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Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict

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For most of the last decade, it seems to me, the world has been busy taking in the implications of the post Cold War environment. Out of this gestation there has recently arrived a flood of books. Geoffrey Robertson's "Crimes Against Humanity" details the development of the legal arguments for humanitarian intervention; Susan Moeller's "Compassion Fatigue" explains its political limits in terms of domestic apathy (blaming, rather too heavily I think, the media); Michael Ignatieff has written compellingly on humanitarian intervention from the perspective of a muscular-minded moral philosopher.. but Shawcross - more than anyone in my view - "tells it like it is."

Shawcross says his is a story of hope. It is hard to see how. With commendable clarity he charts the history of humanitarian-inspired interventions, focussing on the post Cold War world, when the end of superpower rivalries seemed briefly to make all things possible.

Encouraged by the apparent (though only partial) success of UNTAC in Cambodia, the "international community" (please God, let us find another phrase!) rushed naively and disastrously into Somalia (for more on this I recommend Scott Peterson's lively new memoir "Me Against My Brother"). The world powers then turned to water when confronted by the terrible challenge of Rwandan genocide. Shawcross writes powerfully of this, as Gourevitch among others have done. He also writes with chilling force of the events leading to the fall of Srebrenica, and the global pusillanimity that allowed Foday Sankoh his free and terrible reign in Sierra Leone.

As the century turns there are slim victories for those who believe the "good guys" of the outside world can bring peace to the blighted. The Australian-led INTERFET force in East Timor secured a shattered territory to give some hope of genuine transition to peaceful democracy. Mozambique, too, has been a quiet success story, making the recent devastating floods all the more tragic.

But the lessons of Shawcross's dispassionate analysis are those that the political powers least want to hear. If the US, France and other Western powers want to live up to the fine sound of their humanitarian rhetoric, they must stop playing their policies to their domestic audiences. If they want to approve impressive-sounding mandates, they must be willing to back them with men and material. They must be willing to risk the lives of their soldiers. They must look upon their cowardice in Srebrenica and Rwanda with shame (and I don't speak of the individual Dutch and Belgian soldiers who, respectively, were there). They must be more ready to see in Kofi Annan perhaps the last best hope the UN has.

If they are not willing to do those things, Shawcross makes clear, they might as well admit that humanitarian intervention is an emperor without clothes, and that the worst suffering in the world is irremediable.

EDIT of 23 Feb 08 to add links. This remains a priceless reference work.

This book is serious, scholarly yet down to earth, compassionate, insightful, terribly relevant and most useful to any citizen, overseas practitioner, or policymaker. By the books own rendering, "good will without strength can make things worse." Most compellingly, the author demonstrates both the nuances and the complexities of "peace operations", and the fact that they require at least as much forethought, commitment, and sustainment as combat operations. Food scarcity and dangerous public health are the root symptoms, not the core issues. The most dangerous element is not the competing sides, but the criminal gangs that emerge to "stoke the fires of nationalism and ethnicity in order to create an environment of fear and vulnerability" (and great profit). At the same time, humanitarianism has become a big part of the problem-we have not yet learned how to distinguish between those conflicts where intervention is warranted (e.g. massive genocide campaigns) and those where internal conflicts need to be settled internally. In feeding the competing parties, we are both prolonging the conflict, and giving rise to criminal organizations that learn to leverage both the on-going conflict and the incoming relief supplies. Perhaps more troubling, there appears to be a clear double-standard-whether deliberate or circumstantial-between attempts to bring order to the white western or Arab fringe countries and what appears to be callous indifference to black African and distant Asian turmoil that includes hundreds of thousands victim to genocide and tens of thousands victim to living amputation, mutilation, and rape. When all is said and done, and these are my conclusions from reading this excellent work, 1) there is no international intelligence system in place suitable to providing both the global coverage and public education needed to mobilize and sustain multi-national peacekeeping coalitions; 2) the United Nations is not structured, funded, nor capable of carrying out disciplined effective peacekeeping operations, and the contributing nations are unreliable in how and when they will provide incremental assistance; 3) we still have a long way to go in devising new concepts, doctrines, and technologies and programs for effectively integrating and applying preventive diplomacy, transformed defense, transnational law enforcement, and public services (water, food, health and education) in a manner that furthers regionally-based peace and prosperity instead of feeding the fires of local unrest.

