7

THE UNARMY

Nonmilitary Forces Supporting Peace

 

 

 

 

When my friend Jerry Bender used to visit Angola during the war there, he would stop near the airport to buy a few flats of eggs with American dollars at a local street market before proceeding into Luanda, the capital city. In those days, in Angola, eggs had tangible value, whereas the printed currency had none. The war and the government’s misguided economic policies had destroyed the money economy, despite the funds pumped into each side by exports of oil and diamonds, respectively. Much of the population lived in dire poverty, with disease and malnutrition rampant. Most people relied on what they called “schemes,” involving barter, connections, corruption, and ingenuity, to get by. In those days, eggs could get you around Luanda a lot better than money could.

During decades of civil war in Angola, the Cold War superpowers backed opposing factions. Jerry Bender, an International Relations professor at USC in Los Angeles, shuttled back and forth to Angola, talking alternately to the Angolan government officials, UNITA rebels, U.S. oil company executives, and foreign policy experts in the U.S. Congress and administration—all of whom he knew personally. Because of his gregarious, free-wheeling manner, his great sense of humor, and his unruly hair, he became known as a “licensed lunatic” (his words) who threatened no one and could talk with everyone. Along with many other people inside and outside Angola, Jerry tried persistently to end the civil war, just as many thousands of people around the world have worked to end other wars. Mediators, peacekeepers, diplomats, NGO staffs and volunteers, citizen diplomats, businesspeople, peace activists—all have put a tremendous effort into ending the world’s wars. And, more often than is generally recognized, they have succeeded.

The CIA officer who ran the secret Angola operation supporting UNITA during the Cold War (who then resigned and spilled the beans to Congress) recalled that “the professor who stopped the war, my war in Angola, was . . . young Professor Jerry Bender . . .” Bender saw what the CIA was doing in Angola and called his senator to alert him that the CIA was lying to Congress (which indeed it was). The Senate passed an amendment that cut off funding for the Angola war.

Jerry’s licensed-lunatic theory was put to the test when he went to Angola as an election monitor during a cease-fire in 1992. With three other Americans he was sent to a somewhat remote polling station in UNITA-controlled territory. When the group came in and introduced themselves, the UNITA commander in charge became agitated and pointed at Jerry. “Bender! Bender! Sit down.” All the soldiers in the room cocked their guns at the ready, and the other Americans edged away from Jerry. “Why do you spread lies? On the BBC on [such and such a date] you said . . .” and he listed off points Jerry had made on a BBC interview years earlier, and went on to quote things Jerry had said on a dozen different BBC and Voice of America interviews over the years. This might suggest that all politics is global, and it’s on BBC, but the point of the story is that he did not shoot Jerry. Electoral politics, not violence, was the game at that time. The rebel commander finished dressing Jerry down verbally, then gave him a hug and said, “Let’s go out and dance with the UNITA girls.” And they did.

Jerry Bender is a member of a vast but disorganized mass of people and organizations working for peace around the world. I call it the Unarmy because it is an unarmed force working in an unmilitary fashion to accomplish some of the same goals as peacekeepers.

The Unarmy includes many components, ranging from lone individuals to civilians working with peacekeeping missions, in NGOs, or for governments. “NGOs, independent experts, consultants, and committed citizens . . .” have become “an integral part of today’s United Nations.” In this chapter I will focus on three wings of the Unarmy—diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, and women’s peace groups. (Peace movements get their own chapter next.)

I. Diplomacy: Credibility, Not Impartiality

A key component of the world’s efforts to reduce war is unarmed diplomacy, carried out by governments, international organizations, and non-governmental groups and individuals. Long before peacekeepers arrive at a conflict scene, these diplomats must have mediated, negotiated, communicated, and cajoled to get to even a fragile cease-fire agreement, much less a durable settlement.

One of the UN’s most dedicated diplomats, the self-described “man without a gun,” was the Italian Giandomenico Picco. Picco worked for Pérez de Cuéllar, “probably the most underestimated secretary-general of all” by one account, who used the thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations in the late 1980s to empower the Security Council and end the Iran-Iraq War.

As a UN political officer sent to the Cyprus conflict in the late 1970s, Picco learned “the manual labor of mediation” using the “hand tools of diplomacy.” He found that “it was essential to develop personal relationships with the individuals involved on both sides. . . . I learned how to personalize every matter, which frankly isn’t all that hard for an Italian.” Over time, he also learned that “impartiality is not a useful concept.... What both sides want from a mediator is not impartiality but credibility—the ability to deliver the goods.” In Cyprus, Picco had to arrange complex deals with reciprocal gestures and concessions. But over the years, Picco concluded that reciprocity alone was not the main element of finding a solution—“there are a right and wrong in most matters, . . . and not an inevitable middle ground that sacrifices principle.”

Cyprus also taught Picco the difference between mediation and providing “good offices” for negotiations. “A full-fledged mediator usually has a mandate and the independence to make his own proposals regardless of the positions of the parties. A good officer . . . can only encourage the two parties to stretch their positions until they touch.” The UN secretary-general was generally seen as a good officer, to emphasize his “limited ability to negotiate and the circumscribed scope of his initiatives.” But his representatives, such as Picco, tried to “stretch the confining rubber band as far as possible without snapping it.” In Afghan negotiations in the 1980s, the UN negotiator was charged with launching talks based on four simple points, but “what began as four lines became four lines with an additional paragraph attached to each. Over the years, the paragraphs became a set of articles, then a more complete text, and eventually each item became an individual legal instrument that represented a long chapter of the entire agreement.” Those negotiations lasted eight years and culminated in a peace treaty signed in Geneva in 1988.

One limit of UN diplomacy is that only member-state governments, and not rebel groups, are recognized as legitimate actors. We have seen this problem in Mozambique, where it took an Italian religious community to talk with the rebels. In working on the Afghanistan problem in the 1980s, Picco had to deal only with the Soviet-backed government there, and let the government of Pakistan “speak for itself and the Afghan mujahideen it supported.” Thus, civil wars and domestic conflicts tended, especially in the Cold War era, to be approached at the international level as proxies for national governments, when in fact the causes of conflicts might be localized and the substate actors independent.

