When The Peace Cannot Be Kept

Africa is a place where the West prefers to salve its conscience on the cheap. On the one hand, we feel a genuine moral pang when slaughter rages there. On the other, we are not willing to die ourselves to stop it. And sometimes a third factor makes the dilemma still more intractable: a warlord with absolutely no interest in peace. The result is Sierra Leone.

The shambles there now--a false peace broken, power-mad rebels imperiling a U.N. mission as they reignite a vicious civil war--defies the international community's good intentions. Many are rushing to tack another "failure" to the list of ill-fated operations from Somalia to Rwanda to Bosnia. The credibility of U.N. peacekeeping is under siege again and so is the wisdom of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's--and the Clinton Administration's--doctrine of humanitarian intervention.

Sierra Leone, admitted a top U.N. official last week, "is a perfect model for everything that can go wrong in a peacekeeping operation." It began when the merciless rebel leader Foday Sankoh adopted a singularly ruthless strategy: if you terrorize enough civilians--raping girls, mutilating children, burning houses--the world will eventually give you just about anything to stop the atrocities. By July 1999 the beastly killing spree had spurred Washington and London into brokering a flawed peace-at-any-price, handing Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front amnesty, four seats in the government and control over the country's rich diamond mines. In return, the rebels were supposed to disarm and behave. Instead, the amnesty emboldened them; they sold smuggled diamonds for fresh weapons; they got ready to grab power. The slapdash pact assumed Sankoh actually wanted peace, trusting in the good faith of a brutal tyrant.

He didn't, and the big powers were unwilling to provide men or money to police the pact themselves, calling instead for an "African solution" from nations not up to the job. The U.N. cobbled together a ragtag force from some ill-equipped and ill-trained Third World armies that finally trickled in in January. There was money for just 8,700 of the 11,100 troops authorized. Only one battalion of Jordanian soldiers and a 200-man rapid-reaction force from India arrived fully armed to fight. The U.N. had to order 4,000 helmets for troops who came without any and scrounge for simple necessities like barbed wire. When an officer from one country gave orders to a unit from another, that unit's officers first radioed home to find out whether to obey. Though given a mandate to use force, many of the soldiers carried weapons they are not trained or willing to fire. Worst of all, no one drew up a fallback plan for what to do if one side decided to renege on its word. "The R.U.F. was supposed to turn in its guns," says U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard. "Instead it turned its guns on us." Last week Sankoh vanished after allegedly planning a coup. His troops continue to menace the capital.

The trouble really goes to the basic problems infecting modern-day peacekeeping. The end of the cold war caught Western nations in a double standard--ready to right wrongs in Europe, reluctant to step in in Africa. Then two experiences redefined Western behavior. President George Bush took on Somalia's anarchy in 1992 to prove the humanitarian impulse could work. Instead, the U.N.-blessed peace mission skedaddled in humiliation when 18 Americans were killed and one was dragged through Mogadishu's taunting mobs. Amid the domestic backlash, U.S. politicians vowed never to risk their boys anywhere not vital to national-security interests. The appetite for humanitarian ventures was permanently stunted.

That paved the way to the disaster of Rwanda six months later. Haunted by Somalia, the West sat by and let genocide happen, as 800,000 victims fell to madness and machetes. Assessing the shame of a tragedy that was eminently preventable, Annan pronounced his dictum: "Never again" would the world stand aside from such violence. Clinton embraced it too.

But those searing experiences inherently conflict. Annan does not have the capacity to implement his doctrine, and the countries like the U.S. that do have the capacity lack the political will. Even as they vote for new peace missions, Western nations employ weak proxies to do the dirty work. That's why they find themselves scrambling to save the crippled Sierra Leone mission. Washington, which begrudged financial support to the tough Nigerian soldiers who had been quelling the violence until last month, is pleading with President Olusegun Obasanjo to send them back. This time, the U.S. wants them to go in as peace enforcers, "more robust than what we have now," says an official, to run the R.U.F. out of business. But that might come too late, say the British, whose crack paratroopers have already been drawn in to forestall a U.N. collapse.

Both Annan and the West know that if they are the ones run out of Sierra Leone, humanitarian intervention anywhere on the continent is dead. If the U.N. can't handle little Sierra Leone, mutter political leaders, how can they hope to manage in vastly more dangerous Congo? The plan to send 5,500 monitors to stand between six nations and myriad factions in that vast war-torn country already looks too limp to succeed.