict. At the same time conflict has devastating degradation effects on the environment.
Across Africa the effects of conflicts on the environment have included the direct impact of landmines and explosives; defensive works such as trench digging; target-related destruction and targeted natural resources destruction. Indirect impact relates to the effects of population displacement, plundering of natural resources, a funding crisis for environmental restoration operations and the creation of a vacuum in environmental management, as is exemplified in a collapsed state such as Somalia.
The environment can be both victim and sometimes also a contributor to conflicts. It is imperative, therefore, that environmental protection and sustainability be effected by the different cadres of professionals involved in peacekeeping operations and peace-enforcement. If anything, that nexus between the unequal distributions of natural resources around the world, an ever-escalating population, globalization and its effect on economic activity and contestation of the same does justify that this global common good be seen as of crucial importance in any effort to restore communities to normalcy through peace-keeping.
A critical analysis of various peacekeeping mandates reveals that the environmental protection variable has not received the required attention over the past six decades of UN peacekeeping operations across the world. This is evident in the extent to which the environment has not featured, and if at all not prominently, in mandates authorising and / or guiding international peacekeeping initiatives. Major peacekeeping mandates and doctrinal variables have largely been based on the monitoring and protection of human rights, capacity building for law enforcers, supporting the establishment of legitimate and effective institutions of governanceand refugee protection, without any explicit mention of environmental protection.
To illustrate this further, it is common knowledge that, even though the joint AU / UN hybrid operation (UNAMID) in Sudan as established by Security Council Resolution 1769 gives explicit mandate to the mission to support effective implementation of the Darfur Peace Agreement and also protect civilians, the mandate does not mention any ‘environmental management perspective’. This is notwithstanding the fact that the mission is a response to a conflict that is partly premised on resource distribution and sustainability of mutual environmental commonalities.
This opens up a debate as to why peacekeeping operations should go “green”. Different reasons would justify a move towards making peacekeeping recognise the need to take into account environmental management.
The first reason is the fact that environmental issues have a part to play in some of the conflicts around the world, particularly in Africa. In his September 2003 report on the prevention of armed conflict, the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan highlighted the connection between the environment and conflict and argued that in addressing the root causes of armed conflict, the UN system will need to devote greater attention to the potential threats posed by environmental problems. This relates to the ongoing debate concerning the extent to which resource abundance or scarcity contributes to underlying causes of conflict. In some African nations such as Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, lucrative mineral resources, particularly oil and diamonds have fuelled ongoing conflicts. This implies that by confronting environmental contestation as part of peacekeeping operations, peacekeeping missions will invariably be contributing to the reduction of the underlying causes of conflicts and therefore environmental conflict management.
The second reason is that at the heart of the contentious issues that are traded off in peace agreements are scarce resources, most of which supersede political causes of conflicts. The very subject matter of peacekeeping entails the supervisory role of the Blue or Green Berets in the equitable sharing of these resources and their mandate implicitly extends to environmental issues that have implications on resource availability.
Thirdly, a reason for going green is to reduce the unintended consequences of peacekeeping on theenvironment. Where peace enforcement is implemented, it requires enforcers to directly intervene between warring parties in order to restore peace. This sometimes means direct combat with hostile forces requiring the use of the environment as a tactical point of advantage as observed in trench warfare, ambushing and destruction of the surrounding flora. Whilst the ultimate aim is to enforce peace, the unintended effects will include environmental degradation. By going green peacekeepers will minimise the unintended consequences of their activities.
Going green is also a way of stemming further environmental destruction that might already be in existence as a result of warfare. In a protracted conflict situation such as in Somalia, one of the major consequences of tactical manoeuvrings between various parties in the Somali conflict, particularly so in Mogadishu, is soil contamination. This is captured in the Bruno Scheinsky UN Arms Embargo report that brought forward the fact that white phosphorous bombs were used in urban warfare in Mogadishu. Soil samples from the impact area had chemical analysis that showed that the phosphorous residual was 117 times higher than what could be expected of a non-contaminated soil sample. These are the latent realities that peacekeepers have to contend with in such peacekeeping tactical deployments of war instruments.
Whilst going green would be laudable, the question is would missions be more effective if they were also explicitly tasked with the protection of the environment as part of their mandate, at least whilst pursuing peace?
As the world grapples with environmental concerns and climate change issues, it is imperative to confront the situation and to seize the opportunity to stem the contribution of conflicts to environmental insecurity. This could be called “Environmental Peacekeeping” or “Green Peacekeeping”.
Philip Arthur Njuguna , Researcher, ISS Environmental Security Programme and Andrews Atta-Asamoah Researcher, ISS Training for Peace Programme