See also:
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition
The Future of Life
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century

This book more than adequately explores the utility of international intervention from the mid sixties to the near present. Shawcross makes a point of the difference between our desire to end ethnic war and starvation and our willingness to risk the lives of our own military. This dillema is at the heart of most peacekeeping missions. I was amazed to learn that the numbers of troops promised rarely ever show up on time- if ever! Equipment is also often lacking. The collective attention span of our society is also part of the problem. Simply taking a crisis and making it a 15 minute phenomenon to be quickly forgoten when the press gets old will not create a long term solution. More commitment on the behalf of our politicians, and ourselves will be required in the future.

Perhaps most frightening is a thesis that slowly emerges which would indicate that sometimes a happy ending is not possible, that evil will occasionaly triumph despite our best efforts and that in some situations our best efforts will only serve to prolong a conflict.

These and more are some of the issues that Shawcross covers by taking the reader to multiple real world situations that most of us have heard something (but not enough) about. The chapters on Africa's wars were very revealing of the extent that our views can be shaded by the light that the media casts on them. While I knew that there were and are conflicts there, I had no idea of their extent and ruthlessness; almost to an extreme that makes the Balkans seem mild.

One criticism of this book is that I have been able to keep a distance from the events that it describes. Some books have the ability to hit you in the stomach with meaning and this falls just short. However, when taken in combination with other recent books on modern history, Shawcross has made an invaluable contribution. "My War Gone By I Miss It So" is a book would make an excellent companion to this one, as would "Black Hawk Down" and "The Coming Anarchy".

After reading "Deliver us from Evil", my respect has been increased for those individuals in the UN who give their careers and lives up to a higher ideal of peace. Kofi Annan is now a name that means much more to me. He is a man who deserves all of our thanks.

The lesson that this book has to offer can be summed up by Edmund Burke, who is quoted at the beginning:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

I must begin with the disclaimer that I an not a reader of current-world-event reporting. For years, I have been frustrated by the snippets of informatioa that I get from the press: a mass grave here, a NATO strike there, a UN peace intervention somewhere else. Even if I chose to follow such events, I doubt that a coherent picture of world affairs would emerge.

I read Shawcross's DELIVER US FROM EVIL cover to cover. Finally, someone was presenting an overview of the tumultuous nineties. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Zair, East Timor, Kossovo--they are all covered in an informed, evenhanded way. The author largely leads us through the eyes of Koffi Annan, who becomes Secretary General of the UN halfway through the book. The author's obviously extraordinary access to Annan makes this vantage point vibrant, compelling, and renders coherence to apparently unrelated conflicts. World diplomacy is an exercise in frustration and this book does a great job of keeping the attention of the reader who gets this point from the beginning and who knows its ending.

Two are the principal drawbacks of this recounting of the nightmares of the nineties. Shawcross does not spend much time on international criminal justice nor on international finance. The collapse of East Asian financial systems which threatened a world-wide crisis cannot be irrelevant to all these humanitarian crises. Perhaps the relation is superficial--that insolvent goventnments cannot afford to maintain or impose peace--but it might be quite deeper, perhaps triggeming or motivating unrest in various ways.

The nineties, the book shows, were a crucial time for international criminal justice. Regional courts for war crimes were established to punish war criminals and deter atrocities. Eventually, a permanent international court for war crimes was established. Neither the function, nor the creation, nor the arguments surrounding the jurisdiction of these institutions are covered in sufficient depth. These are the drawbacks that shade an otherwise admirable account of an extraordinarily confusing decade.

A Close Examination of UN Peacekeeping Forces By David Isenberg Stars and Stripes Contributing Writer

Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict, William Shawcross, Simon & Schuster, 413pp.

After reading this book nobody will ever again be able to contemplate a call to deploy United Nations peacekeepers without gagging. After I read it I was reminded of the saying that one is either part of the problem or part of the solution. For years people have assumed that when it came to peace and conflict issues in general and peacekeeping in specific that the United Nations was part of the solution. Perhaps it's time to change our minds. The Bible may say "Blessed are the peacemakers" but UN peacekeepers, unfortunately, are not.

In this book William Shawcross, longtime British journalist and veteran of many war zones, has written a dispassionate account of most of the major conflicts the UN has been involved in. The first part is a detailed, and at times dizzying history of UN involvement in the killing zones whose names we have seen so many times in the news: Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Chechnya, and Iraq. He analyzes, in great detail, the few, partial, tentative successes that UN Blue Helmets, such as UNTAC in Cambodia, and the far too many failures such as Rwanda, Somalia, and Sierra Leone.