Incidentally, one skill Picco developed in Afghanistan was how to seem interested in boring talks. In Picco’s meetings with the Afghan president, the latter always rehashed the same story about Pakistani aggression and “by the third telling, I found myself nodding off.” Because Picco was the note-taker for the meetings, and could not “remain idle lest the principals think their words are being ignored . . . I had developed a system of fake writing, jiggling my pen up and down on the pad so that the result looked like an EKG.”

Pérez de Cuéllar had taken over as secretary-general in 1982 and, by the late 1980s, had helped end the Iran-Iraq War and get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Picco, working closely with him, was trying to “reinvent the office of secretary-general.” The UN head “had become a real player in international affairs without using the instruments of a state, which are mainly money and weapons.” Rather, the secretary-general’s power was based on proposing his own ideas based on what was right, and remaining free of the vested interests that states always have. This reinvention of the office “involved a cultural shift of no small magnitude at the United Nations,” especially in venturing into “peacemaking”—the active negotiation of agreements to end conflicts. “Many governments thought it blasphemous” and a threat to state sovereignty, but in fact the idea dated back to Ralph Bunche.

Peacemaking was viewed by many, nonetheless, as a new concept and, by its enemies, as “Picco’s concept.” Picco avoided opposition by working with “a very small group of people and, in some cases, in great secrecy.” Picco realized that “peacemaking could not be agreed upon as a concept and then implemented; it had to be the other way around. . . . Deeds more than words were its currency.” In 1989, Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar received authority to open political offices in conflict areas around the world to support diplomacy. They even gained diplomatic status equivalent to embassies in one case. But when Boutros-Ghali took over, he shut down the three offices, known in the UN as “the Picco offices.” Finally, in another turnaround, in 1992 the first summit of Security Council members adopted a declaration that included peacemaking among the functions of the secretary-general, giving Picco victory in his effort to gain acceptance of this concept.

During the last years of the Cold War, in the late 1980s, Picco and others working under Pérez de Cuéllar, quietly negotiated progress in conflicts in Namibia, Western Sahara, and El Salvador—“working in small teams or alone, avoiding publicity that would only embarrass our clients and harden their positions.” The goal of these negotiators was “to come up with win-win solutions, except in cases where nations had blatantly violated international law.”

The reform-minded Soviet leader Gorbachev transformed the Soviet attitude toward the UN—which had been seen with some suspicion ever since the Korean War and vilified during the Congo crisis in the early 1960s. Now, Gorbachev declared, “the UN will become part of our foreign policy.” Furthermore, in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), the two superpowers found themselves on the same side (against the new Islamic Republic of Iran). Pérez de Cuéllar got the five permanent members of the Security Council together for the first time to push for an end to the Iran-Iraq War. He also hoped, in vain as it turned out, to use the momentum to do the same for the Israel-Palestine conflict. But he began hosting “unity lunches” of the foreign ministers from the “Perm Five,” and they gave him a new “long leash” to negotiate on his own.

The secretary-general thus gained a new independence, and Iran in particular saw him “as a presence separate and apart from the Security Council” (which was composed of Iran’s enemies). “Indeed, in a world of nations they saw as almost uniformly hostile to their interests, the Iranians considered Pérez de Cuéllar the one official anywhere who was willing to listen to their position.” Picco then became deeply involved in the negotiations to end the Iran-Iraq War, although the UN bureaucracy was “not particularly enthralled with the new peacemaking role that the secretary-general was trying to create.”

Picco found that negotiating styles differed drastically for Iraq and Iran. “In general, countries with a monolithic and very authoritarian structure maintain the same position in negotiations, immutable for a long period of time. Then, one day, they advocate a different position with the same bottom-line vehemence. . . . The other side rarely sees it coming.... This was the Iraqi style” under Saddam Hussein. By contrast, the Iranians at first appeared “reasonable, flexible, understanding, and ready to adjust their position,” but in reality proved reluctant to change position and sometimes reopened “what everyone thought was settled ground. They may be intellectually stimulating, but they’re a bear to pin down.”

To help pin the Iranians down after they neither accepted nor rejected the Security Council’s resolution in 1987, Pérez de Cuéllar took the “unprecedented” step of writing down, on his own, fourteen pages of details about how the resolution would be implemented. “Whether this exceeded his authority is an open question, but it was plainly the shortest route to the end of this long, bloody war,” and in fact the Security Council supported him in the year-long negotiation that followed.

Picco had to push both sides hard, but especially the Iraqis who, opposite to the Iranians, considered the Security Council their friend and the secretary-general a “partisan villain.” Parties in a negotiation accuse mediators of bias, Picco argues, to pressure them and see how they stand up. “Any intermediary who tries to relieve the psychological pressure by yielding . . . should find another job.” Picco notes that “90 percent of diplomacy is a question of who blinks first. . . .” A more real pressure was that of time. As the war continued despite the UN’s efforts, Picco worried that “diplomatic efforts can be sustained for only so long before they fizzle out or blow up.” As negotiations neared their conclusion, Picco realized that “this was the first time since the days of Ralph Bunche, forty years earlier, that the United Nations would actually be playing a major role in ending a massive conflict.”

The talks came down to the wire, and a Security Council meeting scheduled for eleven A.M. was delayed because the Saudis—a crucial intermediary who never spoke publicly about their role—had not gotten Iraq to agree on the final terms of a cease-fire. But just after one P.M., with the Security Council “waiting restlessly downstairs,” the phone rang. The Saudi king, on the other end, said “I would like to be the first to congratulate you, Mr. Secretary-General. You have just brought the Iran-Iraq war to an end.” A minute later the Iraqis called to confirm the deal.

