Asia and Africa dwarf Europe and America in peacekeeping missions

How the US, the UK and France spend most of their forces in private wars

After several weeks of war in Mali, the United Nations has decided to discuss the possibility of sending a contingent of peacekeepers to the African country. France, which has so far led the offensive, has been willing to actively participate in a hypothetical multinational force whose mission would be to keep the peace in the region.

That is not the norm. According to the latest UN report on peacekeeping missions, none of the G8 countries are among the top contributors of personnel. They are the biggest money donors, as several of them must endow an extra amount for being on the UN Security Council -which approves and oversees all missions. But soldiers from other countries, mainly from Africa and Asia, are the ones that put their lives at risk on the ground.

The first strong economy on the list appears at number 11 and it is Brazil, which contributes nearly 2,200 soldiers. In the 15^th position we find the first member of the Security Council (China, contributing 1,869 soldiers). We need to dig until the 20^th position to find the first member of the G8, Italy (1,127 soldiers). Behind the Italians are France in the 26^th (968 soldiers) and way behind the United Kingdom in 45^th place (283 soldiers) and the U.S. in 57^th place (128 soldiers).

One of the main reasons for the lack of Western troops as peacekeepers at the UN is that the organization always tries to implement local solutions to local problems. For example, most of the peacekeepers in Somalia right now are African, while in the missions from the 90’s and 2000’s in the Balkans, European troops were the core of the contingent.

Photo: AP

However Pakistan and Bangladesh, the two biggest net contributors for armed personnel, are present far away from their area of ​​influence. More precisely they are present in Africa -in the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Darfur (Sudan) and Congo- despite having a serious problem close to home with neighboring Afghanistan and tensions with India (another top contributor). Nepal, also in the top 10, has nearly a quarter of its troops in Lebanon, a country with which it shares no cultural, religious or historical ties or even a similar climate.

Meanwhile, European countries seem to have a predilection for the Middle East. 98% of Italian troops at the UN, 97% of Spain’s, 91% of France’s and 77% of Germany’s are in the UNIFIL mission in Lebanon. 97% of British blue berets are deployed in Cyprus. On the other hand, the Americans have 67% of their staff in Haiti.

These figures contrast with the number of troops that all these countries have deployed in Afghanistan. Even after sending home 33,000 soldiers in 2011, the U.S. has 68,000 troops still on Afghan soil, two thirds of the total of peacekeepers deployed by the UN worldwide.

France has deployed around 2,500 troops in Mali. Along with more than the 500 it has in Afghanistan, they make a total of three times the number of boots that the country dedicates to peacekeeping missions. Both Mali and Afghanistan are considered scenarios on the global war on terror against al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

In fact, the countries with the largest contingents in the so-called war on terror (the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain), have a total of about 90,000 soldiers fighting in a frontline that stretches from Afghanistan to Mali and Somalia. That number does not include some personnel that do not appear on the books, as the pilots of American drones. Furthermore, none of these operations is supported by the UN, but by NATO.

The total number of UN peacekeepers is a similar figure of 94,090. However, between the six countries mentioned before (the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain) they only add 3,400 soldiers to the UN-led operations -less than 3.5% of the total. They provide, however, 59% of the funds for peacekeeping missions, without which none of these operations would be possible. A formula -the world powers pay the bill; let others do the fighting- reminiscent of certain aspects of the theory of dependency and colonialism.

In the event that finally a UN mission to Mali is approved, and providing France finally gets a prominent place, it would be a significant change of policy for the big countries. France would become the only country that currently forms part of the G8, the UN Security Council and a significant contributor of troops to the UN.