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Feature – Shabiha in Syria and Titushki in Ukraine as Elements of Authoritarian Control

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by Daria Platonova

15 July 2019

“Titushki” on their way to Mariinskiy Park (Image credit: Unian)

Introduction

Incumbent authoritarian regimes[1] can use a variety of tools to protect the status quo and their hold on power. Among those tools is the deployment of groups of armed civilians to disperse political protest that threatens to dislodge the regime and disrupt that status quo. A comparison can be drawn between the Syrian Shabiha and Titushki in Ukraine as elements of the regimes’ responses to political protest. Shabiha in Syria was a complex phenomenon described in most general terms as numbers of pro-Asad[2]  individuals who attacked anti-government protestors from March 2011, at the start of the Syrian uprising, and then became “pro-state … militias, which acted in an auxiliary capacity to government forces”.

Titushki in Ukraine were groups of individuals reportedly hired by state actors, including local elites, to attack Euromaidan protestors[3] in Kyiv and Ukrainian regions from November 2013 to January 2014. In this article, I demonstrate the similarities and differences between the provenance of and the deployment purposes of Shabiha and Titushki. Through this comparison, I argue that the systematic use of these groups is in function of the regime’s strength and the ruler’s expectations about the regime’s viability.

The similarities between the regimes of Yanukovych and al-Asad

The attempts made by Viktor Yanukovych to introduce an authoritarian regime in Ukraine resembles Bashar al-Asad’s consolidation of an already existing authoritarian regime which he inherited from his father, Hafez al-Asad. Both presidents cultivated a patronage system based around a specific minority group. Yanukovych relied on the Donetsk clan, originating from his home region of Donetsk, and the political-economic conglomerate of the Party of Regions, also originating from Donetsk.

Similar processes of over-concentration of patronage took place under Asad, who came to rely on “Alawi familial, tribal and communitarian base” and, specifically, on the Asad-Makhlouf family clan. Like Asad, who increasingly surrounded himself by an increasingly narrow clique of supporters, Yanukovych later in his presidency drew upon the support of his real and metaphorical family.

File photo of Syrian President Bashar Assad, right, with his brother Maher, left (Photo credit: AP)

Both presidents recognised the importance of the security service in maintaining their regimes, with Asad inheriting a vast security apparatus and a strong army from his father. Yanukovych attempted to build a strong security force, appointing his supporters to the key position of the Head of the Security Service of Ukraine and investing heavily in a special police force Berkut.

Bashar al-Asad followed arising challenges to his regime through by imprisoning challengers and severely restricting and repressing civil society. In Ukraine, Yanukovych imprisoned his key rival, Yuliya Tymoshenko, from a competing network of Batkivshchina Party, while exercising increasing control over the Ukrainian media and opposition groups. Viktor Yanukovych’s rule was the ultimate culmination of the domination of eastern Ukrainian forces in Ukrainian politics, which, on the surface, created an expectation that the regime was going to stay. Asad’s strong reliance on the Alawite minority inherited from the three-decade long rule of his father created similar expectations.

We would therefore expect that if in Ukraine the regime was truly authoritarian, as described by many analysts, it would have responded to the challenge of the Euromaidan similarly to how Asad responded to the Syrian uprising, that is: with severe and more or less systematic repression. However, how Shabiha and Titushki were deployed demonstrates that the regime in Ukraine was not truly authoritarian. The major flaw in the regime was that it did not believe in its own durability.

Shabiha in Syria

The Shabiha who came to prominence in March 2011 started as Popular Committees – volunteer vigilante groups originating in Latakia and Homs, who wanted to keep their neighbourhoods free from anti-government protestors. Not unlike Titushki in Ukraine, they consisted of volunteers “who were often unemployed young men” and were initially armed with basic equipment such as sticks. Similarly to Titushki, the motivations to join these Popular Committees and then Shabiha varied widely. Nakkash documented motivations ranging from pragmatic-economic concerns to strong feelings of hostility towards the Sunni community.

