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player ready...An important film on what is rapidly becoming the most problematic military reality of our times–“Peacekeepers” by BBC America–is about to be shown on TV this spring and summer. It is something you need to see, but only on a settled stomach.
“Peacekeepers” is not, you see, just another documentary on Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo or Kosovo, as valuable as those can be. Rather, its often excruciating dramatic impact stems from its fictionalized form. The neutralism of today’s tethered new “warriors” comes up against the grotesque savagery of the world’s new-style oppressors. And it doesn’t take long to see who is winning.
The story of the diverse band of young Englishmen starts out on a note of pure innocence. They are mere boys, drinking beer and frolicking with their girlfriends. Theirs is a precious naivete assured only in countries such as England, which has long ago settled its claims to nationhood.
Suddenly, they are thrust as part of the British forces in the UN Protection Force into the madness of central Bosnia in 1992, the time of the most brutal attacks by Serbs on Muslims. The until-then blithe Brits find themselves not only observing the mass slaughter of Bosnians by Serbs (an estimated 250,000 died between 1991 and 1995), but also forced by their mandate to aid and abet it.
First they find the village of Vitez in the beautiful hills of central Bosnia eerily empty. The British soldiers don’t know where they are–physically, metaphysically or morally. Then the terrified Muslims emerge from the once prosperous farmhouses, hesitantly in small groups, like hunted animals, desperate for the UN’s “protection.” And all around them wait the brutish Serb paramilitaries.
Now the Brits see things go from bad to evil. Because of their “mandate” not to take sides, they soon are abandoning the besieged villagers and even turning them over to the Serbs.
The UN mission and forces become the purposeless players in this excruciating drama. The Serbs are purposeful enough.
In the end, the Brits go home, desperately trying to sort out this world that their government has inflicted upon them. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, peacekeeping missions have been exploding in numbers, eating up the U.S. military budget. But what have they accomplished?
In Somalia, for instance, we know that the mission failed woefully. In Rwanda, peacekeepers were murdered, or else they just left when the Central African holocaust began. In Bosnia, American troops nervously oversee a division they were sent there to prevent. Kosovo remains in chaos.
At the same time, many studies show how these strange missions are draining the morale of American soldiers. One recent report, an internal study for the Pentagon by the Army Research Institute, shows clearly that the U.S. Army is losing some of its best future leaders because these men and women are increasingly disenchanted with the bureaucratic operations of the peacekeeping missions.
At least as worrisome, many of the soldiers are accepting the amoral or immoral view of the UN philosophy that no one is to blame for these wars. In a comprehensive recent report on the Bosnian mission, “Report on Task Force Eagle,” by respected Northwestern University military specialist Charles Moskos, one American soldier is quoted as saying: “There are no bad guys here. But there are no innocents.”
Peacekeeping started out decades ago as a noble calling. These international “blue helmets” came in to enforce the peace after agreements had been made. But after 1991, in a rush of international governance hubris, they were thrown into the middle of these virulent new ethnic wars, and with mandates that barely allowed them to protect themselves.
This is serious business, because ethnic wars and wars over borders have become the norm, and we should expect more. There are more than 50 land borders that remain in dispute worldwide, and of 425 maritime boundaries, 265, or 62 percent, have not been settled.
Point: Most of the peacekeeping missions since the end of the Cold War have been failures in carrying through their mandate or in stopping the killing.
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