By Morten Bøås/NUPI. This article was first published in Norwegian by Forsvarets Forum, 25 March 2020.
As UN peacekeeping faces a major budget crisis, fewer countries may be willing to send soldiers abroad. This will have implications for the international community’s ability to support efforts to prevent violent extremism.
Outstanding payments from member states have led the UN into a financial crisis. As result, the organisation owes more than EUR 70 million to countries contributing to its peacekeeping operations. This also affects Norway, who contributes to the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). Like many others, Norway has been notified that it will have to wait for the money owed by the UN according to their agreement.
At the UN’s frontline
The UN and the international community are, however, not dependent on Norway when it comes to the contributions necessary for large operations such as MINUSMA. Here, up to 1200 troops are deployed, and a majority of them are not from wealthy, Western countries, but from poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
These are the troops the international community depends on. It is these troops that are at the UN frontlines in countries such as Mali, which has been struck by violent conflict since 2012.
In Mali, the international community has been militarily engaged for nearly seven years. Yet, any meaningful step towards a sustainable solution still seems distant. The conflict in Mali is closer to the capital Bamako today than it was when the UN launched MINUSMA in 2013. The conflict has also spread to other parts of the Sahel – first to Burkina Faso, and now Niger is also under increasing pressure. There are therefore many reasons to be critical to what the UN has achieved during these seven years and why the conflict is spreading despite heavy international military engagement.
Nevertheless, the solution is not to withdraw UN forces. This could potentially lead Mali to collapse. What is currently preventing such a collapse is troop-contributing poor countries, whose soldiers lack to varying degrees both the training and equipment needed to handle such a complex and lethal conflict.
Dangerous UN operation
For the conflict in Mali is lethal. Mostly for those residing in the country, but also for UN soldiers. With more than 200 casualties, MINUSMA is the most lethal UN peacekeeping operation today. However, this fact rarely makes it to international headlines.
The reason is that those who are killed constitute the UN’s frontlines – young soldiers from countries most in the Western world have no relationship to, and from cities and towns most have no clue where are located.
Yet, despite these numbers, poor countries keep sending troops to Mali. The reason for this is that they get paid to do so. The question is how this willingness to send young combatants to a dangerous conflict will be affected when payments are outstanding. Citizens in these countries probably don’t have a relationship to the conflict in Mali either.
At a crossroads
Returning dead soldiers is not a winning recipe anywhere, and there is reason to believe that the willingness to send troops to the UN’s frontlines will be weakened if the organisation can’t pay what has been agreed upon.
The question, then, is what is going to happen to peacekeeping operations such as the one in Mali. Have we arrived at a crossroads in the era of ʻcheckbook diplomacyʼ, where the rich part of the world contributes cash and the poor with boots on the ground?
If so, a big question mark can be added to the future sustainability of UN peacekeeping operations.