However, as Asad’s regime was much more cohesive and held strong expectations about its own durability compared to Yanukovych’s regime, shabiha became one of the key elements of Asad’s strategy to salvage the regime. As Michael Kerr argues, the regime’s “civil war strategy was simply to survive, militarily, at any cost”.

Thus, throughout the province of Homs at least, Shabiha quickly came to be used strategically and systematically by Mukhabarat (security service) to prevent anti-regime mobilisation throughout spring to summer 2011. They were involved in killing protestors from the start, such as on 26 and 27 of March 2011 in Latakia and Baniyas. It was reported that Shabiha were numerous numbering 10,000. Shabiha later morphed into “armed paramilitary group or militia with links to the army, the secret service or the Ba’ath Party”.

Families gathered around bodies of victims killed by violence that, according to anti-regime activists, was carried out by government forces in Tremseh, Syria (Photo credit: AP)

In contrast to Titushki, Shabiha came to be strongly identified with the state in Syria. Lund, for example, writes on shabiha formations as being directly sanctioned and legitimised by the state when the protests began in March 2011: “the state encouraged the formation of local gangs, often composed of Alawis or other minority groups that felt threatened by the Sunni-dominated uprising”. Not only that, Shabiha came to be identified with the wealthy business owners in the local communities. Nakkash writes on a proud owner of a real estate business, in charge of about 200 Shabiha, who stated that “they “should be thankful for what I am doing”.

As the protests evolved into an insurgency, Asad’s regime mobilised a vast array of minorities, such as Christians and Shi’a, into Shabiha militias. The sheer diversity of pro-regime militia movement and the advent of the “National Defence Forces” drawing on shabiha demonstrated that, through a systematic and open recruitment and deployment of Shabiha, the regime created strong and durable expectations about itself.

Titushki in Ukraine

The use of Titushki in Ukraine demonstrated a highly unsystematic and reactive nature of Yanukovych’s regime. As mentioned above, Titushki were groups of young men, reportedly hired by the government to disperse Euromaidan protests. They were named after Vadym Titushko, a professional athlete, who was hired to and eventually prosecuted for attacking journalists in Bela Tserkva, near Kyiv, in May 2013.

Titushki were often members of local boxing and fight clubs, and it was reported that coaches and entire clubs participated in the attacks on the Euromaidan, especially in Kyiv. Titushki not only dispersed protestors but also damaged their equipment and vehicles. Like their Syrian counterparts, there were those who held strong Anti-Maidan convictions and considered Euromaidan protestors to be “traitors and hooligans”.

Vadym Titushko in Kyiv, 18 May 2013 (Photo credit: Umoloda)

Here however the similarities between Shabiha and Titushki end and reveal the fatal flaws in Yanukovych’s regime. The major flaw of the regime was the lack of belief in its own durability. Unlike in Syria, where Shabiha came to consist of a broad variety of minorities, Titushki in Ukraine were groups of young unemployed people who were easily coopted due to their lack of employment. Reports claimed that titushki were being paid for attacking Euromaidan protestors because many of them were unemployed. According to these reports, some were paid 100 US dollars per day, with an additional fare for beatings.

In Ukrainian regions, such as Kharkiv region, Titushki were deployed to intimidate protestors rather than kill them, which signified that the regime seriously questioned its repressive capacity. Cataloguing of Euromaidan protests using opposition and pro-government press in Kharkiv and Donetsk cities indicates that the deployment of Titushki was highly unsystematic compared to what was taking place in Syria. In Kharkiv, half of the Euromaidan protests were followed by Titushki attacks; in Donetsk, this number was even less.

