 In this first of our conversation series, I will be talking to Alan Doss and I'll be talking about his book, A Peacekeeping in Africa, learning from UN intervention in other people's wars. Alan Doss is a very experienced peacekeeper and for the past or the last 10 years of his career as a UN official, he served in senior leadership positions at the very front lines of United Nations peacekeeping. First in Sierra Leone as Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General, then he moved on to Cote d'Ovoire also as a Deputy SRSG before he took charge of the 15,000 strong operation in Liberia and eventually moving on to the most difficult and challenging mission of all the UN operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo where he was in charge and head of mission from 2007 to 2010. And in the course of this conversation we'll be touching on a number of issues that we'll be getting back to throughout the course and to which we will no doubt refer later. So please sit back and enjoy. Thank you. Alan, the subject of your book, A Peacekeeping in Africa, covers of course 10 years your work in the field of peacekeeping. But I wanted to start with your UN career as a whole and the fact that you moved from the development side of the United Nations activities into peacekeeping at a particularly interesting time in 99 and 2000. And I wonder whether you could reflect or tell us a little bit about the reasons and why you moved into peacekeeping or why Kofi Annan asked you to move into peacekeeping and whether having been in the development field gave you an added perspective on the challenges in the field. What were the triggers? Why did you move as it were from that side of the UN system into the peace and security, particularly peacekeeping? Well, I can't say it was all deliberately planned and worked out like much of my life and professional career. It was, it was, it happened. An opportunity came up and I thought this would be really interesting. I mean, prior to that, as you said, that side worked pretty much on the development side with the UN development program, UNDP in variety of countries in Africa and Asia, plus policy assignments in New York and Geneva and also some humanitarian work, notably when I was in Thailand working on the Cambodian refugee issues. But then, you know, at the end throughout the 90s, increasingly, partly because of, as you know, the space created by the end of the Cold War, the UN became much more engaged in a broader range of issues which went beyond the traditional development, which was essentially technical economic and increasingly got into the whole issues of governance and good governance and how to deal with crisis. And of course, it coincided, not what it wasn't coincidence, but it coincided with the, with the eruption of a variety of conflicts post Cold War in Africa, in particular, and increasingly we saw that there wasn't this strict demarcation between what was development, what was humanitarian and what was issues of peace and security. But this in turn, with the feeling of all these big missions, it created all kinds of tensions within the UN and the UN system in terms of who does what, who has primacy of position and so forth. And at the time I was in New York, I was then heading up as part of the reform effort that the Khufyan had started just after he became Secretary General, the aim of which one of the principle aims of which was to get the UN to work better together and not to have these silos, which had grown increasingly problematic as we moved into these areas of governance and rights and moved out of the purely tachnocratic approaches to development. And it came to a head in a way in Sierra Leone in 1999 and then into 2000 where the UN had fielded a multi-dimensional mission, which included not just peacekeepers, but administrators, development people, human rights especially. And that mission went badly astray, partly because the peace agreement was broken, there was hostage-taking and the mission really tottered on the brink of collapse. And there were concerns that this was again a rerun of what had happened in Sebranica, what had happened in Rwanda, what had happened in Somalia. The SG went himself, Kofi went himself, went to see the situation. The mission was able to hold its ground. It got a lot of support from the UK, which fielded a mechanized brigade. David Richards, Lord David Richards now, was the commander as a young brigadier. And the situation was stabilized. But out of that, and his visit in particular to Monrovia, it seemed to once again, seemed to, it did raise this issue of how come the UN is so fragmented. And the UN in Sierra Leone was, one part of the UN was against the other part. There were all kinds of claims of incompetence and lack of communication. And part of that was true. So he was determined that he, as part of his reform program, he wanted to pull it all together, stop having these multiple UNs, all quarreling with each other, which cast a lot of doubt about the effectiveness of the UN and certainly was not well seen by the Security Council members or indeed by major donors to the development side. So he created this post I was asked to take it on, which was an effort to bring together the development, humanitarian and peacekeeping political side, not in a sense of one would give orders to the other, but there could be more cohesion, there'd be more coherence between what we were trying to do and frankly less of the effort to pull the blanket to one particular side of the bed. So that's how it happened. I have, as I said, I was in New York. I was handling some of these issues at the headquarters level. And some of that I knew very well, who was the then Assistant Secretary General in the peacekeeping department, Hedy Anaby, who I got to know during my days involved in the Cambodia crisis, a decade before when he was also involved in putting together the mission that actually helped end the war in Cambodia. He asked me whether I'd be interested in going. And as I said in the book, after asking the one person who counted and all of that, my wife, I agreed to go and try it out. It was the first time that it started. The then head of UNDP was very keen on this, Mark Malik Brown, now Lord Malik Brown. He pushed this. He got it through. There are a lot of concerns, particularly about the humanitarian side of the UN, UNICEF, WFP, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and so forth. But Mark, I must say, was the one who really made sure, because these things wouldn't have worked and didn't work. And I've made that point in the book without, however, when you get on with your colleagues in the field, if you don't have that headquarters backing, if you don't have some sense of direction and coherence from the top, it won't work. And I have that both from the Secretary General, his staff, and particularly from, as you say, Mark Malik Brown, who held the fort at headquarters. I want to come back to Sir Adon in a minute, because there are so many interesting observations you make about your experiences there in the book. But I just want to stay for one more second on your experience in the field of development beforehand, and ask whether in particular your experience of conflict on the African continent or something you could usefully bring with you. I'm thinking particularly of your, on the paper, fascinating three-year stint as a UN resident coordinator in Zaire. Because the sense of continuity, particularly in the DRC about the way the political system was working is quite powerful. So one would have thought, if you were hanging around as it were with Mobuto in the 80s, you would have a rough sense of how the system, our political