Picco hoped that Iran would feel it “owed us one” for helping end the war with Iraq, and would respond by helping free Western hostages held by Iranian-allied militants in Lebanon. The basis for the hostage negotiations was a declaration by the new U.S. president Bush that assistance in freeing the hostages would “be long remembered. Goodwill begets goodwill.” In the end, after the hostages were released, the United States gave nothing to Iran in return and Picco had to scurry out of Tehran before radical elements took out their anger on him. Meanwhile Picco was working on several other issues. In a three-week period in early 1989 he traveled to fifteen different cities. Later, in thirty-six hours Picco flew from New York to London to Damascus to Cyprus and back to Damascus, only to be awakened at midnight by a phone call telling him that “there are some complications. . . .”

The “toughest part” of negotiating on behalf of the secretary-general, such as in the hostage negotiations, was that unlike governments, “the secretary-general had no money or weapons to trade.” Picco also had to travel and conduct diplomacy in dangerous neighborhoods with rudimentary equipment and security. For instance, he had to carry documents from Syria into Israel in a small UN jeep, across a hostile border that nobody else had crossed at night since the 1967 war. Later he had to meet shady characters in back streets of Beirut, Lebanon, who would drive him at high speed, blindfolded in the backseat, then shoved from car to car, to meet leaders of militant groups holding hostages. After negotiating during the night, Picco would sleep a few hours in the morning, then fly by UN helicopter to the Israeli border (thanks to the Italian helicopter unit in UNIFIL) and cross over to negotiate the release of Lebanese prisoners held by Israel, “my body running on pure adrenaline in lieu of sleep.” After many repetitions of these routines, he was driven by the militants to a jeep with one of the hostages, Jackie Mann, in the back. Picco got in and said, “Mr. Mann, I’m Gianni Picco from the United Nations, and I’m here to tell you that you are now going to be freed.”

One time, a hostage had supposedly been kidnapped by a Palestinian militant group in Lebanon with ties to Libya, so Picco was asked to go to Libya to arrange a deal. A Libyan envoy in Syria told Picco that Libya could not send a Libyan plane in time, “and suggested I rent a plane, with the cost to be paid by his government. I quickly agreed. . . .” The plane rental cost $50,000, Picco spent less than a day in Libya, did not get to see the Libyan leader, and “incidentally, the Libyans never paid for the plane rental. The bill had to be picked up by the United Nations. It turned out to be the largest single cash expense we incurred in freeing the hostages. . . .”

The whole hostage mission cost less than $100,000 over four years, not counting twelve helicopter flights across Lebanon that Italy covered. The U.S. share would have been $25,000, “but all the expenses were charged to a little fund for peace that an elderly American lady had donated to the secretary-general some fifteen years earlier.” So the hostage operation cost the Americans nothing.

The arrival of the new secretary-general, Boutros-Ghali, severely hampered Picco’s work, both because of new bureaucratic requirements and because the secretary-general personally involved himself in delicate diplomacy with a lack of skill.

Picco left the UN convinced that “over and over again, the human factor is at the basis of crises and the individual at the source of solutions.” Reform of an institution such as the UN should leave “enough room for an individual to maneuver in a world of unforeseen events. The Charter . . . gave the secretary-general that kind of wiggle room.”

Another source of wiggle room within the Secretariat can be found in the quiet diplomacy of the UN Development Program’s Resident Representatives who live in most of the world’s countries and are closely aware of local conditions and problems. Most often the “Res Reps” serve in a role similar to an ambassador, coordinating UN activity in the country, and often they become the Special Representatives of the secretary-general in countries with more intensive UN missions. Because local leaders know the Res Rep and consider him or her to be neutral, opportunities arise to resolve conflicts and head off violence.

In Madagascar in 2002, when two men claimed to have won a presidential election, the Res Rep, a Malian named Adama Guindo, worked with the government, churches, opposition groups, and foreign powers to resolve the crisis. He personally brought the two to talks in Senegal, where they formed a unity government pending a recount. When the recount favored the opposition leader, Guindo defused a military confrontation and, within two months, got the incumbent president to cede power and leave the country.

WHEN THE TIME IS RIPE

Many of the world’s remaining armed conflicts have been going on for a decade or more. These conflicts are harder for diplomacy to resolve because they “have been entrenched in the social fabric and the parties have learned how to block peace efforts.” But William Zartman, an experienced negotiator and scholar, argues that conflicts can be effectively settled when both parties have reached a “hurting stalemate” and have given up on winning easily, and at the same time a “way out” is available as a joint solution for which the parties can aim. At this point a conflict is “ripe for resolution.” Thus, in negotiating peace, timing is key.

In particular, when bad rulers in collapsed or collapsing states have created disasters, Zartman argues, timely intervention could have prevented the problem in most cases. “Specific actions identified and discussed at the time could have been taken that would have gone far to prevent the enormously costly catastrophes that eventually occurred.” But instead, opportunities to end conflicts have too often been allowed to slip away.

Having reached the point of a mutually hurting stalemate, “the parties to conflict confront an immediate difficulty. Having publicly fully committed themselves to victory . . . the parties could not very well sue for a cease-fire without harming their reputations with their own people.” Political scientist Fred Iklé, in his classic Every War Must End, emphasizes that ending wars depends on domestic politics as a war drags on and exacts costs. Leaders who make peace can be labeled “traitors” who betrayed the cause that supporters have died for. Yet this kind of compromise is the most common route to peace. Often, “the military hero of an earlier day is the man who can best conclude a ‘peace of betrayal,’ ” because he is less vulnerable to charges of treason.

Thus, continuing to fight means saving face but suffering further losses, whereas stopping means stemming losses but losing credibility. In this context, the powerful external actor, the UN, solves the dilemma by letting parties reframe their decision to stop fighting as a response to the international community and thus a responsible action.

In some cases, a “ripe” moment does not fully materialize. Instead there is “a soft stalemate that is stable and self-serving,” so that the parties themselves do not fully see the growing dangers and are not eager to solve the conflict. In these situations third-party intervention is needed, even more than in hard stalemates. In either case, conflicting parties tend to distrust outside intervention—“a mediator is always regarded as a meddler to some extent. . . .” In a civil war, “external intervention favors the weaker party, . . . and it suggests that the sovereign state is not able to handle its own internal affairs.” Nonetheless, “conflicting and collapsing parties need help out of their predicament.”