If in Syria, the attacks were deadly from the start, in Ukrainian cities, followed a gradually more violent trajectory, which however never became systematically deadly: in Kharkiv, for example, first, Titushki attacked property of the Euromaidan protestors, then the groups of “unknowns” – a label which often described Titushki – attacked individual organisers, and then they began attacking entire groups of protestors using more sophisticated equipment. In Donetsk, most Euromaidan protests were followed by verbal attacks and highly unsystematic violence by Titushki. All this was taking place before the Titushki attacks in Ukrainian regions suddenly tapered off in late February 2014, just before Yanukovych’s flight. Additionally, Titushki were not as well-equipped as their Syrian counterparts.

Finally, as if to demonstrate that the regime was afraid of itself and unsure of its own survival, it is impossible to trace with certainty who hired Titushki at the regional level. In Kharkiv city, there was only indirect evidence implicating the incumbent supporters of Yanukovych, the mayor Hennadiy Kernes and the governor Mykhailo Dobkin. For example, they issued a number of ambiguous statements, endorsing Titushki, but there is no systematic evidence that they hired them. Only after the “Russian Spring” protests were in full swing, the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine released some evidence that titushki were hired by a local oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko. This was after Kurchenko fled Ukraine.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that if an authoritarian regime is truly authoritarian, one of the elements of political protest control, such as the use of armed civilians, should be systematic, violent and clearly linked to the state. Through the comparison between the use of Shabiha in Syria and Titushki in Ukraine, I have demonstrated the true nature of Yanukovych’s rule and questioned whether it was truly authoritarian. More specifically, I have shown that the highly unsystematic deployment of Titushki and their unclear links with the state actors demonstrate that Yanukovych’s regime either did not believe in its own viability or failed to implement the lessons of the Orange Revolution. In this way, one can characterise Ukraine as a highly fluid polity where no regime can truly stabilise itself.

Daria is a PhD student at King’s College London. Her research focuses on violence and the unfolding of conflict across several regions in eastern Ukraine, 2013 – 2014. She also leads one of the Causes of War seminars in the War Studies Department. Prior to joining King’s, she worked as a teacher. She graduated with a degree in History from the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her broader interests include European history, war studies, and interdisciplinary methods.

[1] While the authoritarian nature of Bashar al-Asad is not in doubt, we can consider Viktor Yanukovych’s regime as a regime with authoritarian tendencies. Hafez sought to build an authoritarian state – Kerr, intro 10, History of autocratic rule there 174, adaptable autocrats

[2] I used the standardised spelling of Asad, instead of Assad, as found in Kerr, M. and Larkin, C. (eds) The Alawis of Syria: War, Faith and Politics in the Levant (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2015).

[3] Euromaidan was at first a political protest against Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the EU Association Agreement. It later evolved into a general protest against Yanukovych’s government demanding its resignation.

 

Where Evil met its End

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by Miles Vining

7 June 2019

(Miles Vining)

Our relief group provided humanitarian assistance to people fleeing the last stronghold of ISIS in Baghouz, Syria. In Feburary and March 2019 we fed over 25,000 and treated over 4,000 wounded. These were mostly ISIS families, a number of which were in critical condition from the fighting and air strikes in the city. Our positions were from the frontline on the bluffs above the Euphrates River east of the city back to the IDP collection points in the desert. While at these forward positions of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), there were numerous SDF casualties incurred from ISIS positions in the valley.

A month after ISIS was defeated, we entered the city of Baghouz. Our first venture was down the bluffs where we had previously taken cover. Underneath them we found the dugouts and cut-outs that numerous fighters had occupied during the battle. Evidence of airstrikes against them was clearly visible with the busted Kalashnikov rifles and twisted hulks in the craters that spanned the walking path next to the Euphrates. Civilians flooded through this path as did ISIS fighters. We found improvised ISIS claymores (complete with cloth carrying handles), and satchel charges held together by transparent tape strewn haphazardly on the ground, as if their former owners decided to ditch them in a hurry. Pointed out by some SDF fighters were the skeletal remains of a dead fighter, his now sun-bleached spine poking through the collar of his camouflage caliphate-issued fatigues. His skull was several feet from him, between the severed body lay the “black standard”, a nylon square of a flag with the caliphate’s slogans stencil-painted on it.

