About Me
- Name: Sagepaper
- Location: United States
An only child and service-brat, I was born in Panama. We lived on Indian Reservations when I was two to four-and-a-half -- crucial years for social development. Culturally, I am a mixed-up White Eyes from Mescalero. I began college at fifteen, enjoying a luxurious seven years of rigorous liberal arts education. Since graduating with a B.A. in Psychology, I have avidly read non-fiction, adding enormously to my formal education. Disabled by Tourette's Syndrome and other conditions, I live in Atlanta's suburbia. My father and husband are both physicians, and share a consulting business. (I am very proud of what they do, but I mention their occupations because people cannot seem to move to another small-talk topic if I simply say I am disabled. They must be told an occupation, and will start asking about family members to get one.)
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Herein find essays, musings, Haiku, and other traditional poetry.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
UN Peacekeepers Need a "USO" of Their Own
It's well-known that UN peacekeeping missions have been underfunded, undermanned, and underequipped. Still, I had no idea of the magnitude of the problem before beginning Shake Hands With the Devil. At one point, Dallaire had not received comprehensive information from the Demilitarized Zone for almost a week. He forwarded a demand for an immediate, full written report on the situation. He received a call from the DMZ informing him that they had neither paper nor pencils, and were unable to give a written report.
There were many, many other equipment problems. Dallaire was informed that the UN was a "pull" system, rather than a "push" system, as he was accustomed to dealing with in NATO. In NATO, if you ask for a battalion, you get the men, the weapons, the encampment gear, the rations, the vehicles, the whole "package." With the UN, you had to request every single thing you wanted, and request it in such a way that you would get something functional. If you needed 150 flashlights for your men, you had better request bulbs and batteries, too.
The American USO did far more for US troops than the UN Peacekeepers would need to raise them from impotent to effective. The Bangladeshi forces arrived with their uniforms on their backs, their personal weapons, and their kits. They didn't even have canvas for their own tents. Feeding and housing them became a drain on their already thinly operational logistics system. It would not even have taken the luxuries of a C.A.R.E. package for each of the 400 Bangladeshi's to help out immensely.
It seems to me that the little things that weigh-down a peacekeeping mission could be taken care of outside of the UN's grinding bureaucracy. Existing humanitarian organizations might be able to help. In Rwanda, at least, the NGO's would not work with UNAMIR at all. Reportedly, they viewed the UN peacekeepers as just another armed belligerent party. I guess the sort of people who commit their lives to humanitarian aid are the sort who think "government" anything is evil, and there is no such thing as a good soldier (until they need an armed escort out of an area they had been told to evacuate weeks ago).
There probably needs to be a new international organization to try to help support UN Peacekeeping Soldiers. The risk I see in that is that the UN will come to rely on that new organization as a source of equipment, and will send forth even more poorly equipped soldiers. Dealing with the UN is a difficult problem. I will give it some further thought as I read more, and some further commentary. Sadly, these days I'm not up to starting a new international NGO from scratch.
I have only a little more information on shamanism. This report does not include the type of information needed to make much of it: the Interehamwe began showing up at crowded events. At first the UNAMIR folks thought they were clowns for the way they dressed and acted. Evidently they wore camouflage clothes with strange symbols on them painted in the colors of the Rwandan flag. It soon became evident that they were not comical, as violence always followed closely on their heals. They performed some sort of antics that looked clown-like, and wielded machettes and woodcarvings of AK-47's.
I wish Dallaire could have been better able to identify the symbols on their clothes and to describe in greater detail what they did that looked like clowning around. It's a useful lead, though. Perhaps I can find another source describing the pre-genocide public appearances of the Interehamwe. Until reading this account, I was unaware that they had been a public presence before exploding on the scene, fully trained and armed, ready to cross-off all names on a deathlist when the word was given.
I'm not halfway through the book yet. It's about 550 pages. I'm definitely hooked, though. You, my readers, might have to endure a few more posts about the book. Some of what I am writing here probably does not make sense without a background on the basics of the genocide. If you can point to my most bothersome omissions, I will try to offer more detailed information.
There were many, many other equipment problems. Dallaire was informed that the UN was a "pull" system, rather than a "push" system, as he was accustomed to dealing with in NATO. In NATO, if you ask for a battalion, you get the men, the weapons, the encampment gear, the rations, the vehicles, the whole "package." With the UN, you had to request every single thing you wanted, and request it in such a way that you would get something functional. If you needed 150 flashlights for your men, you had better request bulbs and batteries, too.
The American USO did far more for US troops than the UN Peacekeepers would need to raise them from impotent to effective. The Bangladeshi forces arrived with their uniforms on their backs, their personal weapons, and their kits. They didn't even have canvas for their own tents. Feeding and housing them became a drain on their already thinly operational logistics system. It would not even have taken the luxuries of a C.A.R.E. package for each of the 400 Bangladeshi's to help out immensely.
It seems to me that the little things that weigh-down a peacekeeping mission could be taken care of outside of the UN's grinding bureaucracy. Existing humanitarian organizations might be able to help. In Rwanda, at least, the NGO's would not work with UNAMIR at all. Reportedly, they viewed the UN peacekeepers as just another armed belligerent party. I guess the sort of people who commit their lives to humanitarian aid are the sort who think "government" anything is evil, and there is no such thing as a good soldier (until they need an armed escort out of an area they had been told to evacuate weeks ago).
There probably needs to be a new international organization to try to help support UN Peacekeeping Soldiers. The risk I see in that is that the UN will come to rely on that new organization as a source of equipment, and will send forth even more poorly equipped soldiers. Dealing with the UN is a difficult problem. I will give it some further thought as I read more, and some further commentary. Sadly, these days I'm not up to starting a new international NGO from scratch.
I have only a little more information on shamanism. This report does not include the type of information needed to make much of it: the Interehamwe began showing up at crowded events. At first the UNAMIR folks thought they were clowns for the way they dressed and acted. Evidently they wore camouflage clothes with strange symbols on them painted in the colors of the Rwandan flag. It soon became evident that they were not comical, as violence always followed closely on their heals. They performed some sort of antics that looked clown-like, and wielded machettes and woodcarvings of AK-47's.
I wish Dallaire could have been better able to identify the symbols on their clothes and to describe in greater detail what they did that looked like clowning around. It's a useful lead, though. Perhaps I can find another source describing the pre-genocide public appearances of the Interehamwe. Until reading this account, I was unaware that they had been a public presence before exploding on the scene, fully trained and armed, ready to cross-off all names on a deathlist when the word was given.
I'm not halfway through the book yet. It's about 550 pages. I'm definitely hooked, though. You, my readers, might have to endure a few more posts about the book. Some of what I am writing here probably does not make sense without a background on the basics of the genocide. If you can point to my most bothersome omissions, I will try to offer more detailed information.
Posted by: Sagepaper / 11:11 PM 
