Dennis Jett
Ambassador Jett (ret.) is a professor of International Affairs in the School of International Affairs at Pennsylvania State University.
They have a combined annual cost of $700 million, have been around for decades, are staffed by 14,000 soldiers and civilians and today do not seem to be accomplishing much of anything. What are they? The four peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in and around Israel. Put another way, why do all four of these operations continue to exist if there is currently so little peace to keep? There are a number of reasons for this paradox of peacekeeping, and an explanation requires taking a look at each of the four PKOs: the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the Multilateral Force and Observers (MFO), which is not a UN operation.
Considering how peacekeeping and wars have evolved more generally will also help explain why these four PKOs exist, even though there is good reason to doubt they are worth the cost. It will also illustrate three other things. First, the United Nations is inflexible when it comes to adapting to changing circumstances. Second, peacekeeping has become an exercise in which poor countries send their troops off to perform tasks they cannot accomplish, while rich countries pick up the tab but refuse to put their own troops at risk. Third, peacekeeping as currently practiced would be incapable of making any contribution to implementing a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, were one ever to be drawn up.
EVOLUTION OF PEACEKEEPING
The United Nations got its start in peacekeeping in 1948 with the establishment of UNTSO, which was created to supervise the ceasefire ending the war that erupted when Israel was first established. Over the years, the other three PKOs were established to help monitor agreements resulting from other conflicts between Israel and its neighbors. UNDOF was created in 1974 following the Yom Kippur War with Syria and Egypt. After fighting erupted between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel in southern Lebanon, UNIFIL was established in 1978. The MFO came into being in 1981, after the Camp David Accords brought about peace between Israel and Egypt and required Israel to return the Sinai.
All four of these PKOs arose from wars between countries over territory. Of the 17 currently active UN PKOs, however, only five deal with territorial disputes, and none of them are new. There are the three UN operations around Israel, which are 68, 42 and 38 years old, and two more, which have been going for 67 years (UNMOGIP between India and Pakistan) and 52 years (UNFICYP in Cyprus). The reason these operations have lasted so long is that national pride, as well as national security, is involved in conventional wars between states over territory. It is easier for countries that have fought that kind of war to accept peacekeepers and an unresolved dispute than it is to draw an imaginary line on a map delineating the border. Invariably one country or the other will feel it has lost out in this demarcation. And since the United Nations is footing the bill for the peacekeepers, the political cost of a settlement is seen to be greater than not having one. Thus, the peacekeepers just soldier on year after year, whether or not there is any political process underway to resolve the underlying dispute.
One exception to this scenario of endless peacekeeping was the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE). It came about in the traditional way: a war between countries over their common border. That PKO was begun in 2000, but it ended in 2008 after Eritrea imposed restrictions on UNMEE and cut off its fuel supplies, making it impossible for the peacekeepers to function.1 The United Nations responded by shutting down the PKO even though the boundary issue remains unresolved, tension in the region is high, and fighting occasionally breaks out.2
UNMEE was also an exception because wars between countries over territory are rare today. Of the 28 UN PKOs initiated in the last 20 years,3 only UNMEE was the result of a war between countries. All the others have been the result of civil wars. This distinction between inter- and intra-state wars is important; the stakes, combatants, victims and weapons are different. The starkest difference involves the demands placed on the peacekeepers in dealing with these conflicts.
The stakes in a war between countries is the territory being fought over. It pits the armed forces of one state against those of another. They can use any and all the weapons at their disposal, from naval and air assets to armor and heavy artillery. While the fighting is often intense, those killed and injured are usually soldiers. When the conflict is brought to a halt, the peacekeepers are tasked with the relatively straightforward job of monitoring the space between the armies to ensure neither side is violating the agreement that separated them and brought about a ceasefire. The peacekeepers report their observations to UN headquarters and facilitate communications between the parties, to try to prevent the conflict from starting again.