The second part is a review, as seen by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan with whom Shawcross has obviously spent a great deal of time with, of the politics and diplomacy that occurred in the amorphous creature called the "international community," especially those nations that are members of the UN Security Council.

Sometimes it is hard to know which is worse; reading the accounts of the various atrocities perpetrated by the warlords and thugs posing as national leaders, i.e., Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevich, Foday Sankoh, Laurent Kabilah, or reading about the petty intrigues and bickering among the leaders of the Western governments and in the UN Secretariat.

Reading this book is like driving by a traffic accident; you are horrified by what you see but you can't keep from looking. The accounts of the enormous pressures encountered by Kofi Anan in trying to secure pledges of funds personnel, and approval for peacekeeping operations, and the obstacles encountered by UN peacekeepers from the forces who oppose their deployment, makes one appreciate that, unlike the Cold War era, there is no longer any peace to keep and precious little will to make peace.

At a time when UN forces are being captured by the hundreds by rebels in a heart of darkness like Sierra Leone one realizes that if UN peacekeeping operations could be symbolized by a car it would be the Edsel.

Though Shawcross is obviously sympathetic to the idea of UN peacekeeping he is too much the dispassionate observer to believe that current "humanitarian" interventions are a model to follow in the future. His last words are "In a more religious time it was only God whom we asked to deliver us from evil. Now we call upon our own man-made institutions for such deliverance. That is sometimes to ask for miracles."

This is a book about the role of the United Nations in international peacekeeping missions. Prior to the end of the cold war, the United Nations was not able to intervene in regional conflicts. The reason being that the split on the security council meant that one or other of the superpowers would veto actions which would conflict with their national interest. With the end of the cold war the world was faced with the possibility that the United Nations could for the first time try to act to limit human misery brought about by civil war and the collapse of civil authority in some countries. The early nineties also saw the election of the American President Clinton. Clinton at the start of his term was committed to trying to increase the importance of the United Nations as a means of bringing a rational approach to ending conflict. He appointed Madeline Albright as an Ambassador to the UN and there were expectations that something could be achieved.

Shawncross examines a large number of conflicts and looks at the attempts of the UN to achieve some positive result. The vast majority of the cases examined by Shawncross were failures. His book is an examination of how those failures occurred and what factors led to them.

There have however been some successes. The intervention in Cambodia, although it did not lead to the setting up of democratic institutions (Hun Sen was able to quickly set up an authoritarian state after elections were held which should have removed him from power) did lead to the end of the civil war in that country. Although it is only dealt with in a sketchy way the UN intervention in East Timor led to and end to the killing and it now seems possible that a democratic state will emerge.

The failures are however significant. The UN failed to do anything to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. What effectively happened in this case was that the Rwandan population was divided into two ethnic groups. One group the Hutus moved to kill the minority group the Tutis. Over 100,000 Tutis were murdered brutally with the UN taking no action at all. However the story did not end there. A guerilla movement consisting of Tutis was able to take control of the country. The Hutu groups responsible for the initial massacres forced huge numbers of their own people out of the country into neighbouring Zaire to form the basis of a guerilla army. This fought for some time against the victorious Tutis. Eventually the Tutis invaded Zaire massacring huge numbers of Hutu and in the process overturning the government of Mobutu. Some peace keepers were put in place to prevent this but the mission failed abysmally.

Another disappointment was Somalia. Again Somalia was a small country which had experienced a total break down in civil society. The collapse of order led to large numbers of rural people moving to the capital and a fall in food production. In place of civil authority the country became ruled by armed gangs. Both the United Nations and the United States became obsessed with one gang leader and spent most of their efforts trying to capture him. Alternative strategies might have involved the provision of food aid in country areas to move people out of the city as a means of increasing rural productivity. In addition attempts to disarm the groups one would have thought productive. Instead the UN and American troops fell into a confrontation with some gangs in the capital and suffered casualties which in the view of the US were not sustainable. This led to a pull out.

The book is interesting. It does not really propose a solution but it raises a huge number of issues. One interesting point made by the author is that it cost the Sierra Leone government $36m to hire a mercenary outfit Executive Solutions to deal with its rebellion. (The rebels involved were brutal and routinely amputated the limbs of village people for no good reason). The cost of hiring these mercenaries was cheaper than the cost of a UN force ($46m for the same period). As a number of the UN members do seem to have a stomach for the work one wonders if this may not be the future of peace keeping.