system, to some extent worked to sort of infamous system D. Yeah, the difference was that it up until basically the, as I say, the early 90s, and the new wave of not just a peacekeeping, but a sense that the UN was more free to work on issues concerning politics, governance, and so forth. Up to that point, and particularly in, I remember in Zaire, we were very much constrained, we were very much involved in trying to improve the economic system, working with the World Bank and the IMF, but we weren't challenging the fundamentals of national governance. But we could see that without that, without changes in society, without above all raining in the the kleptocratic, if you will, governance of the Mobuto regime, we weren't going to get very far because all the progress we could make in the economic area was being lost through poor governance, massive corruption, waste. And we were rather constrained with that. And again, in the book, I mentioned this, that when Pérez de Quer came on a state official visit to the Zaire at the time, we met with Mobuto and his ministers. And certainly with Mobuto, there was no talk about really reform and all those sorts of things. Even though Congo was already on its descent, the economy was beginning, was really beginning to fall apart. And that accelerated and eventually precipitated his departure, in effect, his loss of power. But at the time, we didn't get into those sorts of things. In fact, the evidence of the folly was all around us. We went to his palace in Baranite and so forth. But we were much more concerned and understandably in a way, the Secretary General, with how and the role that Zaire as it was. And Mobuto was still a towering figure in Africa, could help with issues like South Sudan, with issues about ending of apartheid in South Africa, the war in Namibia and in Angola, which Mobuto was implicated via his, we know, he was used by one and the other and he used them. So we didn't really get into that. So increasingly we saw this and this was being discussed. But it was very much within a certain framework. And our approach was more technical, technical, how can we improve, I remember we did have a discussion, how to improve the civil service? Yes. But we never asked the question, how did the civil service get into this situation in the first place? How do we improve the state state industry without raising issues about how all those state industries have been ruined by exploitation, corruption, and so so we kind of, and this is why of course much of that work was eventually was not entirely successful or successful full stop because we were dealing with the symptoms and not the causes. And that's where we changed shifted, I think, more and more, particularly in the peacekeeping operations, where we had to deal with these fundamental political, the fundamentally political dysfunction of the state. Which brings me to Sierra Leone, where of course you deployed as the deputy's heresy with special responsibility for issues of governance and stabilization. And it's interesting you mentioned earlier about this that, you know, the British were there and they helped bring, you know, an end to a particular phase of the conflict. But as one Brit has admitted, the role of the British of course in bringing the war to end is one that improves with telling, especially as other operations haven't gone that well. And what I think you make very clear in the book, and I can quote it here, I think it is important, and I read from your book that the war in Sierra Leone was not ended by a single diplomatic master stroke or military intervention, but rather by an accumulation of decisions, events and incidents, some of which were fortuitous. And I think that's a very interesting reflection on the way in which many of these civil wars end and how you precede stabilization. But I wonder if you are sort of, if you have to put your finger on it and you do to some extent in the book, what are the sort of critical elements in the case of Sierra Leone that made it possible to build some kind of stability and that you was able to exploit and that you were able to exploit? Well, it's always a combination of things. It was very clear, I think, that the, basically, the capture and imprisonment of Foddy Sanko was very important to mention. Because Sanko, although in many ways a, you know, a pretty dreadful character, he was nevertheless, as is often the case, able to mobilize and retain the loyalty of several thousand fighters. And as long as he remained on the scene, it would have been very difficult for the government to fully get control, just like in Liberia with Charles Taylor. It's very interesting, the study of these characters, because in the gradual progressive deconstruction of the state that happened in numerous African countries, but particularly in Syria or Liberia, in these circumstances, these charismatic, charismatic rather ruthless figures emerge. And the outside world doesn't really know how to deal with them always, you know. And so their removal from the scene was really important. But it was a combination of things, how they were removed. I think why the British involvement after the disaster of the summer of 2000 and 2000 was to provide an immediate stiffener. But they never moved outside of the Lungi Peninsula, which is essentially, but that was good. It sort of gave the UN breathing room, the regroup, to make some changes. Frankly, change force field commanders, force commander, reinforce and put a little bit, a little bit, the staff and so forth. So that's what it was, but it, and that was critical at that moment. And then the implication that the UK made it clear that they would remain as an over the horizon force, if need be. But it wasn't the Brits who went into the Diamond District, it was first to believe it on a Bangladeshi unit, and then was followed up by a good tough Pakistani brigade that moved in there and really did a good job. So, I mean, you have these moments, pivotal moments, where, and it was touch and go. There was talk about withdrawing the mission. I know that because Bernard Nie, who was the undersecretary general, and I quote him in the book actually, I refer to him, told me personally on a recount this, that in New York there was really serious discussion about whether they should pull out. Bernard says that he was one of those who, after a visit to Sierra Leone in the middle of the crisis, went back and argued with, with, I went to the secretary, well, Tom Coffey that he should not, they should not, they should stand firm. The other dimension of this, which is also very important from the British perspective, was Jeremy Greenstock. Jeremy in New York was a very, very effective permanent representative, as you know, very articulate, very committed. And he also rallied the council to stay the course. There wasn't a cut and run. And that almost happened, I think. So between them and with Coffey's decision to stay the course, they were able to, to pull this together, stop it and make sure the RUF knew that they couldn't simply once again overrun Freetown, as they'd done twice before with disastrous consequences for the population. So I think you bring all these elements together. And as I list them in the book, I mean, Tejan Kamba, unlike, let's say, Taylor in Libya, was a very sympathetic character. He spoke the language that people wanted to hear. Frankly, he was educated, including in Aberystwyth. He did a law degree. So I mean, and that is very important, you know, to that sort of sense of, not that he's one of us, but that he spoke the language that was understood. So he created a sympathy. The other element was, frankly, also Tony Blair. And you know the Blair connection