While many on either side of the humanitarian-military
divide recognise that complementary protection strategies are necessary,
interaction at strategic and operational levels has faced numerous challenges.
The humanitarian community has struggled to reach a consensus on civil–military
coordination in general, and there are some who reject any form of interaction.
For their part, international military and peacekeeping forces have at times
been dismissive of the contribution that humanitarian actors can make to the
safety and security of civilians. For both, fundamental differences in culture,
terminology, priorities and approaches pose real challenges to constructive
interaction on protection and other humanitarian issues.
The concept of civilian protection also faces many
challenges in common with the R2P agenda, and there is a raft of additional
obstacles, several of which also confront peacekeeping missions as a whole.
These include: ambiguous or under-resourced mandates, insufficient troop numbers,
weak tactical transport and logistics infrastructure and, lastly, competing
demands and priorities. The DPKO/DFS ‘New Horizon’ paper puts this succinctly
in stating that ‘the scale and complexity of peacekeeping today are mismatched
with existing capabilities. The demands of the past decade have exposed the
limitations of past reforms and the basic systems, structures and tools of an
organization not designed for the size, tempo and tasks of today’s missions’
(UN DPKO/DFS 2009: 21).
In 2008, DPKO and OCHA commissioned an independent study to
review the UN’s record of civilian protection. This study, Protecting Civilians
in the Context of Peacekeeping: Success, Setbacks and Remaining Challenges, is
perhaps the most important analysis of civilian protection to date. It
concluded that the ‘presumed chain of events to support protection of civilians
- from the earliest planning, to Security Council mandates to the
implementation of mandates by peacekeeping missions in the field - is broken’
(Holt et al. 2011).
Whilst an analysis of many of these challenges is beyond
the scope of this paper, the problems caused by the poverty of military and
police doctrine dealing with civilian protection is not. Within the literature
there is a striking consensus on the idea that the absence of doctrine focusing
on the role of UN military and police in delivering civilian protection has
accentuated many of the broader difficulties confronting peacekeeping missions
as a whole. In particular the ambiguity of UN Security Council mandates has
placed pressure on commanders to reconcile a shortage of resources and numerous
competing priorities. Arguably the imprecise language concerning civilian
protection in most peacekeeping mandates ‘stretches the concept beyond what is
functional’ whilst commanders are provided with little guidance on how to
interpret particularly the key phrase contained in protection mandates of
civilians ‘under imminent threat of physical violence’ (Beadle 2010: 19).
Giffen continues this theme, arguing that there is a continuing requirement to
clarify the language that is commonly used in the protection elements of
Security Council Resolutions. Using an excerpt from SCR 1590 (2005), part of
the mandate of the UN Mission in the Sudan (UNMIS), as an exemplar, she draws
attention to frequently used and ambiguous phrases in protection mandates. Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United
Nations, (i) Decides that UNMIS is authorized to take the necessary action, in
the areas of its deployment of its forces and as it deems within its
capabilities, {…} and, without prejudice to the responsibility of the
government of Sudan, to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical
violence.
In the absence of greater specificity or guidance, the
language of protection used in mandates creates a recipe for differing
benchmarks of risk and priorities even across the same mission (Pearson Centre
2010). Existing doctrines have simply ‘fallen short in providing guidance on
how to go about protecting civilians, leaving it to those planning and
implementing such operations to develop the conceptual approaches required to
turn ambition into reality as they go’ (Giffen 2010: 7). Peacekeeping
commanders are therefore often forced to improvise their response, ensuring
that civilian protection by peacekeepers has developed a distinctly ad hoc
approach. Nevertheless, the growth in protection mandates has driven innovation
in the field and some of this has been captured in terms of guidelines -
although much of this work currently remains under construction (Holt and
Berkman 2006).
There is a growing literature reflecting innovations in the
field (De Coning et al. 2011); MONUC (now MONUSCO) in the DRC and UNAMID in
Darfur have both provided a particularly fertile ground for innovation and
‘lesson learning’ despite the extreme difficulties of their operational
environments and the paucity of their resources (DPKO/DFS 2010: 34).
Innovations have generally been practical in nature: the increasing use of
quick-response forces, proactive presence patrolling, temporary basing in
threatened areas, early-warning systems, ‘firewood patrols’ and efforts to
create coherent and multidisciplinary operational concepts for protection. Both
missions have incorporated civilians into planning clusters and ‘Joint
Protection Teams’, the latter conducting ‘assessments in cooperation with
military peacekeepers’ (Weir 2010: 25). They both also provide a civilian
interface between the mission and local communities and work with community
leaders and uniformed peacekeepers to develop concrete, localised protection
strategies that use all available protection resources to keep civilians safe’
(Weir 2010: 25).
Many of these innovations were captured in the DPKO/DFS
Lessons Learned Note on the Protection of Civilians, which, apart from
recording tactical innovations, stressed the importance of portraying
protection as ‘an operational-level objective’ within the commander’s concept
of operations. This adaptation would make clear the commander’s principal
intent of protecting civilians and help to prioritise this in relation to the
multitude of other tasks confronting subordinate commanders.