Deliver Us from a Lack of Political Will, by Peter Gantz, Partnership for Effective Peace Operations.

A review of Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict, William Shawcross, Simon & Schuster, 413pp.

So, yes, this book is about peacekeeping, that amorphous blob of activity the international community tasks the UN with accomplishing every day in conflict zones throughout the world. It is clear that expectations far exceed what the UN is capable of delivering, as Mr. Shawcross points out early on. The UN in the nineties was tasked with bringing peace to areas where conflict had erupted, following the end of the Cold War. Mr. Shawcross does an admirable job of describing how well and how often that did not work, and how deep the failures were.

This book is not a UN bashing book, though. It certainly points out the problems at the UN, but Mr. Shawcross knows that these problems, just as the UN itself, are the creation of the member states and their political leaders. In particular, the most powerful member state, the United States, has played a spectacularly unhelpful role. Congress nearly destroyed the UN financially in the late nineties, largely driven by provincial isolationists in the Republican Party. President Clinton and his top advisors were no better, perhaps most notably during the Rwandan genocide. Muddled decisions from the administration did much to worsen crises and conflicts the world over.

Mr. Shawcross puts his finger squarely on the problem. Time after time it has been a lack of political will. The inability of the international community to summon the courage to stop the deaths of millions of blacks in Rwanda, Burundi, and other parts of Africa is one of the more despicable features of the twentieth century, and one of the examples of problems with UN peacekeeping that Mr. Shawcross covers quite well. The U.S. and other countries are simply not willing to back up words with actions.

Hard and fast solutions are not offered by Mr. Shawcross. The reader would be better directed to other works for that. (The book came out prior to the UN's own surprisingly honest and straightforward assessment of peacekeeping, the Brahimi Report, commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan.) But to understand the problems with UN peace operations, and to understand the fundamental root cause of these problems, the lack of political will to act, or to act well, this book is better than most. Mr. Shawcross suggests in the end that UN peace operations have too often been about asking for miracles.

But make no mistake; he does not suggest that peacekeeping should be abandoned. And certainly this book should not provoke a reader to gag at the idea of deploying peacekeepers-they should gag, however, at the antics of their elected officials. The U.S. and other countries sit at the Security Council and give the UN grand and noble tasks to save the world, but when it comes to providing the means to accomplish those tasks, failure is palpable. The abject failure of government officials to match actions to words is what we truly need deliverance from.

This book is a good overview of the UN work as peace keepers during the 1990's and the horrible different wars that took place during the decade. Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and Iraq are the locations / wars the author takes us through. The descriptions of what these people did to each other are almost more then can be believed. The author also provides a good overview with each conflict as to why it was happening and the internal politics, which kept the killing going. He also gives us just enough details on the people effected that you really get a feel for the catastrophic impact the wars / slaughters have had on them. It really makes you wonder how people can do this to their neighbors.

The author also describes the deployment and efforts that the peacekeepers and aid works go through in these war zones. It is truly an aggravating reading experience to see the amount of internal and world politics that slows down the deployment of the soldiers to the point that thousands more people die waiting for the help. With that said that book also makes a very good point that the ideas and people that drive the push for peacekeepers are doing so in a misguided effort. The peacekeepers are solders and solders are not law enforcement officers, they are not trained or equipped for this function. The international and internal UN politics are so vast and ingrained that once a direction is proposed it is often too late in the execution, not well thought out, and ends without a plan for continued safety or improvements. The effect is often that the situation that brought the peacekeepers to the area quickly returns once the solders go home.

The book also covers a review of the politics and diplomacy that occurred during the 1990's in the world covering these events. We get an inside, but abbreviated view of these politics of the nations that are members of the UN Security Council. The author spent of good deal of time with the current UN Secretary General Kofi Annan so we get a lot of detail from his point of view. The author also gives us a few insights into some of the other world leaders involved in these issues. The pressures that the UN Secretary General faces trying to get pledges of funds, personnel, and approval for peacekeeping operations are very interesting and one wonders how anything gets done at all.

I thought the author was letting a little of his own politics or views into the writing by his comments that detailed the deliberate lack of intervention by the United States. The U.S. does surfer from not always having a clear path to follow in these type of issues, but I felt the author was trying to lay out that if the U.S. took the lead then many of the negative issues with peacekeeping would disappear. I would have liked the author to have included some maps of the parts of the world discussed. The fact geek in me would have liked to have seen a list of the UN peacekeeping missions they have done sense inception and a more in depth discussion on the criteria for choosing who sends men.

