Martin Bell - War and Peacekeeping

The two-year-olds were half alive,

Still breathing on their bed:

I asked the nurse Will they survive?

The nurse just shook her head.

10. SOFT POWER

Just as the captains and the kings depart, so do the United Nations peacekeeping forces: all their deployments have been time-limited. But time-limiting is a relative concept. UNIFILs mandate has been renewed, and occasionally strengthened, every six months for forty years. The carrion crows of press and television fly off to other killing fields. Only the UN forces remain, and the UN agencies unarmed and vulnerable, along with other NGOs, to continue their life-saving work in the worlds unquiet corners. Despite a number of scandals in Haiti and elsewhere, they deserve our support and allegiance. They give life and hope to people who, without them, would have none. Yemen is one of the war-torn countries in extremis , with UN agencies but no UN peacekeepers.

In 1998, as a busy backbench MP, I cleared my diary during the summer recess to accept an invitation to visit UNICEF projects in Burundi. It was a time of great danger and hardship, with hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes by a six-year conflict between the Tutsi-dominated government and Hutu rebels based in neighbouring states. It ran parallel to the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, but attracted less attention as the inevitable compassion fatigue set in. An estimated half a million people had been killed in five years and in two waves of mass murder. It was a country of orphans of war and of AIDS. And of famine too or what UNICEF prefers to call food insecurity. Mothers were abandoning their babies at the gates of emergency feeding stations. I asked a UNICEF field worker, How could a mother abandon the child she loves? The answer was: It is precisely because she loves it that she abandons it.

In our parliamentary delegation of three the other two were Labour MPs, Oona King and Hilton Dawson. Our focus was on the children of Burundi, children who had no parents and no homes but their orphanage, children who were heads of families, child soldiers who had been recruited and then rescued, and even a thirteen-year-old who had been imprisoned for war crimes. The orphans were literally countless because no one had got around to counting them. As the nominal head of the delegation, I used my fractured French to assure our audiences of teachers and health workers that the world had not forgotten them, although in my heart of hearts I feared that it had. I wrote in my diary: I have little faith in my own pronouncements. It was easier as a journalist.

The country had a military government and, because of the coup, was under sanctions from neighbouring states which worsened still further the plight of its people. I walked hand in hand with an eight-year-old boy, whose plight was the same whether the government was civilian or military. It was an emergency on both a small scale and a large one. The armys only helicopter was being flown by its only pilot to ferry landmine victims to hospital.

We visited a village with only women and children in it.

Where are the men? I asked.

The men are dead.

I was mindful of the undertow of criticism of UN agencies for leading privileged lives in the midst of deprivation and paying too much attention to their own security. How could it be, I wondered, that we in our luxurious 4x4 Cherokee with its vast radio antenna we whose mandate was the protection of children were breezing past women and children walking for many miles with burdens of firewood on their heads? And in Burundi, a country where even one of the Cabinet ministers had no vehicle and walked to work? Was it not shameful, this flagrant contrast between our lives of air-conditioned comfort and theirs of grinding poverty and hardship?

It turned out that there was not too much security but too little. Eight months later, our host in Burundi, the Chilean UNICEF representative Luis Zuniga, was assassinated in a refugee camp. His escort failed to protect him. His body was flown out in a coffin draped with the UN flag. The UNs East African Representative Srgio de Mello, whom I had known from Bosnia, suspended all operations while he conducted a review of the security or rather the lack of it surrounding the UNICEF mission. Five years later de Mello was himself killed, along with twenty others, in the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. He was targeted by Islamic militants, because he had once authorised the use of force against Islamic rebels in East Timor. In 1999, at a low point in the United Nations fortunes, as head of the UNTAET (the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor), he had countered the perception of UN diplomats living in luxury by setting up his home in a room in a war-damaged hotel. He impressed even President George W. Bush and was spoken of as a future Secretary-General of the United Nations. A colleague called him an encantador de serpientes a snake charmer.