with Sierra Leone. His father had lectured at Furo Bay. And he wanted to, an interesting case of hubris, I think, because I think you learned the lessons of quick and important intervention in Sierra Leone and it worked. Did this set him up for later failure? I don't know, his biographers will decide that, I suppose. But nevertheless, it was the right thing to do at the right time. And it was a bold move. And I often wonder, as I've said in the book, if the Tories had won that election, and not Tony Blair, I just wonder if they would have been the same level of commitment. I'm not sure. I really am not sure. Plus the backing, again, have to say, I recount some some anecdotes there in the book, again, Clare Short and Robin Cook. So you have these elements that came together, fortuitous, serendipity, if you wish. But that's how things end sometimes. And a number of the conflicts where I've been involved, that element, you know, you can plan as much as you like. But there are elements there, the personal elements, fortuitous elements, that the things happen. And of course, what you have to be ready to take the opportunities that arise to make headway. So I can't claim that it was all planned beautifully out. And no, it happened. We chose opportunities and came back from really it was a disaster in 2002. Nobody thought in 2002, that within two years or so, we would have, you know, got to a peace deal, disarmed largely the IUF, and began, you know, a restoration of state authority process. I think what you've said and what you write about, I mean, need all four of those major missions you were part of, of course, raises the issue of seizing opportunities as they arise, and also dealing with a variety of different characters. And I wonder whether one sort of thematic issue which you cover throughout the book, which is raised by this, of course, is the whole issue of what approach you take to transitional justice, and how to deal with people that have a distinctly dodgy war record. I mean, as I think I mentioned in my review of your book, I think Liberia is very, very interesting because the national transitional government of Liberia paradoxically was an absolute disaster those two years in terms of economic reconstruction of a country, because they were all essentially it was a kind of war lords feast. But that brought critical sort of time because you had put in the clause that they had to leave after those two years. And I wonder whether what is it possible, how prescriptive can one be about the approach to transitional justice in these kinds of settings? I mean, the lower my piece of court is interesting in the sense that you could argue you were set up for disaster sooner or later by entering into that kind of agreement with very dodgy characters with other people you have to deal with. And as you said, some of these you might not, they might not be likable characters, but they might hold the reins of power, and they might be charismatic, and they might need to bring them on board. What sort of dilemmas does that present for you as a as a head of mission? Yeah. Well, in all the missions, it presented these difficulties, frankly, and some it eventually worked out others, not so well. Yeah, I mean, you have to deal with the deck of you with the cards that adult you. And, for example, in Sierra Leone, I have no written proof of this, but I know that some assurances were given to the IUF leadership that they would get amnesty. They had seen what had happened at Lome, where even though the Secretary General of the Instructed is representative to the talks, I think it was O'Kello at the time, to enter a reserve about not granting amnesty, that had always been the practice. And some would argue it should still be there. And I do think that the IUF, in fact, I know, were promised certain advantages, scholarships abroad, that sort of stuff, if they, if they sort of basically went along with things. That, of course, would have appalled those who would argue that, you know, justice had to be done, and that people have been involved in truly horrendous, horrendous activities needed to be brought to brought to justice. The problem arises is when you then find yourself dependent on some of these people to make things work. And that was Liberia par exonance. You know, Charles Taylor was not tried and found guilty for what he did in Liberia, or he's some pretty awful things there. It's what he did in, or was said to have approved, I should say, because it was the court that decided to be involved in atrocities in Liberia. The same, although he was subsequently acquitted, Bemba in the Congo. It wasn't what he did in the Congo, but what he was first alleged to have done in the Central African Republic. So there were other people in Liberia who, frankly, certainly could have been put on trial if there had been a similar tribunal as there was for Sierra Leone. A decision was made, excuse me, not to go down that route, talking too much, and not to go down that route. And it was Echoos, I think was keen, because Echoos was largely in the driver's seat for the Accra Accord. I think they had decided that they wouldn't go down that road. And so people who probably should have gone to Accord didn't go to Accord. We had a bit of both in both Cote d'Ivoire and then in the Congo. But in all cases, it was largely, let's be honest, it was the losers who went to the court. And this is troubling. And today in Cote d'Ivoire, it is still consequences of that, because after the President Muattara and the support of the FN, one pound, based on an election that was certified by the UN, nobody from the government side was indicted and sent off to the Hague. And that has left a lingering problem, which is again coming to the fore and has come to the fore in Cote d'Ivoire. So the problem is that if you go for selective transition justice, this is the full mark. And does transitional justice have to be about courts or their alternatives? Columbia, as you may know, outside of Miami, thinks he may experience, but it wasn't involved there with Coffey in the run up to the agreement that ended the war in Columbia and met with the FARC in Cuba with Coffey to explain that transitional justice couldn't be avoided. It wasn't a popular message, but Coffey gave it to them. But what they did do was come up with a formula, which certain elements in Columbia denounced, but which wasn't strictly a formal court process. But it also was more than just a reconciliation process. So I think we have to keep looking at this and seeing how we can manage it. But it does raise issues about who is to be tried and how are they to be tried. And let's face it, if you go back to Nuremberg, that was a very selective court as well. And it was very much, of course, a winners court. But not only Nuremberg itself, which just tried, as you know, as a very small fraction of those considered to be responsible, but then there were national war crimes tribunals, which were authorized by the United Nations, which were conducted by national judges, but by and large only judged those who were considered to be collaborators of the occupying powers. So, you know, this is an issue that's not new. And I think it will continue whenever you decide to go for formal judicial processes as part of that broader set of elements that we call transitional justice. You will face this dilemma. You know, I still remember one of the warlords who came to see me after the, after the, I think it was General Peanut buttocks, I think it was Norm Begea was. And he came to see me and he was, he was on the list of the sanctions list, the UN sanctions list. And he was anxious to get off it. He'd been elected a senator in the first post war elections