When USIP’s Alison Milofsky traveled to Togo in early July to provide negotiation training to the country’s military for upcoming peacekeeping missions, she armed herself with a 1994 New York Times article about Rwanda. This marked the second Togo visit for Milofsky, who works for USIP’s Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, which trains African security personnel as part of the State Department’s African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program, or ACOTA, that USIP has worked with for the last few years.
When USIP’s Alison Milofsky traveled to Togo in early July to provide negotiation training to the country’s military for upcoming peacekeeping missions, she armed herself with a 1994 New York Times article about Rwanda. This marked the second Togo visit for Milofsky, who works for USIP’s Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, which trains African security personnel as part of the State Department’s African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program, or ACOTA, that USIP has worked with for the last few years.
The New York Times article, she recalls, was didactic because it highlighted the challenges intrinsic to international peacekeeping missions. In Rwanda at that time, the United Nations peacekeepers failed to protect civilians; their peacekeeping toolbox was limited. But after the horrific massacres of the 1990s – particularly in Rwanda and Bosnia – the United Nations modified its mandates to enable peacekeepers to protect civilians using any means necessary, including force.
But, this itself presents a series of challenges: how do you identify a civilian? When does a civilian become a combatant? What happens when you have combatants hiding among civilians? Furthermore, given that force is the very last option, how do you prevent a simmering conflict from boiling over into violence?
Milofsky traveled to Togo to train the Forces Armees Togolaise (FAT) about such dilemmas and how to professionally deal with them. The New York Times article was one of the tools she used to highlight the kinds of real life, nuanced scenarios that these officials could face in their African Union deployments to places like Darfur, Sudan, Ivory Coast and Mali.
“We don’t get into military tactics, but we want to help them understand the challenges of protecting civilians,” she said, and to help them understand their mandates “in theory and in implementation.”
The military has weapons, but the kinds of tools peacekeepers use must include more options than force. The two most critical tools here are how to communicate and negotiate.
They started out the five-day training session with work on communication skills, “the heart of negotiation,” Milofsky said. To bolster their negotiation and mediation skills and understanding of their peacekeeping job, Milofsky teaches how to identify someone’s interests and how to use a problem-solving approach. After the instruction, they do a role play. On this trip, they used the scenario of an internally-displaced persons (IDP) camp, loosely based on Darfur, Sudan. In this scenario, the participant is the peacekeeper who needs to help negotiate between the head of the IDP camp and the local leader to avoid a conflict. In a culminating exercise, the group engages in a simulation involving a multi-party mediation around a political conflict in which militia groups are seizing humanitarian aid. Some parties involved want political power, others are after the humanitarian aid – all parties in this scenario have their own interests and priorities.
The simulation exercise emphasizes the pre-negotiation process, identifying positions and interests of other groups as well as trying to form alliances and discovering what parties are willing to compromise on and what their priorities are. The peacekeeper is there to help them negotiate their competing interests – without violence. They have three hours to negotiate and then possibly get to a mediated agreement that is acceptable to all parties. The peacekeepers need to figure out everybody’s priorities, their leverage points and what the parties’ final objectives are. Certainly, the peacekeepers’ objective is to protect civilians from more violence – and even better, prevent violence from happening at all.
Few groups actually reach an agreement in three hours but this is part of the learning. Negotiation is a process. It is never a guaranteed outcome. Which is one reason why training is so critical to prevent such needless slaughters as in Rwanda from happening again.