Kremlin's Peacekeepers Won't Bring Peace

Of course, there's not going to be a war. But there will be such a struggle for peace that it will leave nothing but rubble." This Soviet-era quip comes to mind when observing Russia's feverish calls for peacekeeping actions in Ukraine in recent days.

 

Last week, The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting in New York at Russia's request. There, Russian representative Vitaly Churkin spared no effort in describing the humanitarian catastrophe in southeastern Ukraine.

 

Besides the nearly 1,500 deaths, several hundred thousand refugees including children and the elderly have been left to the mercy of fate. This requires immediate intervention from the global community, Churkin said. Kiev, at least according to Moscow, has failed to provide safe passage for non-combatants, and so Russia should step in to lead convoys of humanitarian aid for those trapped in the conflict zone.

 

Meanwhile, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently visited the 15th Motorized Rifle Brigade, a military unit specifically created for peacekeeping operations. He praised the soldiers' training, and noted significantly: "The world has changed drastically. As you know from past incidents, including the experience of this brigade, peacekeeping units can be called upon unexpectedly."

 

At practically the same time, troubling announcements came out of various Western nations. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he had information that the risk of direct military intervention by Russia in Ukraine had risen sharply. NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said in an official statement that Russia had amassed about 20,000 troops on its border with Ukraine and could use the pretext of humanitarian aid or a peacekeeping mission to send them into its neighbor's territory.

 

Kiev, however, has been ignoring this ploy and continuing military actions, regardless of losses among its troops or the deaths of civilians. And although it's highly unlikely that Ukraine will achieve a smooth military victory, the separatists have nothing good to look forward to in the coming weeks.

 

The likely chaos of the next few weeks could, though, provide the pretext needed for Russia to send in troops under the guise of protecting humanitarian convoys. Military accompaniment for a convoy will force Ukrainian troops into a temporary cease-fire, giving the "militants" a breather.

 

But who exactly is Moscow trying to fool, calling a Russian invasion "peacekeeping"?

 

For a military action to be considered peacekeeping, it must meet a minimum of two requirements.

First, both opposing sides must agree to a cease-fire and the arrival of a peacekeeping force. In this situation, an agreement from Kiev can be easily ruled out as impossible.

 

Second, the peacekeeping operation should have a mandate from an international organization (preferably the UN). Keeping in mind that even close allies like Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko disapprove of Russia's Ukraine policy, it seems highly unlikely that Moscow will receive such a mandate even from, say, the CIS.

 

So the only groups calling a Russian military intrusion a "peacekeeping" operation will be the country's own Foreign Ministry and television anchors. Why go through all this song and dance, then?

 

If such a plan really does exist, then the only explanation is that all these games are meant to convince the Russian public of the necessity of intervening. Of course, they are ready to give their all for "Our Crimea" and "Novorossia." But surveys show that Russians are emphatically against a military conflict; they don't want an invasion of Ukraine. But perhaps the Kremlin believes that they would support an intervention if it were called "peacekeeping."

Somalia - Peacekeepers Admit To Their Heavy Losses

The AU (African Union) revealed that in the last six years some 3,000 AU peacekeepers have died in Somalia. The peacekeeping effort began small and it took a year to get the force up to 3,000 troops. Currently there are nearly 18,000 peacekeepers in Somalia. It’s been a dangerous area for peacekeepers, with about 15 percent of them killed or wounded since 2007. For a long time the AU played down their losses but did not hide them. The casualties were reported in the countries the peacekeepers came from. Somalia has been one of the bloodiest peacekeeping missions ever. As the only professional soldiers in Somalia during this period, it was the peacekeepers that did the most damage to al Shabaab and were decisive in breaking the power of the Islamic terrorist militia.

 

Al Shabaab is still active in the far south (near the Kenyan border) and in Puntland up north. Without the peacekeepers, or a Somali government force, the Islamic terrorists can recover from their losses and become a threat once more. The violent and extremist ways of al Shabaab still appeal to many young Somalis, especially if they are unemployed. High unemployment and low literacy rates are the result of persistent internal problems (corruption, tribalism and a tradition of violence) that are always standing in the way of any political or economic progress. For example, when Mogadishu was freed from al Shabaab two years ago, there then developed major problems with the new police force, which tended to commit most of the crimes. Looting and assault by cops is still common and the government seems unable to do anything about it. 