Civil wars pose a different challenge to the international community. The combatants are the army of the regime in power and whatever group is violently opposing it, whether they are called rebels, freedom fighters, insurgents or terrorists. And the conflict is over political power, which, unlike territory, cannot easily be divided. Often in a poor country, the winner takes all and the loser is out of luck. Because these wars usually occur in poor countries with minimally trained combatants, the arms used are typically the ubiquitous AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The weapons in a civil war are the kind a soldier can carry, and rarely rise above the level of something that has to be mounted on the back of a pickup truck.
Since political power can be measured by the number of people under the control of a group, the victims of these wars are most often civilians. Killing, or driving off, the supporters of the other side is one way to weaken the opposition. The soldiers of both the government and the rebels are almost always poorly trained, equipped and led; therefore, they quickly discover another advantage of attacking civilians — they don't shoot back. And if there is an ethnic or religious difference between those who support the regime and those who do not, it makes targeting civilians even easier.
In these situations, civilian casualties and refugees spilling over into adjacent countries create humanitarian disasters that place great pressure on the United Nations to act. As a result, peacekeepers are often dispatched, preferably after a ceasefire has been agreed to by the various factions. Unlike in a war between countries, the peacekeepers are given a daunting list of things to do, not only on the military front, but frequently on the political and economic ones as well.
Militarily, the former combatants are usually assembled in camps, with the bulk of them demobilized and offered incentives to become civilians. The remaining soldiers are formed into a new unified national army and given some training, so that they might be able to act like one. The police are also encouraged to act like cops instead of another instrument of regime repression.
On the economic side, the country — usually poor to begin with and having spent the war years destroying what little it had — has to be provided development aid to get on its feet again. Refugees have to be helped to return home and resettle. Politically, in a country with little to no democratic experience, elections have to be organized in order to choose a government that has a claim to legitimacy and a mandate.
Those are tall orders, especially when the participants start dragging their feet on implementation. Like all politicians, dictators and warlords define a free and fair election as one they win. The prospect of not winning gives them a strong incentive to rethink their commitment to a peace agreement, so they might try to hold back soldiers that are loyal only to them.
Another problem for the peacekeepers, and the source of the harshest criticism of their work, arises when the combatants in a civil war are not ready for peace. If they continue killing civilians, the peacekeepers have a stark choice — being bystanders to atrocities or becoming forced to take part in the fighting. One early example of how costly that can be occurred in the early 1960s when the UN Operation in the Congo got involved in the fighting. Taking sides in that conflict cost the lives of 250 UNOC peacekeepers, not to mention the second UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, who died in a plane crash en route to the killing fields.
Whether the UN peacekeepers use force, other than in self-defense, is never an easy decision and depends on two things. The first is the willingness of the international community to have the peacekeepers suffer, as well as inflict, casualties to protect the civilians. The peacekeepers' rules of engagement (ROE) are contained in the mission's mandate along with its goals. The ROE can be based on Chapter 6 of the UN charter, which means the peacekeepers can use force only to defend themselves when attacked. Or the ROE can include the authorization contained in Chapter 7, which states that the peacekeepers can use "all necessary means" to carry out their mission.
If the mission's mandate includes protecting civilians, the peacekeepers can use military means to do so if they have the ones necessary for the task. But that gets to the second and more practical limitation, the willingness of the individual peacekeeper to put his own life at risk. For instance, a soldier from Bangladesh might not be eager to use his weapon to prevent one Liberian from killing another if that means he might also be killed. Regardless of the rhetoric in New York, the mandate or the ROE, a modus vivendi can be informally arrived at on the ground even if that means civilians are not defended.
The issue of protecting civilians is less likely to arise in wars between countries. Therefore, the traditional three rules of peacekeeping are more easily applied: first, the peacekeepers must remain neutral; second, they can use their weapons only to defend themselves; third, they are there only if the warring parties agree.
As noted earlier, conventional wars, which were the first peacekeeping challenges of the United Nations, have been supplanted by civil wars in the last 20 years. However, it is the combination of the two that has now left the four PKOs in and around Israel teetering on the brink of irrelevance.