After our walk, we drove to the centre of the town of Baghouz, now completely empty of any life apart from the SDF forces that were stationed in it. During the battle, the area was filled with vehicles of all conceivable types, multiplying the size of the tiny hamlet of Baghouz by at least a factor of ten. Baghouz was a tiny town that become surrounded by a huge tent city during the battle. But in reality, we were only seeing a tiny city centre that had what was essentially a Syrian version of an enormous trailer park that developed around it. Everything and everyone that could be loaded onto a moving vehicle and driven from Raqqa to this little obscure corner of Syria was there, forming the likes of a tent and vehicle city that easily rivalled most music festival campouts in the United States and Europe.

Although we could not walk through the largest of the tent cities due to ongoing clearing operations, we were able to visit that small centre of Baghouz itself. Many of the bodies had been buried, but you could still smell them. And if you happened to have a stuffy nose, the swarms of flies left no doubt in anyone’s mind as to the amount of death and destruction that had occurred here. As we carefully picked our way through buildings and grass spaces once crawling with the remnants of the so-called Islamic state, we did not get the impression of a sort of deathly zombie land or ghost town. If anything, it seemed more like a town that might have had a hurricane come through and everyone simply left in a hurry, waiting somewhere else to come back and restart. There was not a feeling of sinister evil that one might have expected to be omnipresent in the very air molecules.

Then came the suicide belts and vests. We found them in refrigerators, tucked between bushes, strewn across dirt dugouts where families had lived. Poking out from beneath discarded clothes in the empty houses, there was even one sitting in the corner of a rooftop where we paused to eat lunch. One rough estimate we had was that we came across some component of a suicide vest every twenty meters or so. One surprise discovery was an IED manufacturing tent in an open field, components and raw materials still waiting to be stuffed into vests or satchel charges. As if the operator had suddenly realised a late-night soccer game was already twenty minutes into the broadcast and he needed to catch the play, never to return. Upon geospatial analysis of the coordinates of the site, we found out that the tent had been erected in late January. Another discovery was that of a clinic tent complete with sheet metal shelving units still stacked with unopened medicine boxes and vials. This location had apparently caught fire as evidenced by the charred remains of equipment and the burnt down canvas covering. Eerily and straight out of a horror movie was a medical reclining chair, bent upwards at an angle among the black ash of what was left of the tent.

We found so much ordinance among the various sites that at times it was comical. RPG warheads had been shattered to pieces and were laying in puddles as if a part of some olive drab toy kit that had bounced out of a toddler’s hands. Spent shell casings lay strewn among numerous houses, while more PG7 warheads were even completely intact. The SDF had been collecting discarded ordnance since the battle’s conclusion, with piles and piles of captured materiel in the courtyard of one of the houses, but there was still so much more to be picked up. There are many metrics for determining the evil that ISIS became during its reign of terror. Numbers of civilians killed or enslaved, prisoners tortured or beheaded. One of our post-caliphate metrics in Baghouz was stumbling upon suicide belts. Just like how fleeing passengers on a ship are handed life preservers, so did the last of the caliphate’s residents got handed suicide belts. But unfortunately to many in the West, the so-called Islamic State is already becoming a fading memory of a terrorist organization that tried and ultimately failed in its attempt at Islamic utopia. Hopefully what we found on the ground in Baghouz can be a reminder to those that this monster of a creation was tangible evidence of the evil that can still manifest itself among us today.

Miles Vining is a volunteer relief worker behind SDF lines in Baghouz.