The first significant document to describe protection as a
crosscutting issue was the UN’s 2008 Capstone Doctrine (DPKO/DFS 2008).
However, Holt et al. criticise it for failing to provide an ‘operational
definition around which planning for specific missions’ (Holt et al. 2010: 5)
could take place - arguably reflecting both the challenge of producing a clear
definition and the absence of a consensus on what was meant by the term in
practice. In part, the drafters of Security Council Resolution 1894 (2009)
endeavoured to remedy precisely these issues, reiterating the Security
Council’s commitment to civilian protection, but also requesting the
‘Secretary-General to develop in close consultation with Member States,
including troop and police contributing countries and other relevant actors, an
operational concept for the protection of civilians, and to report back on
progress made’ (UNSCR 1894 - 2009: 22).
In 2010 the DPKO produced the Draft DPKO/DFS Operational
Concept on the Protection of Civilians in United Nations Peacekeeping
Operations. It refers to a three-tiered, mutually reinforcing framework for
conceptualizing peacekeepers’ contributions to the protection of civilians
(DPKO/DFS 2010b: 15). These include: Tier 1 - Protection through political
processes; Tier 2 - Providing protection from physical violence; and Tier 3 -
Establishing a protective environment. It also makes clear that the approach
‘goes beyond the domain of physical protection from imminent threat’ (DPKO/DFS
2010b: 4), encouraging a multidisciplinary approach to planning and delivery
that enables the three tiers to be mutually reinforcing and ‘taken forward
simultaneously’ (DPKO/DFS 2010b: 15). The draft paper also outlines the phases
in which protection may be required:
‘passive presence to assure civilians of the mission’s
intent to protect them as well as to deter potential aggressors;
pre-emption in cases where assurance and prevention is
insufficient, which might include enhanced political pressure and more
proactive and visible military and police deployment; response to threats of imminent physical violence to
civilians such as troops taking position between the population and hostile
elements; and consolidation in the post-crisis situations that aim to
assist the population and host government to return to normality through
political dialogue and enquiries into human rights violations’ (Beadle 2010:
18).
Whilst representing a significant improvement, several
issues require further clarification if commanders are to be able to rely on
the document as an aid to their decision making. The drafters do not offer a
definitive definition of the concept, largely because of the political
sensitivities involved. Whilst undoubtedly a pragmatic response to the
practical and political challenges of this, these ‘grey areas have been raised
by practitioners as some of the most difficult to tackle in theatre, and as
such would need further clarification’ (Giffen 2011: 8).
Despite the tiers being intended to be mutually reinforcing,
the document provides little guidance on how to approach decisions requiring
trade-offs between multiple competing priorities in a resource-starved
environment. In particular, balancing short term and long-term objectives,
making judgments between competing protection cases or between protection
objectives and wider purposes such as monitoring the peace agreement or the
disengagement of belligerent forces (Kelly and Giffen 2011). These are
particularly challenging issues as the paper also makes clear that ‘perhaps the
single largest contribution a mission can make is to protecting civilians’
(DPKO/DFS 2010b: 18).
Furthermore, the paper provides little guidance on how to
balance the use of force against the need to manage the strategic consent of
the host state. Situations, in which the host government’s forces also engage
in the abuse of civilians, such as in the DRC, create particular dilemmas for
peacekeeping missions with protection elements in their mandates.
Understandably this is likely to be a politically sensitive issue - raising
many of the same problems found in the R2P debates, but also potentially
encroaching upon the sensitivities of states that provide troops to
peacekeeping missions with clear caveats on their usage. These states are
understandably sensitive about a concept that potentially enables or creates
pressures to allow their pre-emptive use against a host state.
Giffen (2011: 1–4), in her paper on the trajectory of POC
operationalisation within the DPKO, suggests that the work of the Secretariat
continues to focus on five particular areas:
the development of a strategic framework to provide guidance
for missions in elaborating comprehensive strategies for the protection of
civilians;
pre-deployment and in-mission training modules that include
a range of scenario-based exercises for all mission components;
an evaluation of the resource and capability requirements for
the implementation of protection of civilian mandates;
a though examination of protection planning processes, both
pre-deployment and within the mission; and
capability development efforts, including addressing
capability standards for military units, to better articulate the performance
requirements to meet this task as well as the other modern mandated
peacekeeping tasks.
Of these, the two most challenging are the development of an
operational concept that will encourage greater clarity in mandate formulation
and the ability to bridge the gap between mandate ambiguity and mission
reality. Equally difficult will be the efforts to turn the matrix of POC tasks
and the range of capabilities necessary to implement POC into resources that
member states are willing to contribute. As Erin Weir suggests ‘these efforts
will show no results if peacekeepers are left blind, overstretched and
immobile. Peacekeeping missions routinely operate with a shortage of troops,
civilian staff and equipment in some of the most insecure and logistically
challenging environments in the world’ (Weir 2010: ii). In contrast, efforts to
incorporate more systematically POC issues into the integrated mission planning
process (IMPP) and to develop POC training packages of the type currently under
consideration by UNITAR are comparatively straightforward (UNGA 2010: 148).
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