IF ONLY THEY DID HAVE SOME BLACK HELICOPTERS

Military alters mission in Kosovo after rioting
(Peter Carstens, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 4th, 2004)

The report issued by the group Human Rights Watch did not mince any words. German troops failed in their mission and simply melted away last March as a mob raged in parts of Kosovo, the region in former Yugoslavia teeming with Serbian-Albanian tensions.

A U.N. official was upset as well by the military's response, saying the sight of one tank would have caused the violent crowd to scurry away. But that tank never arrived.

Both Human Rights Watch and the U.N. official were referring to the way that German soldiers reacted to some of the bloodiest violence that has broken out in the U.N.-run region since NATO went to war against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999.[...]

At first, German military commanders defended their troops. But after careful review, the leadership has come to a different conclusion. Officials in the Defense Ministry in Berlin now concede that they were more concerned with the products in the PX, the delivery times for military mail and the cell-phone connections to Germany. It says the commanders in Kosovo failed to fulfill their political and military missions. These include guaranteeing freedom of movement; protecting minorities, including their houses and churches; and helping U.N. staff members and the international police force.

This may be indicative of trouble in the German military, but it is more likely a function of morale-crushing absurdities endemic to UN missions, which have generally been disasters in the past few decades. Lack of funds and equipment, internal bickering, diffuse and confused command, UN bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption, unclear political objectives, absurd restrictions on using weapons and cultural ignorance all add up to ineffective messes. The days when blue helmets alone gave armed killers pause are long gone and no one who takes humanitarian intervention seriously (rather than ideologically) should celebrate too quickly even if the UN does eventually go into Darfur.

Highly recommended is Linda Polman’s We Did Nothing, a gritty and disturbing on-the-ground account of UN missions in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Bosnia in the 90's. Polman is a left-wing Dutch journalist who draws a lot of wrong conclusions, but she is light on the ideology and too honest and clear-eyed to hold back from a very artful account of what she witnesses. There is a great part where she comes up against a group of hard-bitten, swaggering U.S. Special Forces in Haiti who are about to be replaced by Blue Helmets and starts to despair of just how dangerous that could be for the Haitians.

The book is published by Penguin and may not be available in the States. If not, I’ll be happy to try to help anyone who e-mails me in the next week get a copy. About twenty dollars.