 

 May 12, 2013: In northeastern Kenya, near the Somali border, a group of gunmen fired on a police station, killing one cop and wounding four. Al Shabaab terrorists were believed responsible. 

 

May 8, 2013: Somali officials and international donors met in Britain to work out the size, scope and management of a major foreign aid program for Somalia. Some $300 million was pledged. Donors are uneasy about the Somalis ability to use all that aid without most of it being stolen. Somalia is generally regarded as one of the most corrupt nations on the planet. As usual Somali officials promised to deal with the corruption. This rarely happens and the donors are insisting on controls that the Somalis consider insulting. Many donors insist on the tight fiscal controls, threatening to not participate if the restrictions are not accepted. Even then, the financial controls often fail, defeated by some very determined elected thieves. For example, last year UN audits of over $300 million in aid delivered to Somalia in the previous 11 years revealed that at least two thirds of it was stolen by Somali government or aid officials. The theft was often blatant and Somalis simply deny guilt when presented with evidence of their crimes. Attempts to impose fiscal controls resulted in all manner of deceptions and even death threats against the foreign auditors and administrators. 

 

The corruption makes it very difficult to run the country. For example, the Somali government has little ability (or inclination) to tax the populations. That’s because everyone realizes that any taxes paid are largely destined for the bank accounts of government officials. It’s not that no one pays taxes in Somalia. Since the post-colonial government collapsed in 1991 there have been areas of Somalia where there was sufficient order for commerce to function. The businesses paid what amounted to protection money. Local warlords made it safe enough for the businesses to operate. But the new government has few armed men on the payroll. Thousands have been trained by foreign aid donors but most end up deserting because they are not paid (because senior officials stole the payroll.) Now the government wants aid donors to provide $160 million to pay for recruiting and training a security force (soldiers and police) of 28,000 personnel. Such a force would cost nearly $100 million a year to maintain assuming lots of the cash was not stolen (causing most of the soldiers and police to walk away). 

 

May 5, 2013: In Mogadishu a suicide car bomber attacked a government convoy and killed eleven people (most of them nearby civilians). Four officials visiting from Qatar were in the convoy but were unharmed. Al Shabaab was suspected. 

 

May 3, 2013: Police shut down many roads in Mogadishu for four days as part of a major sweep to find al Shabaab hideouts and safe houses.

Peres: Israel can't make Mideast peace with open eyes, we must forget the past

At Presidential Conference, president says lesson of past failures shows sides need to close their eyes to the past, saying: You cannot make love and you cannot make peace with open eyes.

Israel can't make peace with "open eyes," President Shimon Peres said at the fourth Israeli Presidential Conference on Thursday, adding that sides must forget about the past and focus on the future to end the years-long conflict.

Speaking at the “Learning from Mistakes on the Way to Tomorrow,” the president said that his "own conclusion of how not to make mistakes is close your eyes a little. You cannot make love and you cannot make peace with open eyes."

"The past is dead. You can't correct it. Can you correct something that is dead? Can you correct the past? Focus on the future. You have to take risks," he added, saying: "You have to choose between two sorts of mistakes. You do nothing and that is a mistake, or you do something that could cause the mistakes."

"It's better to try, do something and maybe you will have a success. If you don’t try, you won’t make a mistake, but you won't have a success," he added.

Addressing the conference's participants, the president said that the "first mistake I have learned from my life is don’t look for perfection. You will make mistakes. You need to be satisfied with allowing people to live together. Perfection can be a desire, but we can’t achieve it in the foreseeable future."

"People set their goals too high. There is the story of the man who looked for the ideal women. When he found her, found she was looking for the ideal man, so she wouldn’t marry him," he added.

