Profile
Maj.-Gen. Frank van Kappen
A former military advisor to the
UN Secretary-General shares his thoughts
on the UN’s role in international security

Interview by Robin Hayden

Maj.-Gen. Frank van Kappen was born in 1941 in Semarang in the former Dutch East Indies, now the Republic of Indonesia. After completing his training at the Naval Academy in Den Helder, The Netherlands. Van Kappen began his career as a commissioned second lieutenant in the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps, and later graduated from the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

In August 1991, van Kappen returned to the Netherlands Antilles as Chief of Staff to the Flag Officer, Netherlands Forces Caribbean; the following July, he assumed command. It was during this time that he served in the Haiti mission for the United Nations (UN).

For three years, beginning June 1995, Maj.-Gen. van Kappen served as Military Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Department of Peacekeeping Operations at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. He states plainly that service in the United Nations before then had never crossed his mind, although this new venue was a natural extension of a long and distinguished military career, much of it with the North America Treaty Organization (NATO).

HM Queen Beatrix has awarded van Kappen the Order of Orange and Nassau; the president of Venezuela awarded him the “Marito Naval;” and the president of the United States conferred upon him the Department of Defense Legion of Merit.

Van Kappen is now retired and resides in The Netherlands. He was recently in Honolulu to present the keynote speech to an audience developing peacekeeping training standards.

Robin Hayden (RH): You were the military advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General for three years. How would you characterize this experience?

Frank van Kappen (FVK): It was one of the most frustrating but also one of the most rewarding times of my whole career. The most rewarding thing for a soldier, of course, is to work for peace. Each and every time you have a small victory—when you do a little bit to improve the situation—you have to be satisfied with what you can achieve. You can’t ‘save’ people, but you can prevent more killing.

You can never do what you set out to do completely—sometimes you have to lower your expectations a bit. I always say that is the price paid for international solidarity.

Look at Bosnia. Everybody says Bosnia was a disaster for the UN—[even though] to be honest about it, the UN probably saved hundreds of thousands of people in Bosnia. When the UN was asked [to see if] it was something to take on, the original advice was no, it’s a war. The UN has a department of peacekeeping affairs; it doesn’t have a department of war fighting. [War] is something for NATO—a coalition—to do. Eventually the politics of the whole thing led to the UN having to go.

Let’s have a look at the “safe area” concept, which quite often is mentioned as one of the UN's big failures. Politically, it was a very attractive concept: create safe havens for Muslims that are protected by the international community. The military advice that was given by my predecessor, [was that] although it was politically attractive, it was militarily unsupportable. You were putting people in an open-air prison surrounded by a sea of Serbs and each time you did something Gen. Mladic didn’t like, he cut off your supplies and you had to get down on your knees [to beg] for every liter of gasoline and each bite of food. If the Security Council still decided to go ahead, then you say you need 32,000 soldiers. What happened? You got 7,800 soldiers instead of 32,000. The whole thing went to hell in a hand basket and everybody blamed the UN. Who’s really to blame in this case? It is not the UN as an organization—the UN had to make the best of what the international community gave to them.

You can’t be negative and cynical. You shouldn’t be, because this is the way the real world works. In the end, you’re faced with a very old truth: if you do military operations, it is a continuation of politics by other means. If you want to have success you must be able to match political and military requirements, possibilities and impossibilities, means and ends.

This “harmonizing” of the political-military process is done in the Security Council [the permanent five, plus 10 other members who are chosen for two years’ service]. Quite often the outcome doesn’t deserve first prize, but how could it? These are not like-minded nations, so the mandates you get out of the Security Council are basically reflections of its [constituents].

The secret of success is to match political and military thinking in an intelligent way. This matching process is extremely complicated, extremely difficult. If you have to do it in an international setting, like in the UN, you bump into the fact that we are not all alike in this world. There are different ways of thinking. The matching process is complicated because the political goals get watered down. Concessions must be made, and then it becomes very difficult for the military to support something that is unclear. That is when you get failure—Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda. When you see the Security Council members in harmony with each other, you have a successful UN operation—a Mozambique, or a Guatemala.