that we had overseen. He came to say, to plead with me to try to get him off the, off the list. I said, well, look, you know, it's not impossible, but you know, basically you've got to, as I had to say to, to a number of them, you know, including Prince Johnson, you have to be save yourself. You have to be seen now to really build peace and not just talk about it and then run off the bush and raise the flag of rebellion again. So he promised me solemnly to do this. And then he said to me, I really don't understand, you know, why I'm on this list. I did everything for them. I said, what do you mean everything for them? He said, yes, he said, I work very closely with the CIA. So I thought, dear God, I mean, who have we been employing? Who are they? That's why it's not so easy. I didn't put that thing in the book. I don't think off the record for you, Matt, but anyway, but I mean, it was illustrative of the dilemmas you're writing to. Who's doing what to whom? Who was working with whom? It isn't so straightforward as we would believe. Absolutely. And one of the things that certainly our students will be covering in the course of the year is the importance of understanding the, you know, the political economies conflicts and the informal power structures at work. And if you don't engage with those informal power structures, you are as you would have, as you write in the book, I mean, you might be sort of groping in the dark in terms of influence and pressure points. And that seems to be a very real challenge. Yeah, that was particularly in the Eastern Congo. I mean, quite frankly, until, you know, the war economy is a form of perverse incentive. And the, if you finally get control of naturalism, most of those people who are involved in, in, especially the Eastern Congo, the Keavos and Orient, but also in in Katanga, didn't have much incentive to end the war, just like the RUF had no real incentive to end the war in in Sierra Leone because they had their supply of diamonds and few other things. So what are the incentives we could offer? You know, talk about peace, reconciliation, kumbaya. These are hard-nosed people. And they want to know, and that applies all the way down the chain, by the way. It's not just, you know, warlords and corrupt commanders and politicians who've got their, their nose in the trough. It also applies to people who are down in those gravel pits in Sierra Leone, trying to sluice some diamond waste in the Eastern Congo, coltons of anything that, because there's nothing else. That's it. We talk of the war economies if it's something special, but it is the economy. And if we don't understand it and how it, how it works, and it covers everything, you know, about groups thriving on the smuggling of marijuana, shark hole trading. That was one of the, the, the FDLR monopolies they managed to get the hold on. So until you can, and to get hold of that, and to manage that, you need a strong state and you need a pretty good security set down, the forces that can manage it, but not themselves, which is what's happened a lot in the past in places like Liberia and Sierra Leone themselves and in the Eastern Congo become part of the problem. So it always goes back to this issue of, you know, who's running the state for whose benefit and how are they managing it? And that's the fundamental weakness. And, and development, if you wait just to go back to where I started, I think we've come to realize that development is very much about that as well, that the sort of peace development humanitarian at the end of the day, that cohesion, that coherence between the, when you start a failing one area, you will fail in others. We have already referred to Congo a few times now, and I want to, to spend a little bit of time on that because you say that indeed you mentioned your book at your, your chapters on the Kiwis is in a way the heart of the book, because it sort of crystallizes from any of these issues. But, but as an introduction into that, I, you know, one of the extraordinary things about your 10 years is that they coincide almost perfectly with the rise of protection of civilians as a, as a major focus of you in operations. Indeed, the Sierra Leone mission in 1999 is the first one where there's an explicit authorization to focus on that. And then of course it acquires a kind of momentum as you, as, as, as just how difficult it is to do, it becomes clearer. And, and I wonder whether you could reflect perhaps just in, by way of introduction to the whole sort of protection of civilians agenda, how you sitting in the field was sort of caught between the pressures coming from international community, from the security council, and, and having to balance that against the whole set of other tasks that you were given to do. And when, you know, how did this creep up on you, the centrality of that particular mission, and what were the challenges you faced in doing so? Yeah, the word creep is, is right here because even though it was in that for the first reason, the resolution for Unamsil and came after the 1999 report that the Secretary General presented on Corriana on protection of civilians, and of course the Brahimi report. And these are all parts of the, of the jigsaw so to speak. Actually in Sierra Leone, it was very much there because of the atrocities committed against the civilian population, you know, the, the, but, and by the way, it wasn't just the IUF. It was also the, the government forces, the, the SLA initially that was also involved in this. So it, that it became a, it became an issue in Sierra Leone because of those years that had gone when these atrocities were widely reported. And, you know, together with attacks on particularly women, rape, slave, basically sex slaves and, and although the, the, the horrendous things that happened there. But the mission itself, because by, we got to the point where the war then, when we found the solution to begin to wind the war down, it began to retreat as an issue. Liberia, we were also, again, had gone through horrendous, horrendous abuses. But again, by the time we got through the ACRA agreement and then the gradual winding down, it was still an issue, but it was lowering its profile because we were able to extend and control. These were also, and I think it's very important, relatively troop to problem ratios were much, much better in Sierra Leone and Liberia. And therefore the presence of UN forces was, was much more visible. And, and then it certainly was to be the case, as I say, in the Congo. Cote d'Ivoire was one where when I arrived, protection of civilians was becoming a bigger issue because they'd been attacks on, on civilians by both sides, actually. And so that began to be much more of the focus of that mission. But the one where it really took off was in, is it was in the Congo. That was, I think, due to a number of things, the fact that people were being slaughtered, displaced, and on all the other things that were happening. The massive violation of human rights that had gone on for not just a year or two, but had gone on throughout the, the first and then the second Congo wars, you know, the, the terrible bloodletting, the millions who died directly or indirectly. The reason it acquired, I think the prominence it did, was because, increasingly, that became a center of interest. International NGOs, international community, various groups began to coalesce, much of it driven, I have to say, and rightly so, by the lobbies, humanitarian lobbies, human rights lobbies, focusing especially on what was happening to women and girls. I recount there that in the book, when I was in Paris, just before I took up my post, I'd gone to Paris to talk to the French. And first question