Widows and Children of the Caliphate’s Last Stand

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By Miles Vining

9 April 2019

“They came in mostly as Burkha-clad widows with their screaming, crying, and confused children.” (Miles Vining)

“She soaked a big rag with bright red blood. We put a new one on and it soaked up a whole rag again within two minutes, bleeding a lot. Does that anti… Elliah, what do we do?….”. Our Chief Medic Elliah responds over the radio sets with, “Okay, is it a complete miscarry or not?”. “Stand by, it’s hard to tell but it looks like arterial bleeding to me,” Jason replied back. The two field medics were describing a pregnant woman who had just suffered a miscarriage. She was with what was left of her family at a temporary IDP (Internally Displaced Person) site behind Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) forward positions that faced the last remnants of the failed caliphate in the small Syrian town of Baghouz. Joining her before this day and afterwards would be over 29,000 IDPs who had fled from the fighting.

Some days they trickled in on foot across wide open spaces of No Man’s Land between the lines; other days they came in caravans of small trucks, pickups, sedans, even motorcycles. They came in mostly as Burkha-clad widows with their screaming, crying, and confused children. Many of their husbands had been killed while fighting for the so-called Islamic State; others vehemently claimed their husbands had no involvement with the group. One such wife even stated that, “I left my husband to die in that damned town!”. Another said, “Mine went into the desert,” while making a crawling motion with her hands. ISIS infiltrators were being killed within sight of SDF positions on many occasions. Sometimes you could hear the ordnance dropping all night from coalition aircraft, along with the illumination flares, mixed in with the Dushka and PKM machine gun fire.

(Miles Vining)

To some of them this would be the first time they had slept outside in the freezing plains of southeastern Syria. As one young Canadian widowed put it, “We didn’t know how to make a fire so we just ordered takeout for every meal”. Indeed, these  were not your covered-wagon, pioneering types but instead the urban middle-class that had been wooed by many a recruiter or suitor to find a way into Syria through Turkey or Iraq. So many widows that our team members interviewed had stories about being drawn to the caliphate during its early years, but still more of these stories had themes of trickery running through them. “He said that before we get married, we’d need to go meet his family in Raqqa”, or “I went to meet him in Turkey and he said we could get medicine for my children in Syria”. Again and again we would hear variations of the same tale, very badly wanting to ask if they had read a single news report about Syria before the trip. Even so, the Canadian lamented, “I mean, it was alright when the Caliphate was doing well,” and in the words of one Tunisian, “This is the land of Allah”.

They came from all corners of the world. Russians, Turks, Malaysians, Canadians, French, Germans, Azeris, Tajiks, Sudanese, Moldovans. The list would go on and on if we were able to conduct a complete census of them all. The flowing robes of the black abayas might have concealed the complexions of the mothers, but the children told a different tale. Different skin tones and hair styles spanned the breadth of humanity. Unfortunately, the youngest of these children had known nothing but the caliphate’s vicious education system, one that used IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device) as symbolic counters to teach basic arithmetic. Yet we saw them, daily, in such horrible conditions that many of our team members would have to step aside for a second to squeeze out tears before going back to tending to a bloody gash from shrapnel or a fractured limb.

(Miles Vining)

Casualties came from all over the spectrum as well. Some were from Inherent Resolve airstrikes or the artillery batteries that were pounding the caliphate lines on the outskirts of Baghouz. Some were from the caliphate’s gunfire as fleeing IDPs were trying to get away from the fighting, while others were even from SDF fire as militiamen in forward positions mistook vehicles packed with refugees for potential car bombs racing towards them in one final suicide attack. Indeed, at the beginning of February 2019, several SDF fighters were killed when fake “babies” that women were bringing in as IDPs exploded. On top of the wartime wounds were skin diseases, live births, miscarriages, kidney stones, and even old age conditions that all had to be attended to medically among the squalor of the temporary IDP site.

Men, however, were a different story. None of them were willing to admit it, but you could almost feel their hatred simmer in the chilly air. Much of it was directed towards us, the foreigner aid workers, but it was also towards the SDF fighters as well. Some of their responses to our greetings were short, showing minimal eye contact if it could not be avoided. Men would refuse outright medical care for injured women in their families, not wanting for a blood relative to be touched by our “Kaffir” medical staff.

