Locating accountability: the media and peacekeeping.

• Author: Moeller, Susan D.
• Position: Economic and Social Implications

"The unequivocal effect of the media is not to change or even shift policy, but to influence its timing--and especially to compress the time available for making policy decisions."

In 1999, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Bowden published his you-are-there account of the Battle of the Black Sea--a firefight in Somalia on 3 October, 1993, in which 18 Americans were killed and more than 70 injured. Titled Black Hawk Down, (1) Bowden's story was first serialized in 29 parts in the Inquirer. In short order, he was tapped to adapt the best-selling book into a film of the same name. Originally scheduled for March 2002, the release date was moved forward three months (to December 2001) by the producer Jerry Bruckheimer to capitalize on the massive public demand for military action movies in the wake of September 11. Black Hawk Down turned out to be a blockbuster. It has been called "powerful" and "rave" by reviewers--"so thoroughly convincing, it's frequently difficult to believe it is a staged re-creation." (2)

It is also a creation of the Pentagon, Director Ridley Scott told CNN that the Pentagon proved "very, very, very user-friendly" over the film, as long as "what you are actually trying to do is represent the [military] in the right and proper light." The result, Scott said, was an "almost page-by-page process of negotiation" with Pentagon officials about the screenplay. (3) An on-screen prologue sets up the battle explaining that "A combination of famine and civil war had persuaded the United Nations to send a peacekeeping force into Somalia." (4) But Scott doesn't delve into the geopolitical implications of the famine or the war, nor does he linger on the reasons why the fiercest firefight for Americans since the Vietnam War occurred in Mogadishu.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the images that Americans had come to associate most with the Battle of the Black Sea are precisely those images that are not included in the film. There is no footage of the Somali mob dragging the naked corpses of two American soldiers through the streets. Hollywood films, no matter whether their genesis is in news reporting, are not in the business of relating background, analyzing politics or locating accountability. That's what the media are supposed to do.

They cannot do more. We can only hope that they do not do less. The conventional wisdom that the media hold Rasputin-like powers is a myth: a phenomenon similar to the fantasy that journalists were responsible for the loss of Vietnam. Proactively, decisionmakers work to exclude, to co-opt or to spin the media. The Bush administration employed all three tactics, for instance, during recent operations in Afghanistan, especially in regard to the bombing of civilian areas.

But as events in Afghanistan have also demonstrated, the media are most effective at raising questions about policy after that policy has been implemented. Strategic and economic interests dictate the formation of policy; however, the media can, when they do their job, reveal that the wizard pushing the buttons and pulling the levers behind the curtain is not all he seems. The media are best at show and tell: If they can show and tell their audience what is happening, then those words and images can act to check the veracity of the diplomats' and policymakers' assertions. For example, the images that came out during the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam--such as the street-corner execution--prompted Americans to question what they had been told by the Johnson administration. The news from Vietnam illuminated a gulf between prior official rhetoric and evident military reality.

In Mogadishu, the media performed the same function. They dramatically showed that the peacekeeping doctrine of "armed humanitarianism" was both a rhetorical and a military oxymoron.

DEFINING PEACEKEEPING

The media's understanding--and therefore the public's understanding--of peacekeeping has been complicated by shifting notions within the United Nations about what the word means. What should be the role the organization's forces play in the buildup, the fighting and the aftermath of conflicts? Should the United Nations be engaged in high-risk, low-yield missions, or should it focus on humanitarian relief, political mediation and such post-conflict matters as voter registration, census-taking and job training?

Peacekeeping seemed to mean what it sounded like in the first four decades of its use--simple and straightforward monitoring of border disputes, such as those in Korea and Kashmir. (5) But in the 1990s, peacekeepers were brought into civil wars, where the task of dividing political power in one state proved much more intractable than dividing political territory between states. The notion of inserting neutral soldiers as a barrier between two sides exposed some creaky logic in the careful games played during the Cold War.

In the Hobbesian post-Cold War world, where opposing sides agree to ceasefires only to catch their breath, where any neutrality by outsiders seems tantamount to sanctioning evil--think of Rwanda and Sierra Leone, to name just two conflicts--peacekeeping has become an immensely more problematic enterprise. Blue-helmeted soldiers added to conflicts merely become pawns for the opposing sides to play.

As a result, the job asked of peacekeepers expanded far beyond the capabilities of the UN institution and resulted in the sensational failures of the last decade, first in Somalia, then in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, and finally in Sierra Leone. As Michael Ignatieff, now director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, wrote in May 2000 about Sierra Leone:

As in Bosnia, the Security Council dispatched peacekeepers to enforce a peace that did not exist. As in Rwanda, member countries supplied troops without the capacity to defend themselves. As in Somalia, forces have been sucked into a civil war without the means and the will to prevail. Once again, peacekeepers have been taken hostage. In 1995, the Bosnian Serbs at least chained them to buildings in full view of cameras. In Sierra Leone, the United Nations can't even find them. (6) In 2000, Lakhdar Brahimi, the former foreign minister of Algeria and currently the UN envoy to Afghanistan, was asked by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to head a panel to investigate the United Nations' use of peacekeepers. In a cogent and critical report the panel recommended that the previously distinct operations of peacekeeping and peacebuilding be formally fused and that UN peacekeepers be inserted in conflicts only where there was consent of the local parties, where there was sufficient political or financial support for their presence and where "robust rules of engagement" existed both to protect them and to allow them to act against those who would seek to undermine the existing peace accords.

At the start of the millennium, Wall Street Journal editorial features editor Max Boot said the United Nations remained what it had long been, "a debating society, a humanitarian relief organization and an occasionally useful adjunct to great-power diplomacy--but not an effective independent force." Yet, noted Boot, the idealism behind the concept of peacekeeping continues to hold power--and remains a force "that policymakers cannot ignore in the CNN age." (7)

BLACK HAWK DOWN

It is, after all, the CNN age that in large measure got the business of peacekeeping into its current state. "We live in a world erected through the stories we tell," wrote media critic George Gerbner.

Violence and terror have a special role to play in this great storytelling process. They depict social forces in conflict. They dramatize threats to human integrity and the social order. They demonstrate power to lash out, provoke, intimidate and control. They designate winners and losers in an inescapably political game. (8) The brutal conflicts that characterized the early 1990s generated millions of words and thousands of images in the international media--most of which can be distilled into a single bullet point: "Never Again" is back. When few countries were willing to step into the conflicts, and media-generated pressure became too intense to ignore, the assignment of stopping the new holocausts was handed over to the United Nations. UN leaders felt impelled to act, but there was neither adequate political will nor financial backing to do enough. When their efforts failed--for example, when under-strength Belgian peacekeepers were forced to watch Rwandan civilians hacked to death outside their compound or a Dutch battalion allowed thousands of civilians in Srebrenica to be massacred--the United Nations, and not any individual country, was deemed culpable. The decade became renowned for its scenes of unchecked mayhem and slaughter, but all wanted to duck responsibility for those acts. Media reports that another UN-led intervention had failed helped national policymakers in their attempts to exonerate themselves.

A case in point is Somalia. In December 1992, the UN Security Council framed a new doctrine to address the crisis in Somalia. Articulated in Resolution 794, the doctrine of armed humanitarianism came to define, if not distinguish, the...