PERSISTENT, UNCOMFORTABLE MEDIATION

Mediation is “a form of third-party intervention in a conflict” that, unlike peacekeeping or military assistance, does not involve the use of force or aim to help one side win. The third party enters the negotiations to help the parties find a solution that they could not find by themselves. Since “mediators often meet initial rejection from the conflict parties,” they must be persistent. And since agreements often fall apart, mediators must remain engaged long-term: “Early satisfaction with superficial results and premature disengagement by the mediator is one of the most frequent causes of failure in peacemaking.”

Mediation often requires multiple attempts before a durable agreement emerges. An authority on mediation, Jacob Bercovitch, examined eighteen serious conflicts, resistant to settlement, in 1945–95, that produced seventy-five serious military clashes. In these conflicts, 382 mediation attempts were made—more than twenty per conflict on average. The mediator was a representative of an international organization in about a quarter of the attempts, of a large government in another quarter, and the leader of an international organization in almost another quarter, with the remaining cases scattered among different types of mediator. In half the cases mediation was unsuccessful, and in another 10 percent it was turned down by the parties, while 24 percent of the attempts resulted in partial agreements and only 5 percent in full settlements.

Incidentally, pressure on negotiating parties can take various forms. When Ralph Bunche mediated Israeli-Egyptian talks in 1949 on the island of Rhodes, he turned poor accommodations to advantage. “The physical arrangements in Rhodes—even the appalling food—were, on the whole, advantageous to the mediation effort. . . . Rhodes presented no incentives for dallying or staying a moment longer than was necessary. A determined mediator could use these conditions as an additional element of pressure.” By contrast, South African mediators in Congolese negotiations in 2002 made the mistake of hosting talks at a luxury resort, much more comfortable than back home, and negotiations dragged on for seven weeks.

In the post–Cold War era, “the United Nations remained the preeminent international actor in the pursuit of peace, but its efforts were part of an extraordinary growth in conflict prevention, mediation, peacekeeping, and peace-building undertaken by other multilateral institutions, regional and subregional organizations, individual states, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and private peacemakers,” writes NYU conflict researcher Teresa Whitfield. As other researchers have noted, conflict resolution began making a difference in the 1980s in places such as South Africa, and the new kinds of conflicts that predominated in the post–Cold War era were “exactly the type of conflict that had preoccupied the conflict resolution thinkers for many years.”

Advocates of conflict resolution emphasize timing, in that a “narrowing of political space” accompanies escalation of violence and a “widening” of that space occurs with de-escalation. In the narrow middle, conflict “containment” may be the most that can be accomplished, whereas earlier or later in the process more transformative outcomes may be possible. A wide range of conflict resolution techniques, from fact-finding to special envoys to truth commissions and many more possibilities, are appropriate to different stages of conflict. Conflict resolution processes can also operate on several “tracks” at once. “Track One” consists of official negotiations with top leaders and international organizations and governments. “Track Two” involves midlevel leaders, international NGOs, churches, academics, and similar unofficial channels. “Track Three” consists of grassroots peace efforts in the conflict area. Many Track Two efforts over the years have addressed various conflicts with mixed success—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would have been long since solved if Track Two were a surefire solution.

The Folke Bernadotte Academy, named for the UN Middle East mediator assassinated in 1948, is “a Swedish government agency dedicated to improving the quality and effectiveness of international conflict and crisis management, with a particular focus on peace operations.” It recruits and trains civilians for international peace operations, operating from its facility on a small island in the Swedish countryside. The academy runs workshops and training sessions such as “conflict prevention,” civil-military coordination in EU peace operations, and a course on personal security issues for people deployed in a conflict area.

NGOs oriented to conflict resolution can “monitor conflicts and provide warning and insights into a particular conflict. In certain situations they can pave the way for mediation and sometimes undertake mediation themselves. . . . NGOs may carry out education and training for conflict resolution . . . help to establish a free press and . . . provide technical assistance on democratic arrangements that reduce the likelihood of violence. . . .” For example, in Russia and Eastern Europe since 1991, the Project on Ethnic Relations has conducted mediation with leaders on both sides of long-standing ethnic conflicts, such as between Serbian and Albanian communities in Kosovo. Another NGO, Search for Common Ground, seeks to diminish risks of violence on several continents, especially in the Middle East. In promoting the understanding of differences and chances to act on commonalities, the group uses tools ranging from radio and television shows to shuttle diplomacy, training workshops, sports, and song. Yet another NGO focuses on education and training to promote human dignity and reduce humiliation, which the group sees as a key driver of conflicts.

In 2000–03, a small, newly created Swiss NGO played a critical role in mediating negotiations between the government of Indonesia and the secessionist movement in Aceh Province. The success of this effort ended a fifteen-year war. The fact that this NGO had no history or resources to speak of actually may have helped the Indonesian government select it to facilitate the negotiations. “In a period of just under three years, a nonofficial organization from Geneva managed to put an obscure and forgotten conflict on the international map and to broker a peace agreement.” The cease-fire quickly broke down in 2003. But after the devastating tsunami at the end of 2004 renewed both sides’ interest in peace, they turned to another NGO, a Finnish group headed by the former president Martti Ahtisaari, to host talks in early 2005. The peace agreement that resulted, broader than that in 2003, has lasted ever since. Ahtisaari won the 2008 Nobel Prize for his work in Aceh and for a lifetime of diplomacy.

The trouble with NGOs as mediators, writes Whitfield, is that unlike states “they have no political power or economic resources and thus bring neither leverage to a negotiation nor the promise of resources to peacebuilding.”

GROUPS OF FRIENDS

Outside of the formal decisions of the Security Council, a “plethora of ad hoc groupings of states gathering outside the Council’s chambers” work to resolve international conflicts. Some of these informal groupings go by the name “Friends of the Secretary-General” and others—less tied to the UN and more self-selected—by the name “Contact Group.” Being ad hoc groupings, put together for the occasion, they are free from some of the limitations of the Security Council with its great-power politics, its mandates, and its complex relationship with the Secretariat. They have “developed as a critical element of an incipient system of post–Cold War global security governance.”

