The Wall Street Journal’s ahistorical look at Congo
This weekend’s Wall Street Journal featured a long article on the troubled UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That mission, the piece suggests, has posed a devilish new dilemma for the world organization–whether its blue helmets should take sides in internal conflicts: Many missions launched since 1999, when the U.N.’s current mission ...
This weekend's Wall Street Journal featured a long article on the troubled UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That mission, the piece suggests, has posed a devilish new dilemma for the world organization--whether its blue helmets should take sides in internal conflicts:
This weekend’s Wall Street Journal featured a long article on the troubled UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That mission, the piece suggests, has posed a devilish new dilemma for the world organization–whether its blue helmets should take sides in internal conflicts:
Many missions launched since 1999, when the U.N.’s current mission in Congo began, have carried the mandate to fight to protect civilians—a sharp break from the era when peacekeepers used force only in self-defense.
The Congo mission "has taken peacekeeping to a whole new level in that the U.N. has effectively become a party to the conflict," says Philip Alston, who in 2009, at the request of the U.N. secretary-general, investigated the mission’s cooperation with the national army.
There is now debate among member nations about whether the U.N. has taken on too much.
The article dramatically overplays the novelty of the Congo dilemmas; UN peacekeeping has been engaged in a vigorous debate about how to navigate internal conflict since the early 1990s. Even more remarkable, the piece fails to note that the United Nations encountered the very same dilemma during the early 1960s–and in Congo, no less. The peacekeepers sent to the hastily decolonized country in 1960 under the supervision of then secretary general Dag Hammarskjold had to consider whether to help a weak central government put down militia movements and separatist groups. The peacekeepers ultimately did resort to arms, and the mission became one of the most controversial in the organization’s history–indeed, many dubbed the Congo mission "the UN’s Vietnam."
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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