UNTSO, the UN's first PKO, has been in continuous operation since 1948 in response to the conflicts between Israel and its neighbors. Today, it mainly supplies unarmed military observers to other PKOs like UNDOF and UNIFIL. UNDOF's main task was to monitor the area on the Syrian side of the ceasefire line, the de facto border, to ensure it remained demilitarized. The civil war in Syria, however, turned the ceasefire zone into a live-fire one. In 2013, a Filipino peacekeeper was wounded by a shell that landed in a UN camp on the Israeli side of the line as Syrian rebels drove government forces out of Quneitra. In response, Austria brought home its 380 soldiers, over a third of UNDOF's strength.4 A year later, the United Nations pulled all its troops out of Syria as the situation deteriorated further.5
That left some of the military observers trying to monitor the war through binoculars from an Israeli café and tourist attraction on top of a mountain miles away from an area that was supposed to have been demilitarized.6 UNDOF has plans to return, but the civil war in Syria will have to end before that happens. At a minimum, the Syrian government will have to regain control of the territory near its de facto border with Israel.
In Lebanon, the situation is more stable for the moment, but more complicated and potentially more harmful to the image of peacekeeping. In 2006, following fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, the Security Council added two tasks to UNIFIL's mandate. It was supposed to assist the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to keep the area south of the Litani River free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Lebanese government. In addition, it was to help the government secure its borders to prevent the entry of illicit weapons. To aid in accomplishing this, UNIFIL added a naval contingent, the first UN attempt at peacekeeping on the ocean.7
Hezbollah, considered a terrorist organization by the United States and others, has become the most powerful military and political force in the country,8 thanks in large part to the support of Iran and Syria.9 That power has left it free to operate in areas where its Shiite followers are most numerous, including the border area with Israel. There Hezbollah has proved more effective than the government at providing basic services, enhancing its popularity.
The reasons for the government's ineffectiveness are outlined in a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "Today, the Lebanese state is deadlocked. Lebanon has no president, and parliament has been paralyzed since 2013."10 Part of this paralysis stems from the political power Hezbollah has accrued from its seats in parliament, its veto power over cabinet actions and its desire to avoid a debate over its role in the Syrian civil war, where it has suffered thousands of casualties. At the end of October 2016 it was announced that agreement had been reached among the various political factions on selecting a new president, but speculation immediately began on whether or not this would end the political crisis.11
The LAF is therefore the ineffective army of a dysfunctional government; it is not going to seriously constrain Hezbollah and set off a renewed civil war in Lebanon. Since UNIFIL's orders are to assist only the LAF, its hands are tied. In his periodic reports to the Security Council, the secretary general reminds Council members of those limitations and points out that UNIFIL, following its mandate, "does not proactively search for weapons or search private property unless there is an imminent threat of hostile activity from that location."12 In addition, even though UNFIL comprises over 10,000 troops, neither the 40 countries that contributed them nor the United Nations have equipped them to engage in combat against a force that could field five times that number.13
According to Israeli security experts, Hezbollah has imported tens of thousands of rockets and stockpiled them in population centers.14 On more than one occasion Hezbollah arms caches have exploded, but efforts by the United Nations to investigate further have always been thwarted.15 If fighting on the scale of 2006 breaks out again between Israel and Hezbollah, the rockets will rain down on Israel and overwhelm its missile-defense systems. To protect its population, Israel will retaliate with artillery and air strikes that will cause many civilian casualties.16 This will not bother Hezbollah; it cares more about a propaganda victory than the loss of people it purports to represent. And the presence of the 10,000 members of UNIFIL for so many years will have done next to nothing to prevent it from happening.