I had from the then head of the IO department in the K-Gosse, was, you have the largest peacekeeping mission in the world. Why are this the mission not dealing with and controlling sexual exploitation abuse in the East and Congo? And that was a question I then, it became, frankly, so that was, was in a way, generated, added a face to the protection of civilians issue, because you talk about protection of civilians, and it's sort of rather amorphous. But then you start showing pictures of Pansy Hospital, where Dr. Mukwega is, and Heel Africa in Goma, and, you know, you start seeing what happens to these two women and girls. And that adds a certain reality. And that's what helped to change, I think, the global perception. Although it was a subset of a much bigger issue that we were having to deal with. But these elements all came together, I think, in the Congo in a way that became much more visible. It was an issue for the age, if you will. And I think the international attention, particularly through the human rights groups and so forth, became, and the council took it on board. It didn't, fortunately, get lost in sovereignty issues. It didn't get lost in Cold War divides. You know, people were willing to speak out about it. And, you know, whereas before much of this had been, even though things were happening, it got subsumed into either Cold War rivalries, or afterwards, particularly in the case of the Eastern Congo, the whole reaction to what had happened in Rwanda. Because, as we know, and the mapping project showed, and it's highly controversial, contentious, very contentious, I know, with the Rwandan authorities, but clearly the invasion of Eastern, then still Eastern Zaire created massive, massive casualties. And there were atrocities on a large scale, committed by the Rwandan forces, just as there had been, you know, when Rwanda itself, maybe not of, I wouldn't, I mean, to be clear, I'm not comparing the two. There wasn't a mass genocide in, but there were huge numbers of casualties. All of these things came together. And as I say, initially there was a sort of, while the war was still going on, it was not possible to really intervene in a way that seemed as if the UN was taking sides. But gradually, as things wore, as the war wore down, the first and second Congo wars, and then we began to see the action of these groups like the FDLR, the CNDP, this began to galvanize. An opinion started to change, particularly, I must say, in Western Europe and in the United States. It coincided with the change of, in the United States, with President Obama coming into office. And I think there was more willingness there then to start hammering away on these issues. Can I just, not interrupt, but just take you up on that, because clearly, great retention was given to it. But there is all, of course, the classic tension here between willing the ends and the means here. And I think one of the great strengths of your book is, you know, the French Kedor Seimei very well have said that you have a very large mission, but it's all relative as it were. And I think one thing which struck me, not just from the DRC, but generally, whether you earn deploys, and maybe it's less the case that it used to be, as you put it, when a peacekeeping operation is deployed with a protection mandate, there is a common, almost automatic, but unrealistic expectation that it will afford blanket protection, irrespective of civilians for the area's department capabilities. And you are sort of creating expectation, which if you are not able to deliver with them, might, in many ways, not just leave you with very, very difficult decisions at your sort of mission level, but potentially aggravate local protection crisis. And I wonder whether this brings, of course, in that question of the use of force, which you had to confront. And the very, very difficult judgments that you had to make. So, yes, it is true that focusing on the POC and DRC was absolutely necessary, given what was happening. But if you're not willing and prepared to provide the means, either in terms of resources or in political track, then aren't you potentially making your life more difficult and also the challenge more difficult? Yeah, I mean, no, I'm going to agree on that. The line you just quoted in from the book was inspired by something that happened, actually not in the Kivos. It was in Oriental province when the LRA attacked civilians. And that attack was actually happened because of, which I do refer to, a US Uganda initiative to try to deal with the LRA and to capture Connie, which went wrong. The LRA, which would be sort of sequestered almost in Garrison, this is not really the right word, in the Gramba National Park, then fled and were able to get away largely and then started moving west heading probably towards Central African Republic, massacring civilians on the way, raiding for food and so forth. When this happened, even though we had a small presence in that area, wasn't a top priority area for us, that was the Kivos, we got a blistering attack, particularly from MSF, which really, really annoyed me because they said, you know, you're failing in your mandate to protect civilians. Well, anybody who was really familiar with that area would know that it's a huge area, ungoverned or under governed, that's for sure, little in the way of roads and the Congolese force that was there, that we were trying to help with supply and get self-organized. There was no way that they could possibly deal with this because the LRA was actually, was one of those armies that moved on foot, they were small numbers, they didn't need to advance logistics, they literally lived off the land a little bit like the RUF. And I was really angry at that and I told MSF, this is deeply unfair. You know, we didn't set this up, we certainly weren't even aware of it, and we do not have a protection of civilians mandate that covers the entire country, every single district, it's just not possible. And by, you know, attacking us in this way, you're undermining us. Yes, we've, I'm willing to admit mistakes and we made them, but not in this particular case. So I was really, that then turned, of course, triggered lots of wondering about what could we do to protect civilians. So we made, you know, these innovations that are really from market patrols to what we call liaison, local liaison officers. I mean, we had hotlines, we developed a whole range of issues, but we were constantly dealing with the symptoms, not the causes. And as I put somewhere in the book, if we'd really wanted the kinds of penetration of protection that you had, say in Kosovo, we would have needed an army of 50, 60,000, which would have run into the billions. That was never going to happen. That was never good. Plus, we had to deal with, with the CNDP and uprising, which was getting indirect, although they always denied it, was getting aid and comfort from Rwanda. So, you know, you have all these competing demands on you. This is why I came to the conclusion at the end that, you know, mandated means need to go together, that the use of force has its value, but it's always going to be of limited value. And that clearly, as you yourself have written in your work, Matt, and rightly so, use of force, we must be careful, it doesn't become a palliative because it doesn't, usually, it is not the long-term solution. You may deal with particular situations like we did in Ituri, the general comat and it worked well, but the Ituri problem hasn't gone away. I mean, I'm still struck when I pick up the daily news and I have a feed from the DRC, how many of those issues and conflicts are still there, despite the brigade, the intervention brigade, which I call for actually, so