Failure or success can be seen at the beginning of an operation. Look at the mandate. If the mandate is clear, concise, and powerful, the operation will go well. If the mandate is weak, it leads to disaster, to faltering military operations where people get killed [unnecessarily]. As military advisor to the Secretary-General, I always looked at [whether] the permanent five were in harmony on an issue. If they were of the same [mind], the operation would be a success. Eastern Slovenia, for example, was a complicated operation but the permanent five wanted to solve it.

As a soldier you are confronted with the basic truth that your profession is a continuation of politics. You depend on this matching process. A nation—[like the U.S.] Pentagon, State Department, the president—goes through this same process every time the country decides to do something militarily. It’s even more complicated on the international level: NATO consists of only 19 nations; the UN [is composed of] 185 nations. Therefore the UN is a more complicated, hodge-podge process. This [created] part of the frustration [of the job]. RH: So your experience as an advisor was the best of times and the worst of times. FVK: Yes. You know how it should work theoretically, then you bump into the real world and how things are really done.

My mother always taught me this is a fair world and things can be resolved. In the UN you discover the world is not fair at all, and some issues can't be resolved—not in our lifetime. On the other side of the tale, you have the successes—you made a difference and you saved lives; while you cannot bring people heaven, at least you can protect them from hell, and [allow them to live] somewhere in between.

Matching political and military requirements is difficult. From a political point of view I understand why it was said, “Look, in order to make sure that we have an operation [at all], we’re going to do an exclusive air campaign [in Kosovo].” If the politicians hadn’t made that statement, [the U.S.] Congress—or the Norwegian parliament, or the German parliament or the Greek parliament—would have said, “Hey, wait a minute, ground forces? Body bags? No.” One of the NATO nations would have pulled the plug at the start.

But from a military point of view…poor General Clark and the NATO military! They knew this wasn’t a very clever thing to do. We took an enormous risk. If you’re using strategic air power, your intention is to destroy the capacity of your opponent to wage war. That means you’re going to bomb power plants, infrastructure, and roads and bridges, not bomb tanks or infantry. That doesn’t go down well with the general public. How long would we have been able to continue? What if you make a mistake and you kill a lot of civilians?

What we told the public was [that this was done] to protect the refugees and to prevent ethnic cleansing. Come on, that’s not what we did. What we did was something else. [After all, what else besides bridges and power plants] do you attack with F-16s at 15,000 feet?

However, equally important, we taught Mr. Milosevic and all the dictators in the world that there is a certain line drawn in the sand by civilized nations that they should not pass. The UN Charter does not say “We the nations of the world,” it says “We the people of the world.” The principle of [national] sovereignty is no longer holy: today, it is the sovereignty of people that takes precedence over the sovereignty of nations. To use the sovereignty principle as an excuse to kill your own population is not acceptible. At least not in Europe—we did not go to Rwanda, [but we did] go to Kosovo. And so here we’re back to politics again.

RH: What’s the world going to look like in 10 years—are we going to have a dozen hot spots to maintain?

FVK: When the Berlin Wall fell, we all thought world peace had broken out. The chance that we would all burn in a nuclear fire has diminished considerably, but the world has not become a safer place. The end of the Cold War was a great achievement because it freed a lot of people in Eastern Europe who had been living under Communist oppression. But it also broke an equilibrium, especially in Europe. Everybody knew where the border was: step over this line and we have a nuclear war. The only conflicts that flared up were those in areas where it was a little bit unclear where the borders were, such as between east and west Africa. With the threat of total annihilation removed, all those long-suppressed ethnic, religious, social conflicts all over the world erupted—in Yugoslavia, in Africa, and East Timor.

Today we have a completely new security environment. We are not dealing with wars between states with governments that are susceptible to international pressure, or armies that do what they’re told by their governments. Now we deal with civil wars, wars within nations and failed states. We’re not only dealing with governments, but also with factions that are not governable. They don’t care. They’re not soldiers. They are fighters, and fighters have to be convinced: you have to give them something before they hand over their arms.

Once in Tajikistan, where a conflict was going on and the UN was involved, the political leaders had signed a memorandum of agreement in Moscow to work for peace. I was sent to talk to the fighters. I explained to a field commander that his political leader had signed the agreement in Moscow and that he had to cooperate. He looked at me and said, “Look, nobody ever asked me what my opinion was and I don’t care what they’ve signed in Moscow. Don’t forget: I control the guns.”