Despite the horror and miserable conditions that the IDPs faced, the frightening realization for many on our team was that these people still had a formidable conviction in their failed caliphate. Indeed, towards the end, during the SDF-ISIS negotiations for terms of surrender, the families that were coming out of Baghouz were not  “fleeing” or were “Internally Displaced” in the real sense of the word. These were widows and husbands that had clung on until the bitter end, only now being forced to leave through political negotiation. In the words of one such widow, “Al-Baghdadi and Dyala went off the track. I’m still on the track and ready to die. This is a test from God to see if I just came to Syria for adventure”.

Many want that black flag to fly again.

Miles Vining is a volunteer relief worker behind SDF lines in Baghouz.

Just Who Are the YPG?

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By Ed Nash

22 October 2018

 

A Manbij Military Council tank, part of the SDF, engages ISIS positions (Credit Image: Ed Nash)

 

Donald Trump recently praised what he described as the sacrifice of Kurds in the fight against ISIS across Iraq and Syria to the international press. His declaration was made shortly after the State Department removed the previous rather limited reference to the Syrian Kurdish militias known as the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (Peoples Protection Units – YPG) from its ‘Country Reports on Terrorism 2017’. As a consequence, President Erdogan of Turkey accused the US of breaking its word in agreements reached between the two countries whereby the YPG were to withdraw from the town of Manbij in northern Syria.

A dangerously volatile nexus — composed of a range of disparate groups including the YPG — now exists in Manbij. These disparate groups operate in the same space as Turkish troops, who seek to advance their own, opposing agenda in the region.

If we read into America’s intention[1] to take a more steadfast position on backing the Syrian Kurds, then the US is very much antagonising a long time NATO ally and critical regional partner with whom relations are already at an unparalleled low.

The reasons for these tensions are multiple, and thus can hardly be summarised in a few sentences. The focus of this piece is elsewhere. Indeed, it is perhaps wise to understand a bit more about the YPG, what they stand for and why the Turks are so concerned about them, as they form such a thorny part of the disagreement.

The YPG and Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (Women’s Protection Units – YPJ) are predominantly Kurdish militias which represent the armed wing of the PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat or Democratic Union Party). The latter organisation subscribes to the ideological, philosophical and historical writings of Abdullah Öcalan, a Kurdish political theorist and guerrilla leader who originally founded the infamous PKK, who have fought a bitter war against the Turkish military on and off for almost forty years.

This connection arguably explains the Turks’ antipathy. For them, the PYD/YPG are simply the same as the PKK and thus represent an intolerable threat to their security (for an interesting refutation of this, see Hurriyet Daily News and Foreign Policy). As the SDF – which the YPG forms the major component of – controls the whole of the north-east of Syria as the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (generally known as Rojava), the Turk’s concerns are understandable.

Öcalan originally founded the PKK as a Soviet/Stalinist style communist party seeking a socialist Kurdish state but, inspired by the writings of American social theorist Murray Bookchin, has since become focused upon promoting  Democratic Confederalism, a political theory that mixes Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, anarchism, and libertarian ideals. Broadly, it espouses the idea that the authority of a central government should be kept to a minimum, that power should be highly decentralised, and local issues should be addressed at a local level; that regional, racial, and religious customs should be respected; and greater attention is need to espouse gender equality and ecological issues. The theory also advocates for a fairer redistribution of wealth along similar lines to European social democracy.

Such a mix of political theories would seem to create a rather schizophrenic ideology that, depending on your personal stance, could be interpreted in any way one deems fit. And there are definite, radical contrasts in how the PYD/YPG conducts itself that demonstrate this. On the one hand, areas under their control have brought women’s rights into fact. On the other hand, however, they have been accused of recruiting child soldiers and criticised for their human rights record, as well as persecution of other political parties in the region.