I can't say it was a bad idea, obviously. But unless we get down to the politics, and that in turn is not just about having a better army, it's about frankly, governance and government. And I don't see that changing. And what we've done, unfortunately, with the protection of civilians and the use of force and linking the two, is to protect, as I said there, governments from their own failings. We can't protect people, ultimately, you cannot protect people from the failings of their own government. And of course, as you do make clear in the book, part of the problem is precisely, particularly over time for your admission, you're deployed for an extended period of time, you are there to support the government, you are there with their consent, but in this particular case, of course, they are one of the principal violators of human rights themselves. And that creates huge difficulties in terms of how you approach and deal with the government. What we were mandated, you know, there are a lot of dilemmas there, like we were actually mandated to help the national army, the FAIDC. And we did try, we did do training and we did advisory work and so forth. But this became a millstone for us, because every time the FAIDC went off the ramp, so to speak, then we were blamed for, even though the unit concerted, nothing to do with us, we were then blamed for being accused of it. I was even in the situation that when Human Rights Watch, to be honest, basically accused us or warned us about complicity in war crimes, because we had been involved with the FAIDC. Even though the council had mandated us to help the FAIDC, to help deal with the security problems. Well, when you're in these situations, and I actually sat in a closed session of the council, I brought that to the council's attention, quite in a quite passionate way, I said, what do you want us to do? It got an interesting response, which was silence. You know, the council didn't want to wrestle with that issue. No, exactly. Just put something in the resolution and roll it over. And this is why we're still in the Congo, because the fundamental problems are still there and will be there. And we made it worse, and I have to say now, I'm getting off back into my, more now into my foundation time. But we went along with the international community, not all of it, and the Africans were a little bit more sturdy, I must say. But key members of the council went along with basically a completely fraudulent election that would have brought the person of power who had actually won. And in the mistaken idea that this would create stability, and we'll at least see the back of Kabila, which we haven't seen, they went along with it. So, you know, you've got somebody in government now who doesn't have the legitimacy, and I would say even the credibility, and Kabila is still there basically calling the shots. So the same problems are there. And you know, unless we deal with it, and we're honest in the level of the council, and or come up with alternatives like they did, I think, in the case of Liberia, with the government of no, what I call the government of no return. Then, and that went back to when Kabila was allowed to become president after his father passed away. And that was a deal that the major powers and the UN went along with. They even brokered that deal, to be very honest. I do want to, I mean, there's so much overlap between themes and cases here, and you have already mentioned the security council, but I do want to spend a little bit of time, I have your views on the challenges of running a UN peacekeeping operation. And I do think that really is one of the most valuable aspects of the book, because it does bring out, as I suggest, intensely in a political nature of the organization. It's intergovernmental character, and also the way in which it is still profoundly and deeply fragmented. I also thought when I read your book that you managed the very skillfully without offending anyone, because you don't use names on the whole, to nonetheless give the impression that it was pretty tough at times within the mission. Fairly profound disagreements, personalities didn't really always work. There is also this fourth line, which you're very explicit about, to the humanitarian side, and those who wanted to push them over to the agenda. And of course, you admit, as they go along, you learned how perhaps you should, you might have wanted to do it differently in terms of building a mission leadership and so on and so forth. But I wonder whether you could say a little bit about the challenges of mission leadership, also a little bit about relations with with New York. I mean, it is obvious from what you already said about Sierra de la Liberia, that if you do have Security Council on board, and they're generally there to support you, it makes your life a lot easier. That's a lesson from the 90s as well. But also, you were frustrated generally about Secretariat support in New York, I think it is fair to say their tendency not to get down into the weeds in terms of unraveling what these mandates actually meant. And I like the notion of getting away from what you call a strategy syndrome. I mean, what you really need to do is to ask, well, this is the mandate. What does it actually mean? How do you translate into objective? And I wonder whether you detected any any progress. And I suppose here you can go on to your role after you left the UN, because you can continue to write and think about these things. Whether this is something which is, which is just inherent in the nature of these operations or whether there are lessons to be drawn and learned. Yeah. Well, first of all, the mission management issue, which is, is, is crucial. As I said somewhere that these missions are really conjuring tricks, you know, kind of sleight of hand. They shouldn't work. And the fact that they do it all, I think is amazing sometimes, but sometimes they don't. And when the mission gets into trouble, that's when things begin to unravel. Things are going swimmingly well. Everybody's happy. Everybody's getting kudos. And everybody wants to invite you to conferences and things. When the opposite happens, and I've had both, and people I work for had both, it's very, you know, you very quickly slip out of how everybody's good graces. And, you know, the missions are put together, including the top management team. In, I wouldn't say I have hazard fashion, but, you know, there's a whole series of factors that count, you know, nationalities, gender, and rightly so. So, and there's no chance for these things to gel, you know. And once they're put together, you're expected to make them work. And I'd say good part of the time they do, but yes, it doesn't always happen. We're not all going to get on with everybody all of the time. And the issue then is what you do when that happens. I think you have to exercise your own judgment, recognize that at the end of the day, if things go wrong, you're the guy on the spot. You're the one who's going to take the, and I worked a number of SL, two or three SLGs who, you know, and I, you know, they basically, not entirely through their own, but circumstances conspired to make the mission go into a crisis. And they inevitably carry the cancer, to speak. I ran into the same problem, I'll be honest, in the Congo. When things go wrong, there's a tendency to say, well, X or Y didn't get it right. They didn't get a good relationship with the government. Well, they misread the opposition. I'm not saying that's untrue. Sometimes that is the case. But there's very rarely, there's too often to look at the personalities and not at the more systemic problems that are led you into that situation. So I think that's