Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 23, 1998
White House backs standby U.N. army
By George Archibald
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Congressional officials are investigating $200,000 the Clinton administration gave the United Nations last fall as seed money to mobilize a worldwide standby army for peacekeeping operations.
While the State Department insists it notified the relevant House and Senate committees about the move, key staffers on Capitol Hill said this week that they do not recall a notification.
The congressional aides have started an inquiry to see if the standby army contribution was "buried" in a larger request to re-program appropriated State Department funds.
The State Department, when queried about the U.N. contribution, refused to release to The Washington Times documents sent to Congress as official notification because they are "privileged," said Joseph Dickie, spokesman for the department's international organization affairs bureau.
The U.S. contribution, given quietly last September, was the first voluntary donation to establish a $2.3 million U.N. trust fund to finance the new U.N. military operation called the Rapidly Deployable Mission Headquarters (RDMHQ), according to sources close to Bernard Miyet, U.N. undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations.
The administration gave "backdoor support" last September because of the political sensitivity over creating an army under U.N. command and political authority, said a U.N. secretariat official close to the process who asked not to be named.
The U.N. official said field commanders of rapidly deployed forces would report to an eight-member command unit at U.N. headquarters, with political authority in the hands of the U.N. Security Council.
State Department officials confirmed the contribution for the RDMHQ, saying funds were given from the department's voluntary peacekeeping account.
The department notified relevant House and Senate committees Sept. 17, "and they did not object," Mr. Dickie said.
Canada and the Netherlands are primary backers of the standby army idea, the U.N. official said.
The Senate is expected to start final action today on an omnibus foreign aid bill that includes provisions to pay $817 million in U.S. arrears to the United Nations and prohibit U.S. support for a U.N. standing army.
Some U.N. critics in Congress believe the standby army concept is a way to circumvent the prohibition in the bill.
U.N. and administration officials said the world body does not need a permanent standing army. They said cultural, religious and language differences throughout the world make full-time military forces under U.N. command impractical. "Country A would not accept troops from Country B," said a U.N. military adviser who asked not to be named.
"Each country maintains the troops and equipment within their own armed forces," said U.N. spokesman Hiro Ueki. "It's not considered a standing army for the U.N."
Instead, the United Nations wants standby forces that could be called up immediately like U.S. military reserves, to permit U.N. headquarters to tailor foreign military units to suit the countries or regions to which they are assigned, the adviser said.
The United Nations already has signed "standby agreements" with 72 countries that "have agreed to provide to the U.N. troops or capabilities -- infantry battalions, engineers, artillery, medical, logistical support and air transport," a U.N. official said.
U.N. sources said organizers of the rapid-deployment operation hoped its eight-member command structure would be appointed and ready at U.N. headquarters in New York for its first assignment in the Central African Republic, where the Security Council last week authorized a new peacekeeping mission as France pulls out troops stationed in the unstable country for many years.
The Security Council authorized 1,350 U.N. troops and an initial $38 million budget for the African operation's first six months. The expected U.S. share would be $9.5 million, or 25 percent.
The office of U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard referred inquiries to Lt. Col. Bernard Saunders, a Canadian army officer on loan to organize the RDMHQ and recruit the eight-member command unit in New York. Col. Saunders said the Security Council had not yet acted on recommended appointments and declined to comment further.
The Clinton administration argues that support for the RDMHQ concept and opposition to the idea of a standing U.N. army are not contradictory.
"Precisely because we don't support a standing army, we did not believe that you should create units under U.N. control that would be available," said Princeton N. Lyman, assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, whose office coordinated the U.S. contribution.
"The deployable headquarters is a temporary mechanism that, only after the Security Council authorizes them to do so, they can deploy a headquarters that can ... get the organization structure in place in country, which is then replaced by the countries that have been selected to be a peacekeeping [force]," Mr. Lyman said.
However, the United Nations is creating the "equivalent" of a standing army with U.S. support, said Thomas G. Moore, director of international studies at the Heritage Foundation and former defense adviser to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond, South Carolina Republican.
"The key thing is having the headquarters, the command-and-control system, and the logistical infrastructure, and once you have that you can plug in your troop units with relative ease," said Mr. Moore, a former Army officer.
"You don't need a standing army. It serves the same purpose without standing. The political benefits are you can deny you have created a standing army even though you have created an equivalent," he said.
Mr. Lyman said U.S. support for rapid deployment of standby troops was motivated by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which cost $700 million for humanitarian and refugee aid because the United States and United Nations did not act quickly enough.
"This is something we're doing to help the U.N. to contain unstable situations in Africa," Mr. Lyman said. "If it were to implode and we have refugees, we'd be paying two, three, four times as much. But equally important, this is an area that we've seen violence [and] instability, and we've got to find a way to enable the U.N. to contain it."
The Canadian government first proposed in September 1995 that the United Nations establish a rapid-reaction force headquarters that could assemble as many as 5,000 troops immediately to deal with international crises.
The United Nations now forms each peacekeeping mission from scratch after a vote by the Security Council. Some take months to gear up, said Michael A. Sheehan, deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. Mr. Sheehan, who served as a U.S. Army adviser in Somalia in 1993, said the commander of the U.N. peacekeeping mission there could not get a working telephone for two months.
Last year, when the State Department told Congress the administration wanted to support a new U.N. peacekeeping mission in central Africa, skeptical congressional leaders questioned how the mission served U.S. "vital security interests" and opposed "bailing out France," which often opposes the United States at the United Nations, House and Senate sources said.
Last month, congressional committees blocked a State Department request to pay $9.5 million for the central Africa mission. But the United States voted in the Security Council to support the mission anyway.
"This is a president who somehow thinks he's a king or a dictator or a one-person government, and he's not," said Sen. Rod Grams, Minnesota Republican and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on international operations.
"We're very against setting up any kind of operation [in central Africa] that the president has talked about. ... [The U.N. is] not a peacemaking operation. They're not a NATO. If we're going to give them that type of an authority, this is a foot in the door to what many have feared to be a world army, and we're not going to do that, we're not going to support it."
Mr. Grams said the president should not have made commitments for the U.N. operations in Africa. "If he put expectations out there that we're not going to meet, of course, then we become the bad guys. It's a political step by this president. I'm offended by it."
The administration's action in the face of congressional opposition "pushes up our arrears at the U.N.," now estimated to be $658 million for disputed peacekeeping operations, said a State Department official who asked not to be named.
"It is a serious dilemma," Mr. Lyman said. "We would much rather have reached consensus [with Congress]. ... There is a serious problem with our voting on peacekeeping operations that Congress has not voted funding for."Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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