It is in their reaction to these external criticisms that we see the key to the world’s relationship with the PYD/YPG. Complaints against them by external actors are generally addressed and openly rectified, which stands in stark contrast to just about every other faction involved in the Syrian Civil War, the Assad government included.

What motivates this willingness is the wish to be seen to be a better, more democratic society that can engage with the international community, something the council currently running northern Syria understands it needs desperately. Without a powerful backer, the fledgling experiment in local democracy will be mercilessly crushed by either Assad or the Turks, as what took place with the Kurdish canton of Afrin.

And it seems that the sudden interest in America for sponsoring the YPG beyond the defeat of ISIS could be inspired by the realisation that, if it won’t commit to backing the Kurds and their assorted allies in Syria, then others will. Recently the YPG has made overtures to Assad and the Iranians, seeking their support. With , the sudden renewed interest in the Kurds as a local ally makes sense.

There is no denying that continued support for the YPG/PYD is beset with political complexities, including a number of concerns with the movement’s ideology, that will need to be addressed if it is to continue to receive said support. At this time, however, it is probably the best chance for more reasoned, democratic, and ultimately law-abiding governance in the region.

 

Ed Nash has spent years travelling around the world and, on occasion, interfering as he sees fit. Between June 2015 and July 2016 he volunteered with the Kurdish YPG in its battle against ISIS in Syria. His book Desert Sniper: How One Ordinary Brit Went to War Against ISIS was published in September 2018. 

 

Notes:

[1] Which, when concerning Syria, may be best accomplished with a crystal ball.

Image Source: the picture was provided by the author

Strife Series on United Nations Peacekeeping, Part I – The Fate of UN Peacekeeping and the Changing Tides of Geopolitics

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By Dr Samir Puri

The UN Security Council (Credit Image: UN Photo/Mark Garten)

The UN’s viability to act as a peacekeeping force for good is always constrained by geopolitics. When the geopolitical tides change – as they evidently are in the twenty-first century, with the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia, and other developments – the UN feels the impact. When it comes to peacekeeping, the UN risks being lost at sea.

We tend to associate UN peacekeeping with interventions in war-ravaged countries. The UN’s blue helmets have deployed to countries like Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the 2000s, mitigating the cataclysms of these wars.

In fact, keeping the peace between countries was the UN’s original mission. Today, the convulsions of a changing balance of power between major world powers are starting to be felt. As such, the UN’s original mission may become much more relevant once again.

“The Parliament of Man”, wrote historian Paul Kennedy, never mentioned the word “peacekeeping” in its Charter: “In 1945, the term meant keeping the peace among nations and checking those that threatened their neighbours or countries further afield”. Indeed, when the UN Charter was signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945 by 50 countries, the atomic bombs were yet to fall on Japan. The UN formally came into existence on 24 October 1945, mere weeks after the Second World War ended.

It is from the theme of Kennedy’s seminal work, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers”, that the UN was born. Since its origins, the number of UN member states has almost quadrupled to 193. But the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (U.S., UK, France, China and Russia) have stubbornly retained their places around the famous horse shoe table in the UN headquarters in New York.

The UN Security Council is where peacekeeping dreams can die. There is no better demonstration than the UN’s inability to prevent Syria’s civil war from entering its eighth year. The carnage in Aleppo in 2016, or Ghouta in 2018, can make us ask what the point of the UN is. Ever since Russia’s military intervened in 2015 to prop up Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Russia’s diplomats have wielded their Security Council veto to help Assad’s forces win on the battlefield.

The UN’s “Geneva Process”, run by Staffan De Mistrua, has repeatedly stalled. If it did not have enough obstacles already, Russia has convened its own talks in Sochi and Astana to exclude the anti-Assad rebels and undermine UN attempts to negotiate an end to Syria’s civil war. Russia simply will not allow the UN to set the pace and tone of conflict management over Syria.

Nevertheless, the UN will never be written out of the script entirely. UN agencies, like the UNDP and the UNHCR, may still be useful when it comes to clearing up messy post-conflict situations.

