A dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it

Peacekeeping is one of those words that should make you feel all warm and fuzzy. Who can be against it? Then you run into a United Nations peacekeeping force, the 'blue helmets' as they are called in the field, usually in a Third World disaster zone of refugees and heat and dust. Your hackles rise.

In the dark, ruined streets of Freetown in Sierra Leone, the UN peacekeepers had fleets of 4x4s that were often the only vehicles moving at night, usually to Paddy's Bar, the only working place in the city.

But it was in East Timor that my worst experience with a peacekeeping force came about. When machete-wielding militias began torching the capital, UN peacekeepers took in 1,500 refugees who fled to their compound for safety.

But when the militias showed up at the gates, the UN command in New York ordered their peacekeepers to evacuate and leave behind the terrified women and children. I stayed, broadcasting after the first stage of the evacuation that the refugees would be slaughtered if the rest of the UN force left. The decision was reversed.

Then there are the infamous black moments in 'peacekeeping' history. In 1995, Srebrenica in Bosnia was one of five safe havens set up by the UN to protect civilians from Serb forces. Threatened by the Serbs, the Dutch peacekeepers handed over all the men, who were taken away on buses and executed.

Or there was Rwanda in 1994, where, despite pleas for help from the commanding general, Romeo Dallaire, the peacekeeping force was overwhelmed and more than half a million Rwandans died in a genocidal spasm. And last month, peacekeepers ducked out of Georgia as Russian tanks rolled in.

So I started Virginia Page Fortna's new book, Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents' Choices after Civil War with scepticism - particularly when she made it clear that she thought it did. She examines two success stories - Mozambique and Sierra Leone - so her choices in many ways lead to her conclusion.

But the research is immaculate, and, rare among such studies, she talks to the belligerents who have been 'peacekept'. Looking at success stories may load the dice, but it also reveals how such forces can work if they are given the correct mandate.

The current UN mandate for peacekeeping as a "way to help countries torn by conflict to create conditions for sustainable peace," sounds unassailable, but Fortna points out often no one has thought through precisely how that mandate can be made to work.

The decision taken often seems to consist of no more than, 'Let's send a peacekeeping force, so we can appear to be doing something.' What happens when a peacekeeping force is sent into a country where there is no peace? How do they actually work when much of their power is nebulous, sometimes consisting of just the perception of international presence?

Well, former belligerents told Fortna that just having a neutral party on the ground helped. The UN officials stopped the inevitable flare-ups from escalating out of control just by getting the two parties together on neutral ground; they could provide a fig leaf so that two parties didn't lose face by sitting down at negotiations with the enemy they had sworn to kill.

The book comes as a new chapter opens in UN peacekeeping. Alain Le Roy, a French diplomat, took over as head of UN peacekeeping operations last month. He has a record 90,000 peacekeepers out there, second only to the United States for troops abroad. His first challenge is Darfur.

The operations need to be streamlined. But my grudging conclusion after reading Fortna's book was that Winston Churchill's dictum could, suitably altered, have been applied to peacekeeping forces: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." ·