Peacekeeping’s a Bargain

The U.N.’s peacekeeping operation has been dogged by scandals for years. Often, as in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica a decade ago, the scandal has been the timidity of the mission. More recently, in the inaptly named Democratic Republic of the Congo, the key distinction between the undisciplined blue helmets and the roving militias is that the peacekeepers pay young girls for sex with scraps of food, while the militias simply rape. In the early 1990s, the U.N.’s top official in Cambodia notoriously shrugged off allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers by saying, “Boys will be boys.”

The United States pays up to 27% of the budget for U.N. peacekeeping, and the bill keeps rising. To cover Washington’s share of peacekeeping costs, President Bush has requested $780 million as part of his $81.3-billion supplemental budget request (most of which is intended to pay for military operations in Iraq). It’s a small slice of the package, but the House still trimmed it down to $580 million, and two senators siphoned off money for such purposes as enhanced border security, cutting the U.N. contribution to $442.5 million. That would be a disastrous mistake. The administration is rightly leaning on House and Senate negotiators to restore the full funding.

There are currently 17 U.N. peacekeeping operations around the world, involving about 78,000 personnel from 103 nations. They are stationed in some of most violent, poverty-stricken nations on Earth, resolving conflicts that U.S. troops might otherwise have to become involved in. In Liberia, for example, about 15,000 peacekeepers are disarming former combatants in that nation’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 2003. Liberia’s first elections since 1997 are slated for Oct. 11, and without the peacekeepers, they probably wouldn’t be possible.

Most of the ills associated with U.N. peacekeeping operations stem from their ad hoc nature. Rather than slashing its support, the United States should work with the U.N. to bolster the staff in New York overseeing operations and to come up with clear rules for the nations that contribute troops. To make peacekeepers more accountable, the General Assembly should adopt the recommendations in a report completed in March by Prince Zeid Raad Hussein, Jordanian ambassador to the U.N. Among other things, it recommends that countries contributing troops also send a military prosecutor along who can compile cases based on that country’s laws -- currently, sex abusers often return to their home countries without any action being taken.

Peacekeeping is not a luxury the international community can do without, and the U.S. has a greater interest than most countries in making sure the U.N. gets it right.