Even after US President George W. Bush famously circumvented the Security Council to invade Iraq in 2003, the UN still played a nascent role after the invasion.  The UN sent its best man for the job, Sergio Vieira De Mello, to try to broker a political deal amongst Iraq’s newly liberated factions after Saddam Hussein had been toppled. On 19 August, 2003, Al Qaeda militants killed De Mello in a suicide truck bombing. Cowed, the UN withdrew its field presence from Iraq at a time when it was badly needed. Bush condemned the bombing. Even if his invasion of Iraq had undermined and divided the UN, then-Secretary General Kofi Annan had still tried to support Iraq’s reconstruction.

Wars such as in Iraq and Syria involve high geopolitical stakes for major world powers. In such wars, the UN’s ability to intervene and stabilise conflicts tends to be low. Conversely, the UN will always remain a much more viable platform for interventions in conflicts with lower geopolitical stakes.

As Peter Rudolf noted in a 2017 article for Survival, “peacekeeping operations have undergone considerable change since the turn of the century. Peacekeepers are deployed in a greater variety of scenarios, ranging from monitoring ceasefires to complex peace operations. The protection of civilians has become an important focus, and operations have become more robust in their use of force to defend their mandate. Despite these changes, the UN continues to champion its original peacekeeping principles, specifically the consent of the parties. Peace operations, like the evolving MONUSCO mission in the DRC, and MINUSMA in Mali have “blurred the line between peace keeping and peace enforcement”, according to Rudolf.

Elsewhere in the world, the UN provides all manner of bespoke conflict interventions that fall short of peacekeeping. In Colombia, after President Juan Manual Santos agreed to a peace deal with the FARC, ending over five decades of guerrilla war, UN observers supervised the FARC’s handover of weapons in 2017. This is vital work for which the impartiality of the UN’s personnel is an asset.

Then there is mediation and UN good offices. As Roxaneh Bazergan of the UN’s Mediation Support Unit explains, the UN provides technical support to regional organisations that try to manage wars, like the African Union in the DRC, and the OSCE in Ukraine. In 2018, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed a new envoy to the Yemen conflict, charging Martin Griffiths to broker peace in the war-torn country. The odds may be stacked against Griffiths, but the UN should at least try.

Wherever there is a conflict, the UN is sure to be providing or offering some sort of specialist service. From full blown peacekeeping missions, to disaster relief, to mediation support and envoys. It is hardly fair to accuse the UN and its agencies of shirking the challenge.

Rather, the real question is whether the geopolitical winds are blowing favourably for the UN to make an impact. The pride of the great powers will often be the UN’s first hurdle. The UN could either be set up to fail, or simply not be invited in the first place.

The rise and the fall of great powers always sets the overall tone, which is why we should pay attention to the changes that are clearly afoot in the international order. The U.S. is slowly shifting from being the world’s undisputed heavyweight champion, to the world’s disputed heavyweight champion.

China will back the UN when its national interests allow it. For example, if the UN can stabilise an African country that China does business with, Beijing will not stand in the way. Otherwise, China will certainly block UN processes that intrude on its great power space. For instance, China prevented the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) from being applied in disputes in the South China Sea.

For the great powers, the UN has always been useful when convenient, and an obstacle when in the way of national interest. We should expect to witness much more of this as the world enters a new phase of rivalry and geopolitical competition.

 

Dr Samir Puri is a lecturer in War Studies at King’s College London. His most recent book is called Fighting and Negotiating with Armed Groups: the Difficulty of Securing Strategic Outcomes. In 2017, his article, “The Strategic Hedging of Iran, Russia, and China: Juxtaposing Participation in the Global System with Regional Revisionism”, was published by the Journal of Global Security Studies.

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https://news.un.org/en/story/2013/09/451502-un-security-council-agrees-rid-syria-chemical-weapons-endorses-peace-process