The risks on the strategic and technical levels have gone up considerably in this new type of conflict. Consent is not assured. In the Cold War, either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. told a government [what to do] and then that government told its soldiers: these are your orders. It’s not that way in Tajikistan, or in Angola.

The roots of these conflicts are very complex; they can’t be cured by political or military means at all. You have to rebuild a failed state or reconstruct it. That’s the real peace process. The only thing the military operation can do is to provide a temporary security umbrella for others who start the real peace process. This process has to gather some critical mass before you can take the military umbrella away. If it has not acquired critical mass, the only thing the military operation has achieved is a very, very expensive cease-fire.

That peace process is a civilian process—the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the international governmental organizations (IGOs): they make this happen and they are engaged in restarting the economy. They do the real work, through a holistic approach. You cannot force NGOs and IGOs to sit around a table. You cannot say “Look, this is the plan, now you do this and you do that and you, you shut up because we don’t need you.” They have no accountability to the Security Council or to your mandate.

RH: It’s to their donors?

FVK: Yes, or to humanitarian law. They’re accountable to their conscience, to humanitarian law, to their donors, maybe, because that's where they get the money. In the end, if this real peace process does not acquire critical mass, the soldiers have no exit strategy. You need those civilian organizations to stabilize the situation to such an extent that you can claim victory, that you’ve done the job. And the civilian organizations couldn’t do that work, under those conditions, if they didn’t have this overall security umbrella that at least takes away the greatest dangers for them.

You need each other and this is all part of what I say are the ‘second generation’ conflicts. You’re not dealing with the classical, old-fashioned type of conflicts of State A against State B, presidents and armies and governments. In complex emergencies you bump into things like different lines of accountability, different ways of managing money. But still you’re all talking about one operation: one [side] cannot do without the other.

One of the biggest challenges for organizations like the Center of Excellence is to cut through all those stovepipes and to make people realize, it’s academic whether or not you like each other. We have to work together if we want to achieve something.

RH: Even though you come from different ideologies.

FVK: That’s another thing—proper government. As an American, proper government for you is something different from, let’s say, for somebody who comes from Tajikistan. While I was working as the military advisor in the UN, and Peter Leentjes was the Training Officer, we heard stories about UN soldiers raping women, selling food, doing terrible things. People blamed the UN. I always said, “Don’t blame us, blame the government who provided those lousy troops. We’re not in charge of discipline. The disciplinary powers are with their own officers, with their own governments. If they provide lousy troops, they will do lousy things.”

Peter and I thought that, although not enforceable, we should have at least a code of conduct we could give to governments telling them, “This is what we expect your soldiers to stick to.” We thought it would be very simple, to write down ten basic “don’ts” on a single Saturday afternoon. It took us two years. We ran into things like, “Ah! General! Are you trying to impose Western standards on us?” Everybody is a victim of their upbringing and their background—me, too.

That’s the price you have to pay for international solidarity: if you want 185 nations to say, yes, these are the rules of conduct of the UN, you can’t expect to do it in one Saturday afternoon. You have to do a lot of talking, a lot of convincing, and a lot of listening.

This is the challenge we will deal with in developing training standards. “Who are you to tell me what a training standard is…it’s your standard, not mine.” If you don’t recognize this, swallow your pride, you will get nothing. Address it up front and don’t let it simmer under the table, exposing you at the end of the conference. That’s the worst moment for it to surface.

RH: Does learning progress?

FVK: Yes, but it is slow. [During] the Cold War very few peacekeeping operations were mandated. The Security Council did not do what it was designed to do—manage international peace and security—because of the divisions of the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall fell, before we knew it we had nearly 80,000 troops in the field, all UN operations. Everybody thought peacekeeping was the panacea for all the problems in the world. It’s not, you know, it’s just one of the tools that you have in your toolbox. Slowly the Security Council drifted into a new kind of paralysis. The Cold War was over, but the Security Council still consisted of nations with different minds.