really important to, and there's a tendency then, as I again refer to, to look for the man on the white horse, or I guess today the woman on the white horse. In other words, let's send in a special envoy and find the way around the problem. And sometimes that can be very useful. I mean, I recount there how I found it very helpful to work with President over Sanjo, who I got to know in West Africa, and for whom I have a great deal of time, and who I think has was very instrumental in bringing peace to West Africa, used as authority and weighted Nigeria very constructively, and worked closely with the UN. But sometimes it's not the case. And then you end up with these serial mediations. Which can be quite destabilizing, actually, because you've got all the voices going back and forth. And I just, and that tends to glide over the more structural problems. It's a sense of, well, let's send X and X will find the solution. And when you've been successful in one place, it's assumed that you'll be successful elsewhere. And that is not a given, not a given. And, you know, reputations are made and broken by what happens. So I think it's important. And when you go back to headquarters to try to get the council to understand these elements is not easy. I mean, I made a point always of trying to see, certainly the P5 members, their ambassadors, or their deputies individually to work through some of these, because in the council itself, it was very pro forma. I understand this has changed a bit, but you had this formal session open to the public and the media and so forth. And then the closed section where you plus one or two people from the mission were there with just the delegations. And there was no public audience, where you could speak more frankly and directly. But the responses the ambassadors came with their talking points already laid out. So it didn't matter what you'd said, they would read from their talking points, which have been prepared prior to the meeting, right? And then left, leaving a second sector or third sector to just, you know, occupy the chair, warm the seat, which was a bit frustrating, because you couldn't really have any real dialogue around those issues. And it was just another meeting they had to tick off. And that was it. You know, occasionally you get some pushback. I mean, I remember Susan Rice was one of those, and actually interesting enough, one of her successes at the, as National Security Advisor, also general by the name of John Bolton, who was then the, it was very interesting, because he came along to a session I was addressing, and I thought, oh, God, what's going to happen now? And he started with very, very complimentary and sort of, I want to thank and express our appreciation to SRSC Jarsford, Jarsford doing the work he's doing and selling. And I thought, my God, this is quite something, you know, hopefully we're making notes of all of this, we can quote him. And then the other shoe dropped because he came to the end of what he was really there for was a proposal he was trying to get through, which was to reactivate in a meaningful way, or in his view, meaningful way, the Military Assistance Committee. All right. That was one of these things, you know, he felt that peacekeeping missions and sort of had escaped proper control and oversight by the council. And the people like me came along and sort of were very nice and very a little bit, you know, spoke well, but did they really know what was going on? So he wanted to, as I understood, he wanted to have a much more hands-on, direct hold on things and to do it through the Military Assistance Committee, rather than through the sort of security council mechanism. And so that was what he'd really come along to push. And that were with these good part of his intervention was on that. But anyway, I took the plaudits and ran with them. I mean, I just wonder on the, you made the point very well, a lot of these missions are put together. There's a lot of politics involved and it doesn't necessarily gel. I just wonder whether are the concrete things that you think would have made your life easier? For example, if greater degree of financial authority, for example, have been delegated to you, if you had been the power to recruit and dismiss without going through the system of human resources, if you had been able to develop what we talked about before, some kind of analysis capacity, strength and that, for example, are the concrete things that looking back might still have been possible within what is, we all agree, a very politically fraught and difficult system? Yeah. Well, I think there are a number of things on the management as well as the more programmatic side. On the management side, yeah, I mean the ability to have more direct control, not just to arbitrarily fire people and all that sort of thing, no, because I wouldn't have been done by me anyway. But on disciplinary issues, the time it took to get anything done, in the meantime, people have been, frankly, been involved in some pretty nasty stuff, including sexual exploitation of use. You could suspend them with New York's approval, but then they were suspended on full pay, well, because they had to be a proper inquiry and the rest, it took a long time. And New York always aired on the safety, on the side of caution, because they were very concerned, I can understand that in a way, but being overruled on appeal, because every staff member has the right to appeal. If they're civilian staff, through the UN system, to the eventually, if there's cause, to the UN, to the tribunal, which is actually is a joint UN ILO mechanism that goes back decades, of course, the founding. And so that made for a very diffuse disciplinary authority, the same on the military side, where your ability to manage discipline was even more diluted, because there is no, the mission, Secretary General, has no disciplinary authority, direct disciplinary authority on deployed units, troops. What you could do is recommend that somebody be withdrawn from the mission, you could insist on that, but you couldn't impose disciplinary action on them, and you couldn't sort of, the most you could do, and I did threaten them on a couple of occasions, is to actually ask for the whole contingent to be withdrawn. Then I got a reaction, then we'd get people generals and the rest of it scurrying in from their military headquarters wherever it was, to plead with me, please, you know, it's just a few bad apples, and don't take it out on the rest of us. But occasionally I would ask for officers as well as troops to be withdrawn and individual soldiers, but again it was, it was, and New York was always reluctant to do it, because of course, and I understand that, you know, these are the same countries that they would then have to go to to try to get troops when the next crisis erupted, or the next peacekeeping mission. So they were usually anxious to keep them on their good side, but clearly there was a price to pay for that. So it was, it was always a bit of a tug of war, if you will, but where there was clear evidence and a prior facial evidence of abuse or misbehavior, then, and it's particularly if I insisted they would withdraw individuals and, as I say, I occasionally said the whole contingent will have to go. In fact, we did actually, and I think it was one occasion we got when I was in Carolina, Liberia, Sierra Leone, we got a we got a whole contingent turned over before they were due to due to go on rotation. So I mean, so that was one issue on the civilian side is saying if we had more flexibility to recruit and to discipline that would have been helped because sometimes I'm told that that's now happening as a result of the hippo and the follow up, there is now a greater delegation, which I hope is the case because the headquarters has to let go. They're always reluctant to do that. You know, it's the usual bureaucratic instinct to keep things to yourself. So I think that is very important on the on the the financing side, we actually have to say all the missions I was in, yeah, we could have done a little bit more for this, a little bit more for that. But by and large, I never felt that was at least now it's different because of the cutbacks. But I never really felt a that we were we were running on on on empty. I must say we also to be very frank kind of game the system, which was that, you know, careful what you asked for, but then asked for what you need, but asked for it in with a certain percentage added on and then be willing when you confront the ACABQ in New York, which is a painful experience, be willing to take off the 10% 15% and they feel good and but you know, you're where you are, but I shouldn't say that publicly. But anyway, but knowing that I didn't. What was more annoying was sometimes the sense and I this comes out in the book I know, perhaps unfairly a bit was the arcane administrative rules that sometimes we had to cope with. The administration was very conservative on these things, partly because it was later on I really realized that that you know, they were always worried about audit. You know what I call the tyranny of audit that you know the audit has come in they find you haven't done this and I knew of cases where people had taken really good decisions, conscientious decisions. But what I remember one, it involved in a senior head of administration or the Charter of Logistics, who had hedged oil supplies for the mission because we were in the Congo huge, we had a huge bill we're paying 10s and 10s of millions of dollars a year. 100 million for fuel or something you know with all those planes and vehicles and so for the fleet and I think almost 100 aircraft at one point and he hedged forward. And then which was I think good way of doing it. Then he was criticized by the audit and I think even the ACVQ you overordered why did you need to order that you didn't use it all up, you're wasting cash because you've got cash locked up in fuel you haven't used. They didn't see that the guy was just trying to be clever and those sorts of things would drive me crazy. But as I said and I just try to be honest about this, I found out the hard way that there was no point you're hitting the head against the wall, don't break the rules, just try to bend them a little bit. And with sometimes my other hats, particularly UNDP in the first mission or two, that was very helpful. Well I think these things were frustrating sometimes having to deal with the bureaucracy that didn't want to sort of accept that you were in special conditions that needed you to be agile, administratively agile. But again much dependent on your staff because I found from one chief administrative office to another things could change quite a lot. The same by the way with military, I mean I know of cases and you saw cases where change the contingent commander, the whole ethos changed of the contingent. Alan we've been extremely generous with your time and I think what I will no doubt do is to ask you to join us again perhaps in a live session with students a bit later with the air so you can have questions with the students and there are so many things. I mean this is obviously something now students will rush to read your book and so much of what we've touched on is brought up there. But if you are okay with that I think we will get back to you later in the year. We spent much more time than had originally in this H and I realize you might have other things to do as well and we'll try to edit and we won't edit it really because I don't think it requires editing but we'll sort of put it together and present to you and then we can use it. Well no that's a pleasure Max. I do indeed have to go off somewhere because I've got to go visit a brand new granddaughter. Well you know that is that is critical and I sort of didn't give you a chance to conclude on something you might want to conclude on but about the future of peacekeeping and all of that but I think we can come back to that later in the year. But thank you so much I thought that was terrific and really enriching and giving us a bit of flesh and blood which is what we all need when we look at these operations not just look at the dry you know you and documents and try to tease things out of that you've got to get a feel for the field. Well let me thank you Max because without you the book wouldn't have got written in the way it was because when I consulted you up front you said above all make it personal write about what it's like and I'm so glad I followed your advice rather than just sort of go off into all kind of abstract stuff which I'm not good at anyway. No no I thought you I thought you got the balance just right and as I said you managed to do it without you know stepping on too many toes. I think I told you separately that the one sort of amusing quote you do give is Claire Schulte again in a town meeting suggesting that they should exterminate the RUF. Well quote that is an absolute quote and Ian Martin's in touch with her quite a lot and Ian's read the book and offered to retail to her those which I said okay I won't but one thing I wanted not to do was you know sometimes memoirs turn into be a sort of a sort of a personal reckoning a setting of scores. Yeah no exactly I thought I would get into that because you do that you know it you lose sight of the fundamental issues you know the quarrels yeah but so I tried to avoid that deliberately rather you know and I think that was right. And I also think on that very last note on that I mean one of the strengths again it's a bit like Jean-Marie's book where what comes out is that the choices you're faced with sort of constantly never present themselves as straightforward ones between the right choice and the wrong choice the right path and the not path and that translates into the moral dimension of those choices as well. I mean if it was only that easy they all involve some set of regulations. Right and I think it was important actually I finally quite started to look back and recognize your own mistakes and realize that you know for the best of reasons you make them but you make them. Yeah. Terrific. Well thanks to Kieran as well. Yeah. I don't know if you'll be Kieran has written an absolutely amazing book on the war in Sierra Leone which I hope he will send to you because he's based on some very serious research which he did on on on the atrocities in particular but trying to understand and make sense of them. So Kieran maybe you'll send him a copy. Yeah well I yeah I'll be happy to inflict that book on you. I hope what I wrote wasn't you didn't find it too off the mark I'll be interested to see how much is your book cover the whole of the war. It's really specifically focused on atrocities so it covers the war but it's it's it's almost entirely fixed on the RUF rather than the kind of broader context of peacekeeping and peacebuilding but yeah I found what you were saying very interesting particularly about Sanco as a person. Yes yes well the RUF you know there's a great court I included the book by I'm sure you've read Lanzana Berry's book but he called the RUF an organized delinquency and I think it very much truly you know it was an army of the underclass and which resulted from mistakes in governance going all the way back to shocker Stevens and so forth anyway for another occasion. Excellent we'll be in touch again Alan. Yep cheers. Yeah all right cheers thanks a lot. Bye. Bye.