The naval contingent of UNIFIL, in its 10 years of existence, has checked the documents of many vessels, but it has searched only a handful and on only one occasion — according to one security analyst — did it actually find any weapons, and they were on the way to Syrian rebels.17 According to a UNIFIL spokesman, troops from the mission are conducting 400 operations a day. He admitted that only 10 percent of them were carried out with the LAF, however, raising the question of how effective those operations could be. He also admitted that there was no political process underway that might ever bring an end to the hostility between Israel and Lebanon.18
The MFO, which operates in the Sinai, faces a different situation. It is not a UN operation; the Soviet Union, at the request of Syria, threatened to veto any Security Council action designed to set up a PKO for the Sinai mission. So the United States and a handful of other countries set one up outside the UN umbrella. The situation in the Sinai is not as dire as that in Syria or as potentially dangerous as the one in Lebanon, but it is equally intractable. Islamic terrorists have been drawn to the area by the crackdown in Egypt and the chaos in other countries in the region.19 Though few in number, these terrorists have attacked government forces in the northern Sinai. The response of the Egyptian army has been as inept as it has been heavy-handed, and it shows no capacity for responding effectively to the threat.20
Scores of Egyptian soldiers have been killed and a number of MFO personnel injured, even though the terrorists have not specifically targeted them.21 As a result, the MFO has closed vulnerable observation posts, made greater use of drones and other technology, and moved personnel from its base in the far northern part of the Sinai to another at the peninsula's southern tip.22 This lack of proximity to the border with Israel is a problem. The Camp David Accords placed restrictions on the number of Egyptian forces in three zones in the Sinai with fewer assets allowed closer to the border. So, while the northern Sinai is where the peacekeepers should be doing most of their work, that is also where the terrorists are. The limits on military equipment specified in the agreement have largely been waived by Israel, however, in order to give the Egyptian forces more firepower to deal with the terrorists. Thus, aside from assisting the Egyptian and Israeli militaries in communicating with each other, much of the role of the MFO has been made irrelevant.
Among the proposals for dealing with terrorism in the Sinai is the suggestion that all civilians be evacuated from the area.23 That would presumably provide the Egyptian military a free-fire zone and an even bigger sledgehammer for its attempt to kill a fly. The opposite has also been suggested — a billion-dollar, infrastructure project designed to convince the local population to forsake the jihadists and support the government, which has traditionally neglected them.24 While the Egyptian government struggles to come up with an effective counterterrorism strategy, the peacekeepers will be forced to lower their risk and reduce their effectiveness.
The MFO has shown some ability to adapt; it can take action more easily than a UN PKO, which has to deal with the will of the Security Council and the bureaucracy at UN headquarters. Changes have also been driven by a desire on the part of the Pentagon to cut back on the 700 American soldiers in the operations. The reason, according to one American diplomat,25 is that Pentagon officials thought they would have difficulty explaining to the parents of a soldier who was killed or injured why peacekeepers became casualties. This is a problem not unlike what the Clinton administration faced after the losses suffered in Somalia.
However, the very purpose of the peacekeepers was to keep the Egyptian and Israeli armed forces apart. The threat of terrorism in the Sinai has driven the two countries into an alliance that includes not only economic cooperation, but Israeli drone strikes against terrorists in Egyptian territory.26 It is worth asking how useful a PKO designed to keep two armies apart can be when those two armies are are conducting joint combat operations together.
The four peacekeeping missions in and around Israel were created long ago to deal with conventional wars. The use of peacekeepers in these cases was predicated on the parties to those conflicts being able to control their own territory. That is something the governments of Lebanon, Syria and Egypt are currently incapable of doing, and it makes effective peacekeeping largely impossible. Those arguing for continuing these PKOs, despite this new reality, cite the difficulty of restarting a PKO once it has been drawn down, the importance of the symbolic presence of the peacekeepers, the political implications of their removal, and their ability to facilitate communication between the various actors in these conflicts. But do these reasons justify keeping over 14,000 soldiers and civilians at a cost of nearly $700 million a year (and the deaths of over 400 of them thus far) engaged in a job that is impossible to perform?
Some would argue that the presence of peacekeepers would make it more difficult for the countries to restart the war and is, therefore, justified. But President Nasser had no problem ordering peacekeepers to leave Egypt in 1956. And the Israelis had no hesitation brushing aside the peacekeepers when they invaded Lebanon in 1982.
This does not mean all peacekeeping is ineffective. It arises in these four cases because monitoring a ceasefire in a conflict between countries has morphed into trying to accomplish something positive in the midst of civil war, government dysfunction and terrorism. And what little good the peacekeepers can do does not justify keeping 14,000 of them engaged in it at a cost of $700 million a year.