These informal arrangements date to the early years of the UN and have greatly expanded in recent years. In the 1990s, they helped end wars in Cambodia, Angola, Haiti, Western Sahara, Guatemala, Suriname, Bosnia, Georgia, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Kosovo, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, and Congo. Since 2000 the list continues with Ethiopia/Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, Iraq, the Rwanda/Burundi/Congo area, and Uganda. The total number of these groupings grew from fewer than five in 1990 to more than thirty in 2005.

The first to operate under the label of “Group of Friends of the Secretary-General” took form in the El Salvador war. Unlike the earlier Western Contact Group for Namibia, which operated outside the UN framework, the El Salvador “friends” worked in conjunction with the UN’s efforts, and served to enhance the voice of the secretary-general, mostly because these countries could bring to bear capabilities that the secretary-general himself lacked. For example, the Friends provided security to guerrilla leaders and raised funds for peace-related programs. The El Salvador friends were Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia, eventually joined by the United States. Their role was “important,” writes Oxford researcher Jochen Prantl, but “largely unrecognized.... And what they had done was difficult to quantify, as befits the quiet labor of diplomacy that attends a complex mediation. . . .”

In recent cases, sometimes several informal groups operate sideby-side in a single conflict. What one cannot accomplish perhaps another can get done. In the Kosovo war in 1999, these included a group known as the Troika (individual diplomats from the United States, Russia, and the European Union), another called the Quint (the five most powerful NATO members), and the Group of 8 (G8, a general group of the big industrialized economies). Negotiations involving the G8 and Troika failed to solve the problem, and NATO undertook a military intervention outside the UN, without Security Council approval. After the UN returned, Kofi Annan created a larger group of countries called Friends of Kosovo.

Some wars are more likely than others to result in the formation of a “friends” or similar group. They seem to be most likely in wars that are neither at the top nor the bottom of the great powers’ agendas, but of middle interest, and neither in the most devastating nor the most trivial wars in the world. Belonging to a “friends” group may offer participating countries who are not great powers a chance to have influence and “to maintain a front-row seat in the diplomatic process without any hard undertaking to commit resources, troops, or diplomatic muscle to the effort.” A group’s composition is usually “directly related to the interests of its members.” Critics of the groups include “elected members of the [Security] Council . . . concerned with the usurpation of their authority. . . .”

THE WORLD COURT

One branch of the UN that gets little attention despite some spectacular successes in preventing wars is the World Court (formally, the International Court of Justice). Its fifteen judges, including one from each permanent Security Council member, meet in The Hague, Netherlands, to hear cases brought by states, not individuals. Almost all the world’s countries have signed the treaty creating the Court, although only a third have signed the optional clause promising to follow the Court’s rulings. (The United States withdrew from that clause in 1986 when Nicaragua sued it over the CIA’s mining of a Nicaraguan harbor during the “Contra War.”)

In 2002, the World Court awarded control of a disputed oil-rich peninsula to Cameroon, and the much stronger party, Nigeria, pulled its troops out in 2006. This dispute, fueled by a combustible mix of oil and bordercrossing ethnic conflicts, had the potential for a serious interstate war. The reason that successes such as this one do not get more attention is precisely that they were successful—there was no war.

Kofi Annan has suggested providing modest financial and technical expertise to poor countries to allow them to use the World Court to resolve disputes. The Court has recently played a central role in some explosive border disputes, notably between Eritrea and Ethiopia, so Annan’s idea could yet prove to be very productive at fairly low cost.

II. Humanitarian Assistance

Humanitarianism makes up another “wing” of the Unarmy. It is a large-scale enterprise. In less than a decade, 1997 to 2005, the overall international humanitarian system including the UN, international Red Cross, and NGOs grew by 77 percent in personnel, with fastest growth in the NGO sector. A “plethora of NGOs” works on humanitarian action in war zones, side by side with the UN but sometimes with a “lack of concerted action.” Other actors are involved too—“states, for-profit disaster firms, other businesses, and various foundations. . . .” Aid levels have also increased dramatically, from about $2 billion in 1990 to $6 billion in 2000 and over $10 billion in 2005.

Some of the most important humanitarian actions in war zones, however, result from the actions of individuals—sometimes working with NGOs and sometimes freelance. One of the greatest was Fred Cuny. I remember his appearance on TV news after a terrible market shelling in Sarajevo, in which he pointed to the sky where NATO jets flew over, and asked why they were just flying around instead of doing something to stop the atrocities on the ground. Cuny was the anti-NATO in this case—unarmed, tiny, underfunded, but there on the ground doing good work every day for the Bosnians. Not so tiny actually, Cuny was a six-foot-fourinch optimistic Texan and an ingenious engineer. With a couple of million dollars, he designed and built a water purification system that served more than 100,000 people under siege in Sarajevo. He designed the pieces to fit in twelve C-130 transport plane loads, each of which could unload in under seven minutes because the airport was usually under fire.

Cuny got started, along with many of the old veterans of international humanitarianism, during the war in Biafra, Nigeria, in 1968. It was the first time that images of starving children proliferated in the mass media, leading to “the first great international response to humanitarian disaster.” Cuny later noted that Biafra was still the “yardstick” by which performance in humanitarian crises was measured. “It’s the defining moment,” during which strategies such as supplementary feeding were first developed.

It did not go smoothly at first, though. When Cuny arrived in 1969 he told the Nigerian interior minister, “I’m from Texas and I’m here to study your war and tell you what you can do when it’s over to get humanitarian aid in.” The minister took Cuny’s passport and ripped out the Nigerian visa. “We don’t want anything to do with these damned Biafrans and all you Americans and others that are helping them. I want you out of here in twenty-four hours,” he said. Cuny left the country and returned on the Biafran side to help feed people.

After Biafra, Cuny went on to help get aid to people in need in countries around the world. He became a leading figure in humanitarianism. After his success in Sarajevo in 1994, before the war there had ended Cuny was off to Chechnya to help its people during a particularly traumatic war between secessionist rebels and the Russian government. Chechnya was one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a humanitarian or journalist. Cuny was reported missing in 1995, and months later, after intensive investigation, he was declared dead although his body was never found. Rumors and theories swirled about who killed him and why, but the only sure truth is that Fred Cuny was never seen again, and the world is poorer for it.

