Interventions by Kofi Annan Page B

new interest in civil wars made things very different. Due to their greater complexity and the number of factions and subfactions involved—but particularly the unclear boundaries between belligerents due to the typical involvement of irregular forces—such wars are far more fluid, unstable, and prone to rapid changes on the ground than those of wars between countries. With the new ambitions of peacekeeping missions in civil war zones around the world, the situation was set for those weaknesses, contradictions, and strains in the governing structures of UN peacekeeping to be tested as never before.
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    C ompounding this problem was the style of management embraced by Boutros-Ghali as secretary-general. He took great pains, in particular, to control and restrict the flow of information to and from the Security Council. Almost all information for the Council was conveyed through his personal representative, Chinmaya Gharekhan. Troop commanders were very rarely allowed to brief the Council directly, nor were officials at DPKO, including its head, the under-secretary-general. Boutros-Ghali maintained strict, private control over his own personal communications with representatives and leaders of member states, as well as special representatives of the secretary-general (SRSGs), who run the political side of the operations on the ground. This meant that, at any stage, we in DPKO could never be sure who knew what, or what had been agreed to in the day-to-day running and direction of operations. DPKO sat within a chain of command, below the office of the secretary-general and the instructions of the Security Council, while in support of troop contributors who retained priority of command.
    Underlying the management challenges of peacekeeping in those years was the opportunism of some member states. They had seized on the instrument of peacekeeping to carry forward their humanitarian ambitions, deploying troops under the UN to be managed by DPKO, but in a manner that often abdicated their responsibilities. In the very short term, they took credit for acting in the face of humanitarian crises, but simultaneously avoided reckoning with the tough realities of the situation. They took few steps to prepare their populations and parliaments for the tasks—and risks—their troops would be required to face. At DPKO we realized that these missions required force, and were encouraging others to understand this, too. But UN peacekeeping had long been perceived as a task that traditionally involved almost no risk to the troops involved. And it was still in this style that peacekeepers were deployed. Hiding behind the label of “peacekeeping,” governments sent troops into civil wars whose conditions were fundamentally different to traditional peacekeeping.
    S OMALIA : F AMINE AND C IVIL W AR
    â€œWhen you drop a vase and it breaks into three pieces, you take the pieces and put it back together. But what do you do when it breaks into a thousand pieces?” This was how Mohamed Sahnoun, the UN SRSG to Somalia, described the dilemma the country had come to pose by 1992. It had not taken long for Somalia to shatter. In January 1991, President Siad Barre had fallen from power in Somalia. This caused a power struggle that swiftly saw the unraveling of the country’s densely knit structure of clans and kinship networks. By November 1991, hostilities had escalated and violence gripped the capital, Mogadishu, with fighting between factions supporting, respectively, the interim president Ali Mahdi Mohamed and the chairman of the United Somali Congress, General Mohamed Farrah Aidid. From then on, the country’s authority structures disintegrated in a proliferation of armed factions and gangs that saw the war—or, rather, a series of multiple and ever-shifting mini-wars that made up the larger conflict—engulf the whole of Somalia.
    UN humanitarian relief agencies were fully engaged in Somalia from March 1991,