The image of success or failure in peacekeeping matters; it has a bearing on the willingness of the international community to engage in such efforts. For the last five years of the twentieth century, there was a sharp decline in peacekeeping as a result of disastrous efforts in Somalia and Bosnia. Then, around 2000, peacekeeping increasingly became the default option for the international community when forced to deal with the humanitarian disasters caused by civil wars. As a result, the number of blue-helmeted soldiers increased tenfold around the world. Today there are about 122,000 people serving in the currently active PKOs.27
This expansion in peacekeeping came about because of pressure on the United Nations to "do something" about these situations. But it has evolved into a way for rich countries to send the soldiers of poor countries off to attempt the impossible. The five permanent members of the Security Council furnish less than 5 percent of the soldiers currently serving in UN PKOs (and the vast majority of them are Chinese). The troops provided by the 32 member states of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the rich countries' club, only amount to a little over 7 percent.
While wealthier countries don't want to put their troops at risk, as demonstrated by Austria's reaction to the problems of UNDOF and the American desire to cut back on its role in the MFO, they do at least pick up the tab.28 The P5 countries pay a little over half the cost of peacekeeping, while the OECD nations together cover 86 percent of the bill.
A recent UN report by a high-level independent panel charged with making a "comprehensive review of the whole question of peacekeeping operations in all their aspects" reached an unsurprising conclusion: lasting peace is achieved not through military and technical engagement, but through political solutions.29 And it is those political solutions — backed up with economic and, if necessary, military pressure — that the international community should pursue with greater urgency. For the five PKOs dealing with conventional wars, which are on average over half a century old, the bill for peacekeeping should be paid by the countries involved. If they had to bear the substantial economic cost of peacekeeping, they might be prompted to recalculate the political costs of failing to resolve their differences.
Finding peace in the Middle East means looking for common ground and cooperation with countries like Russia and Iran, who could act as spoilers. It also means that, if the international community does not act more forcefully and with greater unity, using all the tools at its disposal, it will be a long time before peacekeepers have any peace to keep.
IMPLICATIONS FOR A TWO-STATE SOLUTION
Given the lack of leadership on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, a peace agreement that leads to a two-state solution seems to simultaneously be an urgent necessity and a distant dream. Such an agreement would require security guarantees for both countries, but peacekeeping as it has been practiced thus far in the region cannot provide the assurances necessary. It could, as one Israeli analyst suggested half in jest, provide someone to blame whenever incidents occur,30 but that will not be much of a contribution.
If forces are deployed to ensure the peace, they will not be faced merely with the situation of peacekeepers after a conventional war that are required to monitor a demilitarized zone. They will have to deal with the possibility of terrorism, perhaps a low-grade civil war on the Palestinian side and the infiltration of arms by those who don't support the peace agreement — circumstances not unlike those in Lebanon, Syria and the Sinai, where peacekeeping has become so ineffective.
A better solution, rather than relying on foreign troops, would be close cooperation by Israeli and Palestinian security forces in order to provide their own guarantees. But that imagines a world in which the grievances of the past are overcome and there is a peace agreement that two states are willing to uphold. Nonetheless, as the coordination and joint operations of Israeli and Egyptian forces in the Sinai demonstrate, even former enemies can get along if national security is at stake.
1 "United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea," United Nations, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/past/unmee/.
2 Kassahun Checole, "Heavy Fighting Reported on Ethiopian Border with Eritrea," Graphic Online, June 22, 2016, http://www.graphic.com.gh/features/heavy-fighting-reported-on-ethiopian….
3 "List of Peacekeeping Operations 1948-2013," United Nations, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/documents/operationslist.pdf.
4 Phoebe Greenwood, "Austria to Withdraw Golan Heights Peacekeepers over Syrian Fighting," The Guardian, June 6, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/syrian-golan-crossing-isr….
5 Adiv Sterman, "UN Evacuates All Troops from Golan as Syria Fighting Worsens," Times of Israel, http://www.timesofisrael.com/un-troops-leave-syrian-golan-amid-heavy-fi….
6 A fuller description of this officer and his job, as well as a number of the other points in this article, is contained in a piece that I wrote for Foreign Affairs: Dennis Jett, "A Mission Impossible on Israel's Frontiers," Foreign Affairs, July 11, 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2016-07-11/mission-impos….
