UN Insider Fights for Peacekeeping Reform

BY CAROLINE KORNDORFFER

In 1993, a truck with a few American soldiers and a United Nations political official aboard was headed back to Mogadishu after visiting a remote post. Along the side of the road, the soldiers saw a woman carrying a large basket on her head. The soldiers stopped the truck and offered to take the woman back to the capital. She climbed in. 

When the truck arrived in Mogadishu, there was a crowd waiting for the woman. The crowd stoned her to death immediately, right in front of the UN official and the American soldiers. 

Elisabeth Lindenmayer was the UN official on the truck. In April of 1992, the United Nations deployed a small peacekeeping force to Somalia to monitor a ceasefire between the two major factions in the Somali civil war. Lindenmayer, who had deployed as a civilian political officer with the United Nations, stayed in Somalia as an adviser when the United Nations mission became a United States-led task force in 1993. 

“The stoning had a profound effect on me, because she was a woman, and because she had no defense,” Lindenmayer said. “The same thing happened to women who were raped. They bury them except for their head and then they shoot.”

Inadequate training of United Nations peacekeepers results in avoidable harm to the very civilians the UN is meant to protect. Elisabeth Lindenmayer effectively lobbied at the highest levels to improve the training of United Nations peacekeepers in order to prevent atrocities like those she witnessed in Somalia.

Upon returning to UN headquarters from Somalia in 1993, Lindenmayer briefed the Department of Peacekeeping about the importance of training the peacekeepers about local social mores. While Lindenmayer believes she was able to convince her fellow staff of the importance of cultural training in deployment, she failed to convince the institutional leadership. The training wasn’t changed.

But Lindenmayer didn’t give up. Her determination to reform peacekeeping intensified when, during a later deployment, civilians accused peacekeepers of sexual assault.  

“This was for me a defining moment,” said Lindenmayer. “I remember feeling so ashamed about the blue flag and the United Nations.”

At UNHQ, Lindenmayer heard responses that ranged from “men must be men” to “sexual assault isn’t that important.” She was the only woman in senior leadership at the time, and appeared, much to her frustration, to be the only senior official at the UN who considered sexual assault by peacekeepers to be a grave issue. She was used to being in the minority and remained unflappable in the face of resistance.

“Sexual abuse by our peacekeepers is an example where you have the statistics, where you can easily prove to your department what is wrong, and how much it hurts that something like that happens,” said Lindenmayer. It violates the first principle of humanitarian work—to do no harm—and undermines the credibility of the UN, whether it is UN peacekeepers committing the crimes or just made powerless to prevent them. 

Lindenmayer knew she had limited options. The United Nations cannot refuse to take peacekeepers from countries whose peacekeepers have commited sexual abuse. The UN is always in need of more peacekeepers. “We are beggars and not choosers,” said Lindenmayer.  

The United Nations does not have the funds to train peacekeepers. Furthermore, even though they ostensibly serve the UN, the peacekeepers remain under the legal jurisdiction of their home countries, not the United Nations. The United Nations can criticize countries for failing to hold their soldiers accountable for committing atrocities, but cannot hold soldiers accountable itself.   

“Training of peacekeepers is something which is extremely hard to tackle,” said Lindenmayer. “You should never let constraints paralyze you. There is always a way somewhere, and you have to find it and try.”

Lindenmayer had the personality to take on the daunting task. Her father was an officer in the French military. She grew up moving from war zone to war zone, from the war in Indochina (modern day Vietnam) to the war in Algeria. Her experiences, witnessing horrors on all sides of the wars, convinced her even when she was a young child to work for peace.  

Lindenmayer originally intended to be a doctor and work as a humanitarian. Her family absolutely refused and claimed that being a doctor wasn’t a woman’s profession. Undeterred, Lindenmayer studied political science and began her 35-year career at the United Nations, where she would spend many years in and out of war zones and dangerous environments.

It wasn’t statistics that convinced Lindenmayer to work for peace, but her conviction that doing so was an imperative. She realized this drive had to be integral in her next attempt for reform. Lindenmayer found her way by adapting her tactics. The same tenacity that motivated her as the only woman in leadership at the UN drove her reform efforts.

“If you use statistics and data, you are just talking to the intellect of people, but you are not really giving them the push to move.” So Lindenmayer turned to storytelling. 

Lindenmayer started talking to the leadership of the peacekeeping missions, telling stories of the atrocities she’d witnessed, including the stoning in Somalia. After convincing the top bureaucrats on a given peacekeeping mission, they would then tell the military head of the mission that advocating for cultural awareness while preventing these abuses was a priority. 

These conversations were enough to create forward momentum. 

In 2003, Lindenmayer helped craft an organization-wide zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault. 

The Security Council began and continues to announce lists of countries whose soldiers perpetrate these abuses.  

In 2016, the Security Council adopted a resolution giving the United Nations the power to repatriate entire units if soldiers are repeatedly accused of sexual assault. “Even within the constraints, there is a lot we can do,” said Lindenmayer. “It is 193 member-states saying we will not tolerate this.”

After retiring from the United Nations, Lindenmayer received the Légion d’honneur, the highest award the French government gives to its citizens. In President Chirac’s speech, he noted the contrast between Lindenmayer and her father; while her father received many awards from the government for his work on war, she received the award for her work on peace, a realization of her childhood dream.

Though Lindenmayer has since retired from the United Nations and is currently a professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, officials in the Department of Peace Operations, including some of her former students, have continued her work at the United Nations.

“It is extremely difficult to ensure accountability,” said Tarik Carney, an official at the UN and Lindenmayer’s former student. “But more and more, the Department is running investigations, and there are repatriations of troops who have been the culprits of abuse themselves.”

The United Nations has developed a program, which Carney helped craft, to hold senior leaders accountable for the actions of their subordinates. This formal mechanism mirrors Lindenmayer’s appeal to the heads of missions a decade earlier. 

Carney himself has been directly involved in creating context-specific training and is actively rewriting the training handbooks for all UN personnel who deploy, aimed at preventing exactly what Lindenmayer witnessed in Somalia. The new handbooks and training are based on research from each environment in which peacekeepers are currently deployed, in lieu of decades-old training from dramatically different conflicts.  

Peacekeeping training is still insufficient, and peacekeepers are still regularly accused of sexual abuse and exploitation. But the changes that have been made and are underway are evidence that the United Nations peacekeeping can change for the better. 

“You can do something about the forces of evil,” said Lindenmayer. But first, she says, you have to believe in yourself.