For example, we got into this disgusting discussion about the number of refugees in Zaire. The countries who wanted the UN to interfere [by mounting] an operation, were overestimating the number of casualties. They said, “We have hundreds, thousands of refugees and they’re all starving, and they’re all being mutilated, it’s terrible what’s happening here!” The countries who were not that eager to go said, “No, no, no, that’s not true, [the number is] far less.” Then everybody started to fly their own reconnaissance planes over the jungle to count refugees. At night you use infrared to see the heat from the campfires, and you make guesses—well, I see 20 campfires, 5 people around one campfire—these kind of guesses were becoming part of the political game.

The result of these situations is that you will not have an operation—which is better than having a lousy operation that goes wrong. But on other occasions, where the Security Council is of the opinion to resolve something, the UN can probably do anything it wants to do. Potentially, it is the most powerful organization in the world. It can use all the armies, aircraft, and ships in the world if these resources have been given to it by its constituent nations. The UN is as powerful as nations want it to be.

In particular, the UN is as powerful as the Security Council wants it to be—and I’m really talking about the permanent five (U.S., U.K., France, China and Russia). So if we want to talk about managing international peace and security and what the UN can do and what it cannot do, we have to ask, “How powerful, or how weak, do the permanent five want the UN to be?”

I think [the permanent five] came to the conclusion that the UN is not the sole answer for managing international peace and security in the world. In Kosovo, the NATO operation went through without a Security Council mandate. Apparently, the NATO nations, including the United States, would not accept that two nations in the Security Council could block an operation in Kosovo where a genocide was taking place. They went ahead without a Security Council resolution, which, according to the charter, is illegal, because they believed it was a legitimate and just action. In situations such as this, you will see that the UN will be pushed aside, although in the end they needed the UN to make it right.

But in other situations, the UN can act because there is no alternative. For most operations in Africa, you need the UN because there is no NATO in Africa. And in the Pacific…well, you have the Australians.

RH: But the Australians as the lead for the UN mission to East Timor is problematic for some Asian countries.

FVK: At least they were willing to do it. In the Pacific you don’t have an organization like NATO, so in many operations you need the UN to provide at least the vehicle to get something done. Although it is a troubled organization in many ways, in the future you will see that the UN is still of importance. And although not every American recognizes this, the U.S. cannot afford to lose the UN as a foreign policy tool. The U.S. would never have been able to leave Haiti if there wasn’t the UN to hand off to.

The trend to regionalize is mainly [a policy of] the U.S. It wants a vehicle to share the load financially, morally, and militarily. The U.S. is now the only world power left: it is the only [country with] the capacity, the money, and interest worldwide to do something about peace and security in the world. But the U.S. does not want and cannot do it on its own. Other nations in the world are not particularly interested in regionalization.

Although the Western European Union is, economically, one of the most powerful organizations in the world, most of the Western European nations are still not able to take care of crises in their own backyard without the help of the U.S. It becomes increasingly difficult for the American government to explain to its public that every time somebody in wealthy Europe drops a teacup, you have to send American soldiers to make it right again. [Europe] should be able to carry out its own crisis response operations without the Americans being directly involved.

That [drive] will probably work because of Kosovo. The European Union has just made the decision that they will develop an autonomous capability to carry out crisis response operations in Europe. But who will do that in Africa?

RH: That’s part of the criticism, isn’t it? If you intervene in Europe, why not in all these other places? You don’t care about these people because they’re not part of your ancestry.

FVK: I think it also has something to do with NATO and the European Union. In Africa you have a lot of regional organizations but they're not NATO. They are still a little bit hazy and fragmented—and of course, money is an issue. The European nations are rich. They're even an economic threat to the U.S. There is no organization that has the structure, the power, and the economic power of the European Union, in Africa. It might be there one day and this is one of the things that, especially the U.S., tries to stimulate—the African Crisis Response Initiative, for example. But it is all part of the same drive to regionalize the management of peace and security.

In other parts of the world—in much of the Pacific and Asia, as well as Africa—the UN is the only platform. I know there’s a lot of criticism about the UN in the United States, and I share most of it, but [my] conclusion is different. It’s one of the few organizations that we have that has a worldwide mandate. You would not be able to found the UN today. It’s not perfect, it will never be perfect. But we need it and we should keep it as long as it’s needed.