Cuny’s fate is becoming more common. In 2008, 122 humanitarian aid workers were killed and 138 more “kidnapped or seriously injured in violent attacks. This toll is the highest of the twelve years that our study has tracked these incidents,” wrote researchers at NYU. Not only have numbers risen steadily since around 2001, but even relative to the number of aid workers active in the world the number has risen. However, the chances of a given aid worker in the field experiencing one of these crimes in a given year is still below one in a thousand. The most dangerous countries were Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia, and they accounted for all the increase in recent years. “As security worsens, aid operations are often scaled back or withdrawn, affecting both the quality and quantity of assistance beneficiaries receive.”

ISSUES FOR HUMANITARIANISM

British humanitarian aid worker Conor Foley uses his experiences to criticize recent trends in humanitarian aid in war zones. Human rights NGOs have come together with humanitarian groups that traditionally restricted themselves to temporarily helping people without getting into politics. The result of this merger, Foley says, was a “political humanitarianism” that advocated for military intervention during humanitarian crises in the 1990s, culminating in the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

Foley criticizes humanitarian organizations that have worked with military forces, as in Afghanistan. The government or rebels can give or withhold access to aid depending on various communities’ cooperation with the war effort. Foley argues that only the traditional principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence that have defined humanitarianism in the past can “potentially fit all the situations in which humanitarians work.... The shift away from these principles in recent years has caused more problems than it has solved.” Foley finds humanitarian interventions “at best a necessary evil,” and at worst something comparable to the “rush of missionaries, teachers, and doctors who followed the soldiers of European armies” in colonizing Africa in the late nineteenth century.

Recently the lines dividing military from humanitarian operations have blurred. Insurgents began targeting all foreign groups, often finding NGOs and the UN to be “softer” targets than military forces. At the same time, military forces in counterinsurgency operations have integrated humanitarian aspects in their efforts to “win hearts and minds.” In some ways traditional humanitarian agencies and military organizations are today “jockeying for position in conflicts around the world,” write researchers Ian Smillie and Larry Minear.

One dilemma for humanitarian aid from Biafra to Bosnia and beyond has been that the assistance may sustain rebel groups and prolong the war, leading to more suffering. In 2010, international food aid in Somalia was found to be going partly to the Islamic militant groups fighting the government. In Bosnia, “UN humanitarian aid . . . had undoubtedly kept many people alive, but it had also sustained the war which had killed many others.” In some cases, UN convoys carrying desperately needed aid to UN-designated “safe areas” in Bosnia had to supply diesel fuel to the besieging Serbian forces in exchange for passage to the safe areas. By one estimate, between 35 and 70 percent of relief assistance to Bosnia was captured by the combatants.

In Sierra Leone, after a coup during the war, Britain suspended desperately needed humanitarian aid because of concerns it would be diverted from its intended purpose. Some NGOs felt the aid suspension, along with an embargo on fuel and arms, had political purposes, to pressure Sierra Leone for a political solution, but a British minister called this an “absolute lie.” Nonetheless, the situation on the ground “deteriorated rapidly” as most NGOs pulled out of the country and the governmentin-exile urged others to follow.

“When politics intrudes on humanitarian action, the higher the level of the policy maker, the higher the political quotient in the humanitarian equation. Human need looks more compelling on its own terms from the front lines than from donor capitals.” Nonetheless, Reagan-era American aid to Ethiopia, and Clinton-era aid to North Korea, reflected genuine humanitarian concern rather than political calculation.

The combination of humanitarian and political concerns results in different “tiers” of emergencies, where the top tier of “high-profile political crises such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq” get most attention and funding. “Second-class emergencies” are the more traditional big humanitarian crises such as Sudan or Mozambique, with genuine need but lacking strategic political value. They receive less funding but are not entirely ignored either. The “third-class emergencies” are the “forgotten” cases and also the majority of cases. After the top ten recipient countries receive half the world’s humanitarian aid, a hundred others share the other half, according to Smillie and Minear.

Another issue is that bureaucratic budgeting at the global level, especially by UNHCR, does not necessarily reflect the quickly changing realities on the ground, as when UNHCR budgeted for 2,000 Liberian refugees in Sierra Leone in 2002 but found instead more than 50,000 needing help.

Humanitarian organizations are reforming in response to such problems. After Rwanda, where aid was delivered to genocide perpetrators who controlled refugee camps across the border, humanitarians asked hard questions. Reforms included new codes of conduct, better coordination of efforts across groups, and accountability in budgets. The business “remains messy and imperfect,” though. “There is at present no humanitarian regime—that is, no set of standards, enforcement sanctions, and accountabilities . . . ,” write Smillie and Minear. Activities reflect a mix of the needs of people in distress and “what humanitarian agencies think the political traffic will bear and what they think donors will provide. . . .”

Relations between NGOs and host governments do not always go smoothly. In Sierra Leone, the government did not always appreciate the help of NGOs that, understandably, preferred to deal directly with the population where possible rather than working through the government. However, legally, the obligation to help citizens resides with their governments. After the number of NGOs in the country grew from about thirty to ninety from 1996 to 2002, the “mutual antipathy between NGOs and government” became “open hostility.” The government complained that international NGOs resisted coordination and openness, and consumed scarce resources such as vehicles. “When they get into trouble, they come running to us. Otherwise they simply ignore us,” complained a senior government official. The NGOs were exempt from import tariffs, which were a key source of government revenue.

Of the ninety NGOs in Sierra Leone, about twenty were large “brandname” groups such as Save the Children and Lutheran World Relief, and others were less familiar to Sierra Leone officials but fairly well known in the humanitarian community, such as the British group Marie Stopes Society. About fifteen others were “less well known”—an NGO with three medical ships, a French group helping land mine victims. Dozens of others, however, were “mom and pop” NGOs that might raise money for a single hospital or water system in Sierra Leone, and did not want the distraction of dealing with government red tape. The relief effort in Sierra Leone did have problems. But “often missing from the long catalog of problems, misperceptions, false starts, and mistakes is the tremendous dedication that most humanitarian agencies and workers applied to their work in Sierra Leone.”

