Ivor King is an honours student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Australia

Recent international events have again raised the oft considered question of whether the UN should, and could, have a standing army, made up of forces from member nations, which could intervene with a suitable UN mandate when certain types of conflicts arose. The idea is ostensibly appealing, but has been widely criticised by some as being wholly impractical, and in some cases undesirable. The following will make an argument for such a force, and briefly consider and critique some of the principal objections. Such a force would have the mandate to get unashamedly involved, as there is no point being a peace keeper if there is no peace to keep. UNFOR (UN Force) would be a peacemaker and peace enforcer, not only a peacekeeper.

The crisis in East Timor is an excellent example of why waiting and doing nothing just does not work. It is not good enough for the international community to sit by and watch these catastrophes unfolding without acting immediately. The response times of the international community compare starkly against those which may be bought, or are demonstrated when a country's interests or sovereignty is at stake. However when other people's lives are at stake, the best we can collectively offer is that we all think it is a bad thing that these people are being raped, pillaged and murdered. Bureaucrats and academics sit in coffee shops, sipping their lattés, pontificating on the wrongs of flagrant human rights abuse and widespread ethnic cleansing, lamenting the horrible, terrible "tragedy" they see unfolding, but unwilling to endorse direct, immediate military intervention. Instead many of them criticise any who do intervene for doing so for ulterior motives, and continually restate the importance of taking everything through the UN General Assembly and Security Council, even though they know such attempts are easily and frequently vetoed or thwarted. This same phenomena recurs for almost every international conflict where UNFOR could be deployed.

Eventually, most concede that something must be done, but inevitably, action is slow in coming, if it comes at all. The Kosovo conflict is another example of the immense human cost which vacillation, hesitation and irresolution cause. Effective action is only truly possible if the UN has an armed force which it can deploy quickly and efficiently anywhere in the world in minimum time. By the time everyone has agreed as to the constituency of an intervening force, and who will take which piece of land, many have died, and resolution of the conflict becomes more costly in terms of lives and economic consequences.

Let us consider the pathetic UN uninvolvement in the Kosovo crisis, which we watched with shock, surprise, and a sense of sorrow at the pervading impotence of the wider international community in the face of a petty despot. NATO eventually decided to intervene after countless threats and counterthreats. But it chose only to bomb, which unsurprisingly did not work. Eventually, after a humanitarian and refugee crisis unseen in Europe since WWII, the international community, following much squabbling over who would get which bits of Kosovo, decided to do something substantive, upon which the Serbian forces retreated. This was acceptable to the Serbs, they had inflicted all manner of atrocities upon the people of Kosovo, had committed a good deal of murder, and felt that it was probably time to leave anyway. NATO had bombed much of Serbia, and will now find itself paying directly or indirectly for much of the reconstruction, which it inflicted, somewhat expensively. Nobody wanted the young men and women of their armed forces to get their fingers burnt in fighting an actual war on the ground. The western media responded with indignant disbelief at KFOR soldiers being actually shot at during the Kosovo occupation. Western countries just could not believe that soldiers would actually be shot at.

If upon the realisation that a crisis had gripped Kosovo, the international community through the UN sent in UNFOR, specially trained in the resolution of internal ethnic disputes and the special skills required for the likes of guerrilla warfare, the humanitarian crisis would have been averted. UNFOR would benefit from concentrated military experience in the defusing of internal disputes, and would be equipped and prepared for this more so than a regular army or some hurried, hastily collected mismatch of soldiers from disparate forces. UNFOR would have to attack with surprise and immediacy, with full and total force, so as to minimise casualties on both sides. UNFOR would have to benefit from a nonpartisan command structure, which could be based upon a system of voting in military commanders by members of the General Assembly, and troops would be devoted entirely to UN work.

UNFOR's work could range from peacekeeping, aiding in earthquake disasters, distributing food, or active engagement such as in KFOR's case. There would never be any shortage of work for such a force. Most importantly, such a force would have to be extremely well-equipped and professionally trained, with the emphasis on mobility and being able to respond rapidly to any disaster or conflict zone in the world, neutralising the situation in the shortest possible time. Such a force would have to be mandated to fight back, and KFOR is a better prototype than the continually hassled, heckled and emasculated UN peacekeeping force which had the misfortune to be in the Balkans before them.

Most agree that UNFOR is a nice idea. However, commentators point to obvious impracticalities plaguing such a proposal, deeming them overwhelming and fatal to its implementation. However, it is this author's view that these difficulties are surmountable, and the eventual creation of UNFOR is an inevitable part of increasingly globalising security interests and concerns.

