Interview: Jean-Marie Guéhenno
By Peter Guest | Published: 17 January, 2011
As United Nations undersecretary general for peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guéhenno oversaw the organisation’s largest expansion in deployed personnel, but today he is cautious about the use of military intervention and critical of the UN’s ability to properly leverage its deployments.
“I think we often exaggerate what military force can achieve. Myself, I was and I am a supporter of robust peacekeeping, but I don’t think one should overplay it,” he says. “There are situations where a decisive application of force… makes a difference and creates the right momentum. But most of the time the notion that you can just weigh in with force is an illusion. Force, the possibility of force sends a signal, but force is a … very blunt instrument.”
The international community was quick to raise the prospect of intervention when the much-delayed elections in Côte d’Ivoire resulted in a stalemate, with incumbent and loser Laurent Ggagbo refusing to relinquish his office. The UN already has a limited presence in the country and is protecting the internationally-recognised winner, Allassane Ouattara. The regional bloc, the Economic Community of West African States initially backed military action to unseat Mr Gbagbo.
For some analysts, this action did little to help the already tense negotiations, as the incumbent was able to draw support from the nationalist sentiments enflamed by the appearance of outside intervention.
Mr Guéhenno’s advice is to think very hard about intervention, and to make sure that any action involves decisive and overwhelming force “If you’re not sure then you can get in the worst of all worlds, as you harden the position [of the target] but you’re not in a position to really deliver [peace],” he says.
The UN has often been criticised for inadequate or inefficient interventions, which do little to break long-term cycles of instability. Mr Guéhenno says that often, this is a function of the lack of political support that follows an action.
“We throw troops at an issue and then the Security Council thinks it has done its job, whereas that’s really where it starts,” he laments. “There should be political fuel behind the troops. There is a loss of interest. The peacekeepers, in my view, are just like chips that the international community puts on the table to show that it has an interest. But then it has to demonstrate that interest with political engagement, and it often doesn’t do it.”
Even so, he adds, the criticism that the UN becomes bogged down in areas of insoluble instability, unable to withdraw or progress, is not always well thought-out.
“Sometimes the absence of war, even if there is no real deep peace, is already a good thing. You see situations that have been in a stalemate for many years, like Western Sahara, for example,” he says. “Yes there are military observers there and the situation hasn’t found a political resolution yet, that’s unfortunate. At the same time, the cost of any conflict is so much higher than the cost of having those observers. People complain a lot about frozen conflicts in all continents. I’m of the view that a frozen conflict is better than a hot conflict.”
In January 2011, Mr Guéhenno took on a new role as chair of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Geneva-based organisation which intermediates in conflict zones. A small group which has no affiliation and operates outside of the international media spotlight, it is a far cry from the legions of blue helmets that he is used to.
“The strength of HD is that it has no army behind it, it is just a foundation with no political power, and that absence of political power is the greatest strength, in many cases. We are not threatening. That is important to a lot of actors in conflict,” he says.
There is a worrying trend, he says, of international actors refusing to negotiate with individual parties to a conflict for fear of legitimising them. This has added complexity to situations such as Sudan, where an International Criminal Court warrant taken out against Omar al-Bashir, the country’s president, precludes the mainstream of the international community from directly speaking with the head of state. Similar situations occur on a smaller scale, and the exclusion of any one party from talks is far from conducive in reaching agreements. This seems self-evident, but is not often observed.
“HD takes the opposite stance, in that talking to a party in a conflict is not rewarding it, it’s not making a judgement on the goals it pursues, but it’s the essence of conflict resolution. One should not make any judgement before talking to a particular party,” Mr Guéhenno says. “Unfortunately, that is a business that is expanding, because there are many conflicts in the world where just talking to the parties is not seen as acceptable, and that’s what HD does.”
In Sudan, the HD Centre has been involved in the disputed South Khordofan and Blue Nile provinces, which lie along the disputed border between the north and south of the country, an independence referendum in the south has passed, largely without incident, despite widespread pessimism. The Centre also mediated in Somaliland, which held successful elections in 2010.
An increasing international focus on state building in so-called “ungoverned spaces” that followed the NATO-led invasion of Afghanistan throws up new challenges and new sources of conflict as it presupposes a western model of state building that can clash with existing structures, Mr Guéhenno says. The modern state, with its legal and enforcement mechanisms, is part of the package that comes with western-led intervention and investment. However, it is difficult to mesh this with traditional mechanisms.
“This is not an abstract problem,” he explains. “If you look at land issues in Africa, for example, the tug of war that you often see between the modern state that wants to apply the national rules to the allocation of land, and then traditional rights, and, for instance, when international companies buy big tracts of land, how that infringes on traditional rights, how that is managed, how that can become a source of conflict. These are issues that are not abstract. They are very real. So when one talks about governance, I think one of the big issues is precisely how you connect those different levels.
“In a place like Congo, I have been struck by how, in a way, local conflict, the situation in the Kivus are a big part of the conflict, but then they become manipulated and instrumentalised by the regional and at the national level by various actors. That is what makes it intractable. If you want to solve it, you have to connect these various levels.”
State building and conflict resolution according to academic plans drawn up in Western capitals is unlikely to succeed, and an increasingly complex international distribution of power – including the emergence of geopolitical poles in Asia and Latin America – means that a wider spread of voices need to be taken into account, Mr Guéhenno says. The HD Centre will be looking to recruit mediators from a broader pool than it previously would have, he adds.
“I think it will be very important to have negotiators from a range of countries, not [stick to] the idea that it is just some sophisticated Europeans or Westerners that are going to solve the problems of the developing countries,” he says.
“We tend to think that these [developing] countries should take exactly the same path that we followed and just take a shortcut. While in reality, they’re going to take a different route,” he adds. “The injection of international money is immensely destabilising. It can be destabilising for the good, but it can also be destabilising for the bad. We don’t have much awareness, I would say, of the impact that we have on fragile countries. Even that expression is already, in a way, a judgement that projects our own definition of what states should be.”