The transition from short-term emergency aid to long-term development assistance is a perennial problem in humanitarian aid. The director of a major international agency complains that the World Food Program “doesn’t care about relationships, and they will often get you started and then shift the money elsewhere.... The UN is the most difficult donor to manage.” In Sierra Leone, aid agencies were ready to move to “recovery” in late 2002 but had available only donor funds earmarked for “emergency” purposes. The head of one UN agency in the country said, “Recovery appeals don’t work. They send a signal to the emergency departments of donor agencies that they can begin to phase out, and the development departments don’t pick up the slack because recovery isn’t seen as development.” A USAID official agreed: “Humanitarian agencies are not here to do poverty alleviation. Nobody is interested in development in Sierra Leone. Development simply isn’t on CNN.”

“Unlike membership dues in the United Nations and contributions for peacekeeping, all humanitarian resources are completely voluntary . . . ,” note Smillie and Minear. Yet the world raises about $10 billion a year in this way, about the same as UN dues and peacekeeping assessments combined.

A special place in the humanitarian system is reserved in international law for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a Swissbased group independent of the national Red Cross or Red Crescent societies in different countries. The ICRC historically put priority on working to facilitate the well-being of prisoners of war, as well as care of wounded soldiers and other issues of international humanitarian law. The ICRC operates independently and follows strict neutrality in war zones. In 2009 it had a budget of about $1 billion, with about 2,000 Swiss and expatriate personnel and 10,000 local staff in the eighty countries where it operated. The ICRC visited nearly half a million detainees in 2009, and supported more than 500 hospitals and health facilities that treated about a million people, notably in thirty-three first-aid posts established near combat zones. Governments contribute about 80 percent of the ICRC’s funds. In these operational aspects, the ICRC resembles other humanitarian agencies such as Doctors Without Borders and the UN refugee agency. But unlike most nongovernmental organizations, the ICRC also conducts diplomacy, such as getting governments to comply with treaties they signed. And it promotes norms regarding war-affected populations, such as asserting the illegitimacy of land mines.

III. Women and Peace

Sanam Anderlini, a pioneer in women’s peace activism, notes that what was a “bandwagon of women in peace and security” a decade ago “is now a full-fledged convoy on a bumpy road.” She ties the rise of recent women’s peace activism both to the changing nature of war—especially the blurring of lines between military and civilian spheres—and to the UN-SPONSORED conference on women held in Beijing in 1995. The Beijing conference brought together women peacemakers from the civil wars of the early 1990s in places such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland. The women were often motivated to take action after losing children to war. After Beijing, “local, national, and international women’s activism in peacemaking and security-related issues grew exponentially, with regional and international networks taking shape.”

At the five-year follow-up conference to Beijing, in 2000, NGOs appealed for a Security Council resolution on women and war. They worked with governments holding temporary seats on the Council—Bangladesh, Jamaica, Canada, and Namibia—and shepherded Resolution 1325 to passage later in 2000. Under that resolution, all UN peace operations are supposed to take gender into account in terms of women’s participation as peacekeepers, women’s involvement in peace processes, and attention to the protection of women and girls in conflict areas. Implementation of 1325 has been uneven, but the overall effect positive. A new resolution in 2009 reaffirmed the goals of 1325 and emphasized women’s roles in peacebuilding. Yet, of the 80,000 military peacekeepers deployed in early 2008, fewer than 2 percent were women. This reflects the composition of national military forces in contributing countries.

In Sri Lanka (where, incidentally, women made up about a third of the rebel Tamil Tiger combatants), about a hundred women formed Women for Peace at the start of the war and collected ten thousand signatures across the country, calling for the war’s end. In Israel, Women in Black dressed in black and stood in protests against the occupation of Palestine starting in 1988. Women in Serbia and Palestine emulated this tactic. In 1995–96, when the genocide in Rwanda threatened to repeat itself in next-door Burundi, women’s groups launched radio shows, workshops, and female-run mediations. Reportedly, violence was lower in communities where such women were active.

In Liberia, a schoolteacher speaking on a radio show called for a mass meeting and 400 women showed up, starting a women’s initiative that was critical to Liberia’s progress toward peace. “They ran workshops in which members of opposing parties were forced to partner with each other to complete simple tasks.... They kept their public support through demonstrations. They were the first sector of society to speak up to the fighters.” Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, credits these women’s efforts with ending the civil war in her country—they “sat in the rain and sun promoting peace, advocating reconciliation and the end to the war.” She also argues that if women ran the world, “it would be a better, safer and more productive world,” with no wars. (This is a long-standing argument that has never been put to the test.)

However, more often than not women’s peace activism is “not enough” to end wars, as it “comes too late,” notes Anderlini. Women’s peace groups generally do not plan for worst-case scenarios, and have trouble responding effectively when their hopes for peace are overwhelmed by an outbreak of violence. Most women’s peace efforts begin small and remain below-the-radar, with either local grassroots groups eventually seeking help from NGOs, or sometimes NGOs identifying and supporting potential women leaders to take action. One recurrent problem faced by women’s groups is that international donors and organizations “that could be their natural allies are often ignorant of their existence.” A UN official realized that “we keep focusing on bringing organized groups to the table, but women are organized in a different way so they do not appear in the picture. They are not invited to the table.” In 2006 in Nepal, for example, there were no women in the multiparty peace negotiations, although women’s organizations had helped catalyze the talks.

In the Niger Delta region in the south of Nigeria, where a low-level violent conflict has run for decades—poor local communities want more money and less environmental damage from the massive oil drilling there—women in 2002 took a new tack. They staged a nonviolent sit-in against Chevron/Texaco to push for the same demands that men had been seeking with guns. Chevron/Texaco opened a dialogue with the women and agreed to adopt a “different philosophy,” in the words of one company executive, to “do more with communities” by funding schools, clinics, water, and electricity, and giving microcredit to women. The conflict in this region diminished in 2009, with a government amnesty and a reduction in rebel attacks, although the final outcome is not yet clear. No doubt the women’s nonviolent actions contributed to the progress that the Niger Delta has made.