Peres said that the "ultimate difficulty with peace is not your enemy, but your own people. I am asked 'why are you paying so much? Why do you trust them so much?' Who can measure how much you can trust them? The greatest problem is couples. They want to have a perfect life, and if they try to keep life perfect they will get a divorce."

The president even went far as saying that avoiding early negotiations with the PLO was one of his mistakes, saying: "They killed our people. We said, 'how can we speak with murderers.' It was a mistake. By not talking, they would continue to shoot. But talking, maybe they would have stopped."

When the topic of the opening panel of the conference was chosen: “Learning from Mistakes on the Way to Tomorrow,” there was no way of knowing that while it was taking place, all of Israel would be engaged in discussion of mistake-making in the case of the Carmel fire disaster.

As television journalist Dana Weiss pointed out earlier in the session, it might be helpful to send a transcript of the panel directly to the offices of government ministers.

Nobel laureate Professor Daniel Kahneman said that the whole concept of learning from mistakes was generally based on flawed assumptions. “To really learn from mistakes we need stable circumstances where there are rules.”

Under these conditions, he said real expertise can develop. "This is how chess masters develop their expertise in the game. Every game is the same, the rules are fixed, and therefore they can learn from mistakes over and over again until they don’t make mistakes."

"But the world isn’t like that, it’s an uncertain place, and therefore 'decisions are gambles.' What that means is that the best possible decision can have bad outcomes and a bad decision can have good outcomes,” he added.

Kahneman also said that in "the military there are generals who are willing to take more risks than others, even risks that are that are unacceptable, but it is possible for them to gamble several times and be successful. When a general gambles and is successful, that he was a military genius, and those who told him not to take those risks were cowardly.”

“In the financial crisis, there are people who say they knew the crisis would happen. But really, they thought the crisis was going to happen and at the same time there were people with just as much knowledge and expertise who thought the opposite,” he said.

“The world in general makes too much sense to us. We do not admit the level of uncertainty.” Essentially, most of these decisions are just ‘going with our gut.’

So what is the alternative? Kahneman suggests that to lessen mistakes we shouldn’t focus on outcomes, we should focus on the process of decision-making.

"There is an absence of quality control, and on-going critiques of decision-making. We don’t have it and we should. It is in fact possible.... We should keep track of the considerations, of the deliberations. This is very difficult to achieve in organization. Organizations resist examining their decision-making process. When you look for mistakes in real time, there is a feeling that someone is looking over their shoulders and they will be blamed," he said.

Kahneman even added that "leaders should have coaches."

"A tennis coach doesn’t play better than the player, but he can look objectively at the athlete and help him.... I have known some organizations where leaders have taken someone they trust who can critique the quality of the decision-making while it was going on and not just relying on the outcome to determine whether the decision made was the right one," he added.

Another panel speaker, Dr. James Sebenius, an international expert on negotiations, says that common mistakes made is focusing on the other sides’ statements and demands rather than probing on what the other side wants. "Often," he said, "if you take the time to probe behind incompatible positions and find interests that can both be met."

7 U.N. peacekeepers killed in Ivory Coast

UNITED NATIONS — Seven U.N. peacekeepers were killed in an ambush Friday in a remote area of southwestern Ivory Coast while trying to protect civilians threatened by attack, the United Nations said.

Bert Koenders, the U.N. envoy to the west African nation, said the peacekeepers were part of a patrol south of Tai in an area which the U.N. mission recently reinforced because of threats of attacks against the civilian population.

He condemned the attack “in the strongest terms” and said the seven peacekeepers who died were from Niger.

Kieran Dwyer, the spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping department, said “we are moving in reinforcements as soon as we have daylight.”

A U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the peacekeeping patrol was attacked by a large number of people. The official estimated that perhaps 40 peacekeepers had been in the area and were dug in overnight to protect the village against a new attack.

Koenders said in the statement that the U.N. mission “will take all necessary measures following this grave violation of international law.”

The United Nations has had a peacekeeping mission in Ivory Coast since 2004.

At the end of April, the U.N. said there were about 9,400 peacekeeping troops, 200 military observers and 1,350 international police in the mission along with civilian staff. More than 40 countries are contributing military personnel.