The first objection is that such a project would be too expensive. A counterpoint to this is that the international community arguably collectively spends much more on messy half-hearted peacekeeping efforts currently than it would on UNFOR which would save money for participating countries in the long term. An example is the Balkans crisis. Vast amounts have been spent on tents, food, medical aid - patching up people whose injuries could have been prevented in the first place by fast action. The international community has spent lavishly shunting unsuspecting, long suffering refugees back and forth across the globe. In addition, countries will ultimately have to pay directly or indirectly for all the bombs they dropped on Serbia and Kosovo, as they will now have to rebuild most of its crippled infrastructure. Then is the phenomenal military cost of such a protracted and unsure operation. UNFOR would be expensive, but would amount to little more than the ongoing cost of applying band aid solutions to the wounds of international crisis, which just continue to fester under the present system, and then flare up again years later, to the horror and surprise of the international community.

The next objection is that countries could not agree to the command, training and unengaged placement of such an army. Indeed, they argue, nations could never even agree to the creation of UNFOR. This is an issue which would have to be resolved through sensitive international diplomacy, with UN leadership. The command structure naturally would have to be nonpartisan and meritocratic. The issue of training could be resolved by providing the most appropriate training for the specialised units in question, and that too could be a combined international effort. UNFOR could have headquarters in a number of countries, placement would be a matter of strategy determined by nonpartisan global security concerns. Regional or continental bases could be the chosen method of placement, however the issue would be immaterial if such a force was only deployed to situations where the circumstances warranted their presence. In this they would not be particularly based anywhere, nor would they need to be.

The choice of deployment for conflict or disaster management would be based on appropriate democratic voting procedures within the UN. Sceptics counter that such a force would not be used, as the UN is plagued by toothlessness which resulting from its democratic structure, and the Security Council veto, as in the Kosovo case. Such problems would also prevent decisive, quick deployment, they argue. This is a strong point, and UNFOR could be hamstrung by the UN's omnipresent impotence. There would have to be appropriate procedural reform of the Security Council and General Assembly to ensure that UNFOR could actually be used. This would scare certain countries, as they would fear the potential infringement of their sovereignty by UNFOR pursuant to a UN vote in favour of intervention. The voting system need not be reformed to such an extent that a majority could easily apply UNFOR to a pariah nation, a middle ground would have to be achieved between this and the current debilitating Security Council veto. This the creation of UNFOR would have to be concurrent with UN procedural reform, which is a further impracticality, and a difficult problem.

Others blindly blabber that UNFOR would be dominated by westcentric influences, the US, they cry, would control everything it does. This, I contend, is the least serious obstacle in the way of the creation of an effective interventionist force like UNFOR. They argue that if the UN was reformed, the result would be the further securing of hegemonic US interests. Again, such a contention is usually founded in rabid unthinking antiAmericanism, and does not fully account for the contribution that the rest of the world would probably expect the US to make to UNFOR in terms of hardware and personnel. UNFOR need not be controlled by the US, it would not be a simple extension of NATO, but a global protector.

Why should only the rich countries of Europe and the northern hemisphere have the protection of their own well equipped and well trained private security force in the form of NATO, whilst Asia, South America and Africa are left to the ineffective wiles of the UN, with its hapless peacekeepers and UNAMET fleeing in terror at the sound of gunfire, unmandated and under resourced to the point where they cannot fight back and cannot keep the peace? The solution, I suggest, is UNFOR.

A further argument that this is little more than a pipe dream is founded in the contention that it will simply never happen, as there is insufficient high level impetus behind this idea. States would care little for reforming the UN and properly resourcing it to tackle international crises. This could constitute a fatal problem for the establishment of UNFOR, as without high level diplomatic initiative and agreement nothing will change. Agreement may only be attainable after reform of UN procedures. The diplomatic and bureaucratic lethargy on the issue will arguably change over time, as processes of globalisation continue to change conceptions of sovereignty and territoriality, and internationalise security concerns. Currently there is little public or political will to implement such change, and disperse power upwards away from government to the UN. Public opinion may call for more effective solutions in the wake of an increasing number of crises such as East Timor. A further solution, which would be less effective than a standing force, would be to earmark certain sections of countries' armed forces for UNFOR, whilst maintaining a preconcluded command structure. This would make UNFOR partisan, leading to controversy and argument over impartiality.

Peace is worth fighting for. UNFOR remains an enticing prospect, and one which will probably come to pass eventually through globalisation and associated trends in international security. Even now it is not an impossible prospect, but would have to be coupled with reform of the UN voting structure, so that it could be made effective. There has also been a startling lack of diplomatic initiative in this area, although all admit the benefits of UNFOR, nobody appears to be pushing for such a proposal. Regional disputes, and increasingly prevalent ethnic fragmentation may change this, making UNFOR more of a necessity. Therefore, independent of whether the international community is ready for it, UNFOR should and will eventually come into existence in some form. By this time it is hoped that the world has not lost millions more of its people to ethnic conflict and humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by pathetic, sorry diplomatic agonising, inaction, selfishness and consequent unwillingness to intervene whilst fellow human beings die in their numbers around us.