Women also played a vital role in South Africa’s peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy in the early 1990s. One in four peace monitors sent out under the National Peace Accord was a woman—included in each monitoring group because they were found to “bring the temperature down.” A UN official in Alexandria Township, where rival black groups were prone to violence, found that a local group, Women for Peace, made the local peace efforts effective. “With men it was war all the time.... the women were keen to get peaceful resolution.... [It] helped to get men to buy in.... Sometimes I would hear them [the men] talking among themselves . . . saying ‘we need to show respect for our mothers.’ ”

Women as actors in conflict-torn communities, especially as mothers of fighters, can be more effective than men at cooling tempers and getting men’s cooperation in a peace process. In Papua New Guinea, one UN worker observed “women being able to disarm a drunk or rowdy man or group of men, whereas a police or outsider would have enflamed the situation.” In Cambodia, a 2004 report on disarmament concluded that “in most cases involving weapons, women managed to do a better job than men. . . . Some women were so brave that they dared confront people even when threatened with weapons. The braveness even shocked armed men as they had usually considered women as the weaker sex. And as a result, those armed men turned their disputes in a compromising way.” Yet these “community-based women, working informally or within small organizations, receive little support and rarely a penny of the millions pledged by donor governments” for DDR programs.

Gender awareness can also improve conflict early-warning and prevention. “Deterioration . . . in the status of men or women can be the earliest signs of conflict trends that might lead to violence.” For example, Islamic radicalization in a society may begin with repressive actions toward women’s freedom and then lead to violence against the government or foreigners. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finds an “absolute link” between the oppression of women and U.S. national security. Groups that threaten U.S. security “are making a stand against modernity, and that is most evident in their treatment of women.” In Rwanda prior to the genocide, a popular tract portrayed Tutsi women as temptresses who steal away Hutu men while staying loyal only to the Tutsi group.

Another gendered aspect of conflict prevention is the potential for women to see conflict coming, if only the relevant officials or peacekeepers would ask them. In Sierra Leone, “women watched as arms were shipped in overnight along the river,” and wanted to warn peacekeepers but had no access to them. Conversely, the emergence of more violent concepts of masculinity may predict war, as when unemployed young men in Serbia “were readily recruited by hypernationalists into ‘soccer teams’ and indoctrinated with ethnic hatred,” later morphing into the “militias and armed gangs that terrorized the region as the war spread.”

After a war, women have until recently found themselves sidelined in disarmament programs, because combatants were assumed to be men. Women kidnapped by rebel organizations and forced to fight have often been left on their own to try to reintegrate after the war. In Sierra Leone, for example, ownership of an AK-47 automatic rifle was required to participate in the DDR program, but women fighters had often shared a gun or had their gun taken at the end of the war by a commander who gave it to a man so he could receive the DDR benefits. At the outset of the DDR program, the Sierra Leone government estimated that 12 percent of combatants were women, but by the end of the program only 7 percent of the fighters registered with the program were women. Of the roughly 12,000 girls (under age eighteen) in the armed groups, fewer than half a percent participated in the DDR program.

Recent initiatives to include women in DDR programs have focused on the women’s rights to be included, but Anderlini argues that an additional benefit of these initiatives is to improve the overall outcome of the DDR process. For example, although DDR has usually focused on young men as the greatest threat of becoming “spoilers” who will not disarm, in some traditional societies women who have joined rebel organizations “as a means of exiting traditional life are often more reluctant to lay down their weapons than male fighters.” This was the case in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Congo. One woman former combatant in the Congo said, “We used to protect ourselves by weapons. Now there is no one to protect us.” Also, in their roles as support for fighters (cooks, porters, medics, wives or sex slaves), women and girls are essential for the operation of rebel groups, which therefore may be more hesitant to release them to civilian life than their male comrades. By targeting women and girls for DDR programs, international organizations could pull away the infrastructure that would allow armed groups to threaten the peace process.

In transitional justice after wars, as in early warning and DDR, women again can play a key role. In the war-crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, investigators found that women “literally saw things that men could not,” as when men but not women were blindfolded in concentration camps, and therefore proved useful as witnesses. In the Yugoslavia tribunal, the participation of women also led to the first prosecution based entirely on sexual violence as a war crime.

UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was ahead of his time in 1960 when he told a top UN official that when acting in a UN capacity he should “first of all acquaint myself with the position of women in the country” and favor countries that allowed women to freely develop their capabilities.

Although recent attention to women in war has had positive effects, it also can cause a distorted view in which male victims of war, the majority of those killed and injured, become invisible. Hillary Clinton was wrong when she declared in 1998, “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. . . .” It is safe to say that the “primary victim” is the one killed, not the one left in mourning, although certainly both are victims.

Incidentally, one often hears that the majority of refugees (or other civilian war victims) are “women and children.” This is misleading, since a strong majority of any population is women (half the adults) and all the children. Almost half the refugee population of concern are children under eighteen, and half of those are boys. Women and girls make up 49 percent of the population of concern according to the UNHCR, and this shows there is no real gender imbalance in the makeup of refugee populations. Nor are women and girls disproportionately targeted in wars—quite the contrary. As Nicholas Kristof notes, the population of South Kivu, in the Congo, “is 55 percent female because so many men have been executed.” To say that resources and protection should go to females at the expense of males in refugee populations is very odd considering that the males are at demonstrably higher risk. On the other hand, if NGOs find they can raise more money overall to help war victims by pandering to gender misconceptions held by donors, this is not entirely bad.

Given the diversity of initiatives to stop fighting, clearly much of humanity shares a deep seated desire for peace that manifests in whatever way it can. In each of these three wings of the Unarmy (and they are not the only ones), individuals and organizations from NGOs to governments are working hard every day around the world in very different ways for what amounts to the same goal. Others are seeking that goal by another route, one closer to home. They belong to peace movements seeking to change the government policies that create and sustain wars.