After reading this book you will understand that sending in United Nations peacekeepers means there is a huge mess that probably will not be resolved quickly. This is an interesting book and well worth it if you are interested in the topic.

"...humility is important. Not everything can be achieved, not every wrong can be righted simply because the international community desires it. We cannot suddenly rebuild failed states or failing territories in our own image..." With those powerful words, near the very end of his epilogue, Shawcross clearly states his thesis: there are limits to power. Limits which, in the post-Cold War world, we have not, yet, learned how to successfully manage.

In the preceeding 412 pages, Shawcross details the impotence of international diplomacy and peacekeeping. Calling forth the heart-breaking litany of Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, Congo, East Timor, Guinea, Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Libia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Uganda, Shawcross reminds us that the world community: (1) idealistically sought to end each of those horrors, and (2) inevitably found itself powerless to significantly change circumstances for the better.

While Shawcross' description is undoubtably correct, he fails to offer a prescription for the situation in which the world finds itself since the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Thus his book ends up being little more than a descent into hopelessness.

Shawcross would have more positively contributed to the debate if he had followed the example of Colin Powell, and others, who have clearly stated under what circumstances they believe international intervention to be warrented and useful. As it is, Mr. Shawcross has left us nothing to debate or ponder. He has merely served as the deliverer of bad news.

Deliver us from Evil: One reporter's panoramic study of a decade of death and deliberate diplomatic delusion.

William Shawcross's 14 chapter survey of the 1990's ethnic conflicts and peace keeping attempts to interdict them, is gripping in its sweep. Written by a reporter with a great deal of international travel and experience, it focuses on the Balkans, Central Africa and Cambodia.

The book has a wandering eye across the globe. Angola is slighted at the expense of the Balkans, Russia's repression of Chechens is highlighted while the Chinese experiments in ethnic redistribution are ignored. The book does not cover every ethnic repression or potential genocide, but it does a very good job of focusing on a few selected examples, specifically those where there was an attempt to reconcile warring factions and then keep the peace through UN diplomacy, agencies, and forces.

Definitions are important: they provide a baseline for understanding and clarifying the following dissection of a topic. In this book, no real definition is provided of "ethnicity" (usually defined as a group norming self defined by religion, language, culture, and sense of shared history). Likewise, no real definition is provided of the subtle nuances of peace making, peace enforcement and peace keeping. Peace making is the introduction of military forces into a war environment, where the mission of the military force is to separate the belligerents and set the conditions for peace negotiations and settlement. Peace enforcement is the application of military force, or the threat of its use, normally pursuant to international authorization to compel compliance with resolutions or sanctions designed to maintain or restore peace and order. Peacekeeping are those military operations undertaken with the consent of all major parties to a dispute, designed to monitor and facilitate implementation of an agreement and support diplomatic efforts to reach a long term political settlement.

Lastly, the book fails to adequately explain the difference of United Nations Charter Chapter VI "Pacific Settlement of Disputes", Chapter VII "Action with respect to threats to peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression", and Chapter VIII "Regional Arrangements." These are important distinctions with regards to how force structure is apportioned and paid for, as well as the mandate extended to those forces, which may be either "authorized" or "directed."

Despite these blemishes, this book is a good survey of the interaction of the UN, diplomacy, and military forces. Shawcross bases most of his book on his own personal observations and extensive interviews with many of the key actors in many of these conflicts. There is an immediacy that comes from someone reporting first hand. There is criticism of many of the actions of the "international community," much of it justified from the perspective of first hand experience. There is good documentation of the struggles and successes of peace operations in East Timor, Cambodia, the Balkans and Africa. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is its detailed account of the daily struggles and challenges of the Secretary General of the United Nations.

Shawcross spent a good deal of time with Secretary Kofi Annan, and captures many of the intricacies of the UN structure, and its relation across the international structure of governments, non state actors, non governmental organizations, private volunteer organizations and military operations. He quotes Secretary Annan at length, and provides the reader a good picture of a international bureaucrat.

The book should be read by anyone interested in the interaction of diplomacy, international organizations, peacekeeping operations and the delicate use of military force. I recommend you read it with an open, yet cautious eye. There are many lessons earned in what he writes, as well as what he does not.