Peace in Our Time?

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Let the Peacebuilding
Begin—Soon
No undertaking of the UN is without its complications, and the start-up of the Peacebuilding Commission has run true to form. “Although it was approved in December 2005, it took over a year to get underway,” Del Rosso says. “There were a lot of procedural problems relating to longstanding UN bureaucratic issues before the Commission finally became operational in 2006. During this initial period Corporation grantees, again, provided analytical support for the fledgling organization and served as convener for lots of ‘unofficial, official’ meetings.”

On board throughout the launching process, Stephen Stedman expresses frustration with the fact that “what got through negotiations did not match the original proposal,” faulting the member states’ political maneuvering and the U.S. government’s apparent lack of engagement. The Commission was made larger than the Panel recommended and there was too much squabbling over the minutia of how things would run, he says. As a result, the Commission has gotten off to an “incredibly slow start.”

The success of the Peacebuilding Commission will be measured in individual countries by the transformation of sustained international attention into concrete action from the subject governments, regional neighbors, and the international community in support of the development process that ultimately will help prevent a return to violence.” —Carolyn McAskie, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support

But “love it or hate it, the UN is the only body that covers the whole world,” says Carolyn McAskie, assistant secretary-general for peacebuilding support. “Only the Peacebuilding Commission brings all the relevant actors together and leaves no one out, which means all walks of life and all parts of the globe.” McAskie confirms that the current peacebuilding entities have been set up based on the recognition that the international community in the late 1990s and early 2000s was getting better at solving conflict, but not fast enough. “Now we’ve reached a critical phase,” she says, “and keeping on track means bringing all aspects together into a north-south, east-west, rich-poor coalition where we target a number of fragile countries falling off the edge, and talk about them from a global security point of view.”

McAskie, a foreign policy veteran, was most recently the special representative of the Secretary General and head of the peacekeeping operation in Burundi, having come to the UN after 30 years with the Canadian International Development Agency. She acknowledges the existence of past peacekeeping disasters such as Somalia but argues that critics of the UN aren’t looking at what’s happening right now, or how much has been learned through dealing with chronic problems in countries like Sierra Leone and Côte D’Ivoire. “Maybe the Security Council doesn’t agree on Darfur and Kosovo,” she says, “but it has put more money into peacekeeping than ever before. As a result, even though Africa still has huge problems, it’s not like back in 1999 when we were talking about World War III starting there.”

Research on global security continues to inform McAskie’s view of today’s danger zones and what to do about them. Development holds the key, she says. “There’s a recognized correlation between neglect and conflict, with the most at-risk places not on anybody’s donor list.” Political exclusion, economic frustration and despair are dangerous because “where there’s little hope, the seeds of conflict will find fertile ground,” she points out, citing Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion, which demonstrates that 73 percent of the world’s poorest billion inhabitants live in conflict-ridden societies. These facts reinforce the core rationale behind the Peacebuilding Commission, she says, which is helping the international community bridge the crucial conflict-development gap.

How to achieve coherence, to bring it all together—peacebuilding, politics, development—and get countries up and running is the question facing McAskie and the Commission members. “After a war, how can you support a country sufficiently to reach the level of being a valid partner in the process? This is our chief mandate,” she stresses, “helping countries past the period when their economy and infrastructure are devastated, when there’s no tax base and therefore no public services. It’s essential to start capacity building and relaunch all the public functions: police to provide basic security and disarm the populace, for instance. All relevant actions have to be taken together. We’re the only organization that has the convening power to get everyone to the table to figure out how we can help the country define what the minimum is, when everything is a priority. Our job is to all agree on a strategy and mobilize the resources.”

The process begins by getting all the players together, McAskie explains, which means representatives fly into New York while the UN Mission makes a shadow Peacebuilding Commission on the ground, within the post-conflict country. Members of both groups fly back and forth, and videoconferencing is used extensively, she says, with everyone pooling their knowledge to avoid having to start from scratch. Among the participants in these country-specific meetings are members of the Peacebuilding Commission’s central organizational committee and the senior UN representative in the field as well as representatives of the following: the country under consideration; engaged countries in the region; other engaged countries (including donors such as the Scandinavian countries); civil society including relevant regional and sub-regional nongovernmental organizations; troop and civilian police contributors as well as relevant regional and international financial institutions. A representative of the Secretary-General and representatives from the World Bank, the IMF and other institutional donors are invited to participate in all meetings.

“Out of all we learn, we ask ‘what are the half-dozen priorities that must be addressed? What are members and the government going to do to make it happen?’” Meanwhile, “can we raise the money?” is a continuing challenge, she says. The UN Peacebuilding Fund, which supports the Commission, has a small budget and received an initial allocation of $250 million as a one-time commitment. According to a United Nations report, the Fund has been able to rely on a broad base of donors from the United Nations membership, a number of whom agreed on multiyear commitments. Norway and Sweden made the largest initial contributions, followed by Denmark, the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan.

The purpose of the Fund is to get things off the ground, providing critical support during the early stages of the peace process immediately following the conclusion of a peace agreement. A country is eligible to receive funding once the Commission takes it under consideration. In Sierra Leone, for example (which, along with Burundi, is one of the Commission’s first advisees) these funds were used to close the gap in election funding, keep the police on board and trained, put the soldiers in upgraded barracks and set up a Human Rights Commission. “Very practical stuff,” says McAskie. Sierra Leone’s election results were excellent, she reports. The population accepted the outcome and the outgoing government accepted that they’d lost. There was already a duly elected government in Burundi, but because of the Commission there are new donors participating, such as Norway, who wouldn’t have been there otherwise. As these signs of progress indicate, in choosing Sierra Leone and Burundi the Commission is seeking start-up projects with a relatively good chance of success. Unlike Nigeria or Iraq, where the need is so great the Commission would undoubtedly be overwhelmed, it is hoped these two small African countries will act as a model for future operations and will build confidence in the UN’s capacity for peacebuilding.

Yet money issues seem destined to plague the Commission. From the start there’s been an $8 million gap between the Peacebuilding Fund’s allocation and donor contributions—in UN terms a lot of money—and no guarantee of renewed funding, according to McAskie. While there has been discussion of some donors pledging more money, there are no official commitments in place.

“Will we get the big-ticket donations? It’s dicey yet, but I’m encouraged because members are discussing new sources of funding. It’s a difficult challenge, the right kind of funding within the right security framework, because there’s a risk of failure whatever you do.”

While some at the UN are asking “now what?” and wondering whether peacebuilding will take off, “a good bureaucrat will use the process itself to make things happen,” McAskie maintains, “engaging with government, reminding them the world is watching and getting them on track. Then the bank starts giving money and, slowly but surely, we start seeing benefits.” She’s highly optimistic about what the Commission can accomplish and, while she concentrates on raising the level of public awareness and keeping key people thinking strategically about Burundi and Sierra Leone, at the same time she is getting the process started for Guinea-Bissau (a small West-African country on Senegal’s southern border, with a population under 1.5 million) which last December became the third country on the Commission’s agenda, and considering what countries to assist next. The plan is for the Commission to deal, eventually, with four to five countries annually.

To those who complain that it’s too slow a process she suggests, “Try it yourself!”

Next page: “We’re the only organization that has the convening power to get everyone to the table to figure out how we can help the country define what the minimum is, when everything is a priority.”

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