7 "United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon," United Nations, http://unifil.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?tabid=11552&ctl=Details&mid=1….
8 Anne Bernard, "Hezbollah's Role in Syria War Shakes the Lebanese," New York Times, May 20, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/world/middleeast/syria-developments.h….
9 Jonathan Masters and Zachary Laub, "Hezbollah (a.k.a. Hizbollah, Hizbu'llah)," Council on Foreign Relations, last modified January 3, 2014, http://www.cfr.org/lebanon/hezbollah-k-hizbollah-hizbullah/p9155.
10 Joseph Bahout, "The Unraveling of Lebanon's Taif Agreement: Limits of Sect-Based Power Sharing," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 16, 2016, http://carnegieendowment.org/2016/05/16/unraveling-of-lebanon-s-taif-ag….
11 Carine Torbey, "Lebanon: Will New President End Political Crisis?" BBC News, October 31, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37821698.
12 "UN Documents for Lebanon," Security Council Report, last modified 2016, http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/lebanon/.
13 "Suffering Heavy Losses in Syria, Hezbollah Entices New Recruits with Money and Perks," Haaretz, December 19, 2015, http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/1.692632; and "United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon," United Nations, http://unifil.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?tabid=11559&language=en-US.
14 Joshua Levitt, "IDF Says Hezbollah Weapons Cache Exceeds 60,000 Rockets, All Israel in Range," The Algemeiner, July 12, 2013, http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/07/12/idf-says-hezbollah-cache-exceeds-6…; and Hanan Greenberg, "Video: Blast at Hezbollah Arms Cache," Ynetnews, May 9, 2010, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3949769,00.html.
15 Louis Charbonneau, "Hezbollah Arms Cache Violated U.N. Embargo: U.S.," Reuters, July 23, 2009, http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-un-usa-idUKTRE56M6UV20090723.
16 Amos Harel, "Israel's Military Now Sees Hezbollah as an Army in Every Sense," Haaretz, April 3, 2016, http://www.haaretz.com/misc/iphone-article/1.706956.
17 Author interview with a retired Israeli general.
18 Author interview.
19 Emma Graham-Harrison, "How Sinai Became a Magnet for Terror," The Guardian, November 7, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/08/sinai-magnet-for-terror.
20 Al-Monitor Sina Muhabiri, "Egyptian Army Struggles to Address Terrorism in Sinai," Al-Monitor, February 11, 2015, www.al-monitor.com/pulse/tr/originals/2015/02/sinai-egypt-army-failure-….
21 Jack Khoury, "At Least 50 Egyptian Soldiers Killed in Sinai Terror Attacks," Haaretz, July 1, 2015, http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/1.663864; and Yossi Melman, "Observer Force in Sinai Increasingly under Threat of ISIS," Jerusalem Post, October 4, 2015, http://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/NECESSARY-BUFFER-415722.
22 "U.S. Ready to Replace 'Hundreds' of MFO Troops in Sinai with Remote Monitoring Systems," Daily News Egypt, April 13, 2016, http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2016/04/13/us-ready-to-replace-hundreds-o….
23 George Mikhail, "Egyptian MP Says Forcing Sinai Residents to Move Will Only Worsen Terrorism," Al-Monitor, April 27, 2016, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/04/egypt-north-sinai-par….
24 Khalid Hassan, "Will Sisi Fulfill His 'Sinai Promise'?" Al-Monitor, April 24, 2016, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/04/egypt-sinai-developme….
25 Author interview.
26 David Wainer, Jonathan Ferzinger and Ahmed Feteha, "Old Mideast Foes Unite over Gas Deals and Fighting Militants," Bloomberg, July 10, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-10/old-middle-east-foes-….
27 "UN Peacekeeping Operations Fact Sheet," United Nations, last modified April 30, 2016, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/documents/bnote0416.pdf.
28 "Scale of Assessments for the Apportionment of the Expenses of the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations," General Assembly of the United Nations, December 27, 2012, http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/67/224/Add.1.
29 "Report of the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations," General Assembly of the United Nations, April 1, 2014, http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-….
30 Author interview.
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