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| Author: | Robert McMahon, Deputy Editor |
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Updated: July 24, 2008
The United Nations, founded after World War II to maintain peace and international security, has evolved into the world's central nation-building body. UN peacekeeping missions over the years have increasingly taken on a leading role in rebuilding conflict-shattered states from El Salvador to Liberia to Cambodia to the Balkans. Results, however, often are mixed. A recent case study is East Timor, whose continuing struggles tarnish what had once been considered one of the few recent successes in UN nation-building. The United Nations shepherded the former Portuguese colony turned Indonesian province to statehood after violence erupted in the aftermath of an independence referendum in 1999. But most of the 11,000-member international presence was gone by 2006. The UN's experience since then, including the February 2008 shooting of President Jose Ramos-Horta, highlights the difficulties in following through on nation-building projects, no matter how small. Experts say the UN Peacebuilding Commission could provide more consistency and sophistication in stabilizing post-conflict societies. But they are doubtful of long-term success without major actors' involvement.
In the aftermath of East Timor's violent separation from Indonesia in 1999, a UN administration, initially backed by an Australian-led peacekeeping force, guided the province to elections, a constitution, and formal statehood in 2002. A UN force of military observers, police, and five thousand soldiers remained until 2003 to maintain stability. The last peacekeepers left in 2005 amid growing concerns that their departure was premature. After the government sought to dismiss nearly six hundred soldiers from the army in April 2006, violence flared and degenerated into gang warfare in the streets of the capital, Dili. At one point, more than 100,000 people were displaced in the unrest and an Australian-led force returned in 2006 to help restore order.
Experts cite the following as causes of the instability:
The thirty-one-member commission was created by the UN General Assembly with the aim of ending the ad hoc international approach to nation-building. It seeks to bring together development, security and other actors to provide a cohesive approach to reconstruction and institution building in post-conflict zones.
Experts welcome the body but are concerned about its viability. "The peacebuilding commission is a useful concept," says Jones. "Whether it actually makes its way into substantive changes on the ground [is] too early to tell partly because for the UN to be successful, including in peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations, [it] requires cooperation among major powers that are contributing." Barton says it will be a challenge for the agency to thrive in the UN bureaucracy. The commission, he says, "will have to have an extraordinary amount of leeway, a very entrepreneurial leadership and great flexibility in funding